Oakland Police officials have confirmed that a teenager was shot at Skyline High School, an Oakland public school, today.

Assistant police chief James Beere said officers received calls just before 1:30 p.m. of a shooting at the campus. He said police offered medical assistance to a male juvenile victim before transporting him to a local hospital.

Two suspects were arrested, he said, and police recovered two firearms. Beere did not say if any of the people involved were students, but confirmed they were all minors.

“The violence that we’re seeing in schools, in the city and nationwide is disgusting,” Beere said. “You know, these are our children, and having access to firearms alone is unbelievable, let alone that violence is occurring in and around our campuses.”

Beere said the shooting victim is expected to survive. 

Parents received a notice at 1:57 p.m. of a medical emergency, saying that teachers and students had been put into the school’s secure protocol, during which they are not allowed to leave the classroom they’re in. A message the school sent at 2:07 p.m. said, “The lockdown is lifted and we will be dismissing students at the gate.”

Just before 5 p.m., the Skyline administration sent an update confirming that someone had been shot in the school’s 20 Building and that their injuries were not life-threatening. The notice said that police arrived to the school within 2 minutes of staff dialing 911 and “quickly detained those responsible.”

Skyline will hold classes on Thursday and counseling will be available for students and staff, John Sasaki, OUSD’s director of communications, said. The Skyline update said staff from the district’s behavorial health team will be on site for the rest of the week “to assist anyone needs help processing what happened.”

Mayor Lee responds

Mayor Barbara Lee arrived on the scene this afternoon to share condolences for the victim and all those impacted by the incident.

“Guns should not be in the hands of children, and so gun violence, and stopping this gun violence has been a priority of mine from day one,” Lee told reporters. “Once again, we see what takes place when young people have guns.”

In a statement she issued later in the day, Lee said, “Every child deserves to feel safe at school. Gun violence is a crisis we must address with unwavering urgency. We will continue working with law enforcement, our community partners, and school officials to protect our children and ensure schools remain sanctuaries of learning, not scenes of violence like today.”

‘I hear three shots going off — bang, bang, bang’

Students told The Oaklandside that they believed the young person was shot in a campus bathroom.

One junior at Skyline said she was on her way to the bathroom when she heard a commotion.

“I heard the gunshots in the 20s building and I ran back to my classroom,” she said.

Another student, a sophomore, said he was in his digital arts class when he heard an argument nearby.

“I was on the computer, and then I hear somebody saying, ‘No, no, no, don’t do it!’” the sophomore said. “And then I hear like, three shots going off — bang, bang, bang — coming from the bathroom, and then, like, everybody’s there getting scared and the lights go off.”

At Wednesday evening’s school board meeting, student director Maximus Simmons condemned the shooting and called for the district to provide more mental health supports.

“I think we need to have better practices around our students letting out their anger,” said Simmons, a junior at Oakland High. “We need to have better practices centered around letting our students understand where their anger comes from. We need better practices centered around helping our students feel seen and giving them an outlet. I think this is what happens when students don’t have that.”

Today’s lockdown was the third of the school year for students at Skyline, a large public high school in the Oakland hills. On Sept. 26, students were sent into secure protocol when OPD responded to a report of a student on campus with a firearm; that report was determined to be false. Then on Nov. 4, students were put into secure protocol a second time as, Skyline said, the school’s security team was seeking to remove “an upset parent on campus.”

Skyline has had a spate of violent incidents in the last few years, including a stabbing that injured a student in 2022, a shooting in 2023 with no apparent victims, and a shooting after graduation in 2024 that injured three people.