How to be a Greeter: Lessons from Oakland Unified

In April, we released our latest report, From Gatekeepers to Greeters: How to Make School Enrollment Work Better for Families and Districts. We chose to write about enrollment because year after year, our Navigators observe families encountering the same kinds of challenges when it comes to school enrollment. From glitchy technology and labyrinthine online systems to paper chases to an absence of translation services, school enrollment processes often seemed more designed to keep families out than to welcome them in. At a moment when public school enrollment is down across the country, gatekeeping our schools doesn’t seem like a great move for either families or districts.

But we wanted to do more than just spotlight the problem. We wanted to offer an opportunity for districts that want to make enrollment work better, but feel overwhelmed at the prospect of change. Alongside the report, we created a short self-assessment that measures an enrollment system’s current level of family accessibility, on a scale from “Gatekeeper” to “Greeter.” After all, the first step to making a better system is understanding the pain points of your current one.

Already, dozens of district staff have taken the self-assessment. (If you haven’t yet, start there.) We’re seeing a range of practices represented even in this small data set. But notably, a majority of districts seem to be missing opportunities to understand how families experience their enrollment system. Almost two-thirds of respondents to the self-assessment so far say their district hasn’t conducted an audit of their enrollment process from a family’s perspective in the last three years. And more than half say they “rarely or never” survey families on their enrollment experience.

For districts that want to become Greeters, understanding the family experience of enrollment is a great place to start. We created a short guide to help. 

Making a school district’s enrollment system more family-friendly might seem like a complicated and overwhelming undertaking, but it doesn’t need to be. It does require some curiosity about families’ experiences, and a willingness to rethink protocols that may have been in place for a while. 

At Oakland Unified School District, the enrollment team tackled the challenge head-on. In Oakland, changes to enrollment were fueled by a combination of competition from the local charter sector and the team’s belief that enrollment could become a tool for achieving equity. Here’s how they approached the challenge:

“We are not trying to gate-keep our schools from our community.”

Before Kilian Betlach took on the role of Executive Director of Enrollment for Oakland Unified School District, he was a teacher and principal for two decades. As principal of a small middle school with no designated guidance counselor, Betlach helped eighth grade students enroll in high school.

“It was clear to me that, like so many things in education, these [enrollment] systems were built with an end user in mind who was an English-speaking, tech-literate, upper middle class person. The school I was working in was 99.5 percent Title 1 students, and 60 percent of our families spoke a language other than English at home.”

Nonetheless, before joining the enrollment office, Betlach acknowledges that he didn’t view enrollment “as a place of equity. I was just sort of doing the work.” Now, he says, “I’ve come along to the idea that enrollment is really our lifeblood as a district, and serving families is the first thing we need to do. This process needs to be easy for families. I think when you start there, you really do shift some things.”

One major shift in OUSD enrollment over the past three years has been a change of technology. They adopted a new online registration tool that is optimized for mobile use, to accommodate families who don’t have computer access. Betlach says this stemmed from his experience as a principal in the early pandemic days, when his school surveyed families about how they accessed the internet at home. “We found out that for almost 75 percent, the only way they accessed the internet was on their phone, and they didn't have an internet connection in the house."

The district’s mobile-enhanced online tool also has built-in features to support families through the process. A caregiver can give it access to their photos, for example, so it can locate images of documents like passports or birth certificates that they may have saved in the past.

In addition to being mobile-friendly, the new system also allows families to register their child without uploading any documents. This is a big change from their earlier system—and the system in place in many districts—where families must include certain documents in order to submit their registration to the district. Shifting the order of operations means Betlach’s team can connect with partially registered families to support them to finish the process: “Like, ‘Hey, you said your child has an IEP but you didn’t upload it.’ And the family says, ‘Well, it’s in Vegas and I don’t know how to get it.’ Okay, well, now we’re going to call Vegas. That’s a very significant shift.”

Betlach’s team has also focused on creative strategies for “how to get to yes” for families. “We are not trying to gate-keep our schools from our community. The point is not to say no,” he says. “The point is to say yes. This is public school. We're not trying to keep people out of it. We're trying to get people into it. So how do we get there?”

Documentation, for example, is an area where simple changes can make the process much smoother for newcomers. “Knowing that a lot of our families are coming from places where birth certificates are not the norm, we were thinking, what are the other documents that we can accept that verify that this person is who they say they are?” Since they were receiving many families from Catholic-majority countries, the OUSD enrollment office began accepting baptismal certificates as proof of identity and birth date.

The OUSD enrollment team frequently uses their own office address for families experiencing homelessness, which not only eases the enrollment process, but means that Betlach’s team can connect families with other important communications from school that could otherwise get lost in the shuffle between temporary homes. (“We get a lot of report cards,” says Betlach.)

Finally, ensuring seamless access to translation support has been a huge priority for Betlach and his team. The office previously relied heavily on a language line for phone-based interpretation, but “it was very clunky,” he says. He shifted his budget around, in part by opting to work from the office himself, which allowed him to eliminate a management position and instead prioritize bringing in full-time staff who are native speakers of Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Mam, a Mayan language. His team has also built relationships with community groups that can provide in-person interpreters for appointments in other languages, such as Pashto or Tongan, as necessary. Now, the language line is mostly a thing of the past. While the office still has access to it, Betlach says they rarely need to use it anymore.

If this all sounds like a lot of change, Betlach says the reality is the improvements his office made were largely about building on what the district already had in place, while committing more fully to enrollment as a means of achieving equity in their community.

“I don’t want to pretend like I went on some kind of crusade,” he says. OUSD staff as a whole are on board with the fundamental principle that enrollment matters for families. For one thing, it’s the right thing to do.

And then there’s the math, Betlach adds.

“You do the back of the envelope math of what's your per-pupil state reimbursement. How many new kids do we need to bring into our district by virtue of streamlining or improving our practices?”

Easier enrollment is also just good customer service. “This is the front door of the district, so these are people's first impressions. I spent money on beautiful photographs of kids for the office. We painted the walls. We got some plants. We got some new furniture.”

Customer service matters when families have alternative options. For OUSD, the pressure to compete against local charter schools is intense—and Betlach says his team looked at charter enrollment practices too, to get a sense of what the competition was trying as they marketed to families.

But OUSD isn’t just competing against charter schools. In many cases, they’re also competing to get kids in school, period. And that’s what the work of enrollment is about, fundamentally: “It’s not always about going to a competing system,” Betlach says. “Sometimes if we don’t get them into school, it means they're not in school. We know that if we're not proactive with vulnerable populations, particularly those that have immense pressure on them to work instead, that we're going to lose them to education. We definitely encounter families where the student just wasn’t in school last year. I can’t give you an exact number for how many that is, but it’s greater than zero. And it should be zero.”

Banner photo by Carla Hernandez Ramirez.