Development

We asked neighbors, teachers and business owners in Golden Gate to share their thoughts with us. Click each video below to hear what they had to say.

In this special report, we have created an audio-visual map of the learning resources in Oakland’s Golden Gate neighborhood.

It’s rose season — and to celebrate this perennial, on Sunday the East Bay Rose Society held its 63rd rose show at Oakland’s Lakeside Garden Center at Lake Merritt.

The three schools in the Golden Gate neighborhood are Santa Fe Elementary, a traditional K-5 public school; Civicorps Elementary, an environmentally focused K-5 charter school; and Berkley Maynard, an Aspire K-7 charter school. Each school has its own character and its own focus, according the principals of the schools and the many community members we spoke with.  Above you will find slides that take you through the raw data for each school, and below you’ll find a little information about…

The Oakland Unified School District is set to cut $85 million from its budget next year.  Inevitably, this will include some cuts to staffing.  The infographic above reflects the projected staffing cuts in the Oakland Unified School District for the 2010-2011 school year. Staffing cuts in the district are allocated based on the idea of “Full Time Equivalencies” or FTEs. One FTE is the equivalent cost of one full-time job, but it does not necessarily make up an individual position….

A number of people interviewed for the Learning in Golden Gate project said that many of the 1,100 students attending Golden Gate neighborhood schools* do not live in the area. To see where students were coming from we collected the zip codes of students attending the three Golden Gate neighborhood schools: Berkeley Maynard Academy, Civicorps and Santa Fe.  We then mapped the zip codes (see above) so that we could see the population density of enrolled students per zip code….

We wanted to test what percentage of students attending school in the Golden Gate neighborhood have home Internet access.  Over 70 percent of students attending school in the neighborhood are low-income, so we thought this would give us a basic picture of whether the digital divide—a situation in which low-income populations have less access to the Internet than middle- and high-income populations—was at work in Golden Gate. We distributed a simple survey asking students whether they have Internet access in…

Dear Readers, We’d like to explain the background story behind Learning in Golden Gate.  This project was a collaboration between Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, which runs the Oakland North website, and the Berkeley Graduate School of Education, where all of those who worked on this project took a class called Urban Education taught by Professor Ingrid Seyer-Ochi.  As part of this class, Seyer-Ochi requires groups of students to learn more about a particular urban neighborhood and about the learning…

Ken Ott and his wife, Lulu Lin-Ott, are part of a generation of young Oaklanders who are trying to change one of the Bay Area’s most troubled and dangerous cities on their own terms. Lulu wants to sell organic ice cream; Ken wants to drive electric pedicabs.