Thursday night may have been the last graduation the Edward Shands Adult School puts on. After 139 years of free basic adult education and ever-expanding offerings, including its high school diploma program, Oakland Unified School District has decided to close almost the entire adult school department.

All that may be left would be skeletal literacy training for ESL students whose kids attend the school where they study. Some GED programs would be saved, but the complex in East Oakland named after Oakland’s beloved adult education leader, Edward Shands, will be shuttered.

Shands has offered ESL programs, nursing assistance training classes, morning and evening GED classes, and the high school subject program in which students may take regular high school classes and receive diplomas in front of their friends and family. It is located next to the Eastmont Center and is convenient to the majority of students who live in Fruitvale, Central East Oakland and Deep East.

Also closed would be student learning sites in Eastlake (the Neighborhood Center and Clinton Park), Bond Street and many other scattered training sites.

All OACE (Oakland Adult Career Education) staff, teachers, office workers, janitors, counselors and administrators were invited to meet Monday afternoon with OUSD Superintendent Tony Smith and Brigitte Marshall, head of the adult school program.

OACE employees found themselves piled together with barely standing room to hear the grim pronouncements. One teacher later mused the scene was symbolic of the teachers' plight: There is no place left to go for these highly trained, long-time employees.

Until 2008, the Oakland Unified School District had a large and diverse adult program including fitness for seniors, training for adults with disabilities, computer and technology classes, construction, entrepreneurial, nursing assistance training classes, English as a Second Language programs (during the day, evening and at the schools as prep for parents wishing to assist their children) and GED programs -- plus the aforementioned high school diploma classes.

But in February 2008, the governor took top legislative leaders into a room and made some deals with them in order to pass a budget. One of those deals was to eliminate categorical funding for free adult basic education. After 160 years of this education birthright, California wiped it off the books. The programs were told to go, hat in hand, to their K-12 districts and beg for crumbs so adult ed classes might continue.

Now our district has told us that most of our remaining funds must be appropriated to prevent the Early Childhood Education Program (a beacon to struggling parents, like me) from being decimated.  We heard the grim news that, unless something changes, our $11.4 million budget will be reduced to a $1.9 million budget. Some adult ed teachers are bitter that the district sacrificed them and their students rather than cut small schools, which have a higher per student cost ratio.

That means the only remaining ESL course will be the one that helps parents work with their children and their teachers in English. It’s an essential program, of course, but so are the classes that immigrants who study after work, or study in order to look for work, must have.

Recent immigrants will not get their English skills lifted, their citizenship training or learn things like what to ask at the doctor’s office. All those trained and certificated teachers will be out of work along with the rest of the staff, most of them hard-working Oaklanders who will not soon find other jobs.

Today, the shock is wearing off and anger and a sense of hopelessness are overtaking the students who had come back to school to turn their lives around. No one can tell them where they can go now to retrieve their educations. Many other districts are closing their adult education departments.

There are real-life consequences for the decisions that we Californians make by refusing to change the two-thirds rule -- we are the only state in the country to demand that two-thirds of the legislature must agree to raise revenues and pass budgets. We are one of the few states that doesn't charge to drain our oil out of our ground, known as the oil depletion allowance. We have set ourselves on a downward spiral of economic loss, and we seem too dizzy to pull out before we hit ground.

Superintendent Smith reported that 500 school districts are about to file for bankruptcy. I guess then they can be taken over by the state, which will run up fines the state will collect from the broken districts.

There will be more and more young people with no education or jobs, who know that even their teachers can’t find work. In which case, perhaps all of us should have visited the Laney College Auditorium Thursday night to cheer on the last students to graduate from this disappearing program. We are all Edward Shands students now.