Advice on Peralta Elementary from current parents
Hello,
We were assigned Peralta Elementary in the Oakland Public School lottery and would love to connect with any current or very recent parents to hear about their experience at the school. Our son will be going into Kindergarten. We are moving back to the Bay Area after a couple years in Southern California and unfortunately can't visit the school in person at the moment, so any thoughts from parents would be really helpful! Thanks so much!
Mar 16, 2023
Parent Replies
My daughter graduated from Peralta last year. We had spent a few years in the middle of elementary school in private school and in the end regretted the choice to leave Peralta. No school is perfect, but Peralta has an amazing arts program, a really strong parent group, and some really wonderful teachers. It will likely not be as academically rigorous as some private schools, but they do a good job of meeting kids where they are at and meeting standards. We also had a positive experience with Special Ed resources. From what I can tell, the biggest challenge has been turnover in principals and I don't know anything about the current principal. It is a smaller school and some of the classrooms are portables. They have an amazing garden and a sweet homey vibe which makes up for the lack of spaciousness in my opinion. Feel free to message me. I was not heavily involved there as a parent, but obviously I have good feelings about it!
We have a current first grader in Peralta and an incoming kindergartener next year. We've been very happy with the school. The teachers are great and they have gardening, music, and an art program. We've been really fortunate to have an awesome parent committee that raises the funds to cover these programs since OUSD doesn't cover them, so the success of the school extracurriculars is largely dependent on parent donations and volunteering. They also do community events which have allowed us to get to know a lot of the other parents, such as monthly weekend gardening work parties, monthly coffee/bagels at drop off, and a welcome party/potluck at the start of each year.
My daughter goes to Peralta and has had a lovely experience! It's a great school, amazing teachers, but has had changes in principals quite a bit. They have a great PTA which helps fund many activities and give a lot of the families resources. It's a smaller school in a great neighborhood. I've had great experiences so far! I'd recommend it!