In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

| 117 Youth in a “Private Estate” in the Oakland Hills In January 2001, five high school students came to the monthly Skyline Task Force meeting to present their idea for creating a Youth Center at Skyline High School. Youth Together, a multiracial youth leadership and organizing group, had been organizing high school students to prevent youth violence , especially interracial violence in the public schools. Luis, a junior and long-time youth organizer, explained that the Youth Center would increase the number of students in AP classes, offer tutoring, and provide health services and counseling. He carefully argued that the center would benefit the neighborhood as well as the school. By providing supervised activities for students, the Youth Center would raise student self-esteem, improve behavior , and build a “sense of responsibility to the community.” When the students finished their brief presentation, neighbors peppered them with questions . “What hours would it operate?” “How many days would it be open?” “How late?” “Where would it be located?” Neighbors worried that the Youth Center would draw more youth to the Skyline campus, keep them in the area longer, and increase security problems . As one neighbor insisted, “This may just give them more time to be up here and make a mess. At least now they leave at four o’ clock.” At Task Force meetings, neighbors regularly complained about students littering at the bus stops, fighting in the streets, and “invading” the neighborhood by walking down private streets or coming onto private property. They blamed Skyline High School students for any theft or vandalism in the neighborhood. Students invited Task Force members to participate in a meeting to develop a plan for the Youth Center, but one neighbor said, “If you want my input now, it needs to be put in a location to have minimal impact, as far as possible away from neighbors.” Nate Miley, then a city council member and later a county supervisor, convened the Skyline Task Force in 1997 to bring city and county agen- 118 | Youth in a “Private Estate” in the Oakland Hills cies together to solve the wide range of problems that neighbors identified as coming from Skyline High School. Over the next three years, the Task Force worked to improve security around the school, to discourage students and parents from using the neighborhood’s private streets, and to improve bus service and food at the school. But many students and parents remained skeptical of neighbors’ interest in meeting student needs. One Youth Together member thought neighbors were only interested in keeping youth on campus and off their private roads, remarking, “They don’t like us.” The Task Force met monthly in the school library, with Nate Miley’s staff facilitating, and often included Oakland school police officers, security guards, school representatives, Alameda County Transit officials, or sheriffs (responsible for bus security). Task Force meetings were usually small gatherings of eight to ten adults, though sometimes a conflict would swell the numbers to twenty or thirty. I was first invited to the meetings by a white couple whose son was a junior and who described the meetings as “better than a movie.” The Task Force meetings were animated, often rippling with tension between people who introduced themselves as “neighbors” and those who introduced themselves as “parents” or “parent advocates” as well as “neighbors .” Those who identified themselves as “neighbors” were all middle-aged or older and white, while “parents” included white, Asian, and black parents, including the Smiths. “Parents” and “neighbors” sat at different small tables scattered around the library, though Theresa Thomas, one of the “neighbors,” told me that at the next meeting she might “sit on the parents’ side. . . . I think it will really shake them up. It will make some uncomfortable if they have one of the homeowners just plop myself down at their table.” Youth Together and the Task Force continued to meet, to plan, and to fight over the next five months about where the Youth Center would be built, what hours it would have, and what programs it would offer. People sent a flurry of emails and arranged meetings with the superintendent of schools, school board members, and Supervisor Nate Miley. Youth Together staff reported that one neighbor had called the major foundation funding the Youth Center to complain and put their grant at risk. Supervisor Nate Miley reassured worried neighbors that the center would focus on making kids into “better students and members of society as opposed to providing a...

Share