Community
At a long-awaited special school board meeting, and after over six months of hearings and notices, Oakland Unified School District board members voted to revoke the three American Indian Model Schools’ (AIMS) charters. The 4-3 vote came after Superintendent Tony Smith recommended the board revoke the charters, and after a particularly emotional and dramatic series of public comments and discussion.
In a Castlemont High School classroom converted into a theater for the day, seven-year-old Junior returned home from school to face his parents after receiving a bad report card. “How the hell did you get an ‘F’ in English?” the father asked. “Are you stupid?” Junior kept his head down. “You should act like a man,” the father said. And that’s where Caheri Gutierrez, a 23-year-old woman who has dedicated her life to mentoring teenagers about causes and consequences of…
Enjoy the photo gallery for our weekly series, The Pulse of Oakland. This week’s featured ZIP code is 94607. The area includes the waterfront, Chinatown, West Oakland and the Port of Oakland. Oakland North reporters will be taking photographs documenting each of the ZIP codes in Oakland over the next few months. Every neighborhood is diverse and different, and we want to capture that. Of course, we can’t see everything in Oakland ourselves. So we also want to know how…
The Oakland City Council heard for the first time on Tuesday night an informational report on the First Friday art and food festival’s effect on the city’s economy and public safety.
At a board meeting on February 27, the school board voted to cut all remaining adult ed teacher positions as way to create $1 million in savings for the next school year. OUSD superintendent Tony Smith said the proposal to terminate the positions was also in reaction to Governor Jerry Brown’s January budget proposal, which included moving adult education to community college systems. If layoffs ar
Every week, Oakland North will publish a photo submitted by one of our readers. This week’s photo is by Sharon Olson.
Karely Ordaz remembers the first time she realized that good grades had good consequences. She was an eighth grader at Oakland Charter Academy and she had just found out that she was one of ten middle school students chosen for an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C. “Never in my wildest dreams as an eighth grader did I think I’d be able to go to the capitol for free just because I had good grades,” she recalls. “That’s when I decided that I’d keep doing it.”
Oakland North is continuing with our feature. Every week, Oakland Animal Services will spotlight an “Animal of the Week” that’s up for adoption at their facility. This week it’s Jessica Rabbit.
In February, the California Office to Reform Education (CORE), a group of nine school superintendents who represent more than a million students from Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Fresno, Sacramento, Santa Ana, Sanger and Clovis, announced that they were seeking waivers from the performance standards outlined under No Child Left Behind (NCLB).