Development
After months of discussions, protests from community organizations and residents, on Tuesday night the Oakland City Council voted to end its relationship with Goldman Sachs.
On Wednesday evening, a crowd of nearly 150 people, many of them parents, kids, and Occupy Oakland protesters, gathered on the concrete steps of Lakeview Elementary School hours after their two-week-old tent city was raided by Oakland Unified School District police and other law enforcement officers. The encampment was an effort to protest the district’s decision to close five elementary schools —Lakeview, Lazear, Marshall, Maxwell and Sante Fe—and keep all neighborhood schools open.
The tent city at Lakeview Elementary School has been dismantled. At 4 a.m. Oakland Unified School District police and other law enforcement officers raided the encampment where parents, teachers, and community activist had been sleeping for two weeks in an effort to protest the district’s decision to close five elementary schools.
The energy was palpable, with people filling the entryway, shaking hands and engaging in excited conversations as they waited for the ceremony celebrating the opening of Girls Inc’s new location in downtown Oakland to begin on Thursday. The organization works with girls to help them with literacy, career goals and to learning to care for themselves, both emotionally and physically.
On Saturday afternoon nearly 200 protestors showed up for a 1.7 mile march organized by a coalition of community organizers, Occupy Oakland supporters and Lakeview Elementary parents to protest the closure of five Oakland elementary schools by the Oakland Unified School District.
The People’s School for Public Education is nearly a week old.
Protesters, including parents of students at Lakeview Elementary and members of Occupy Oakland, continued to occupy the Oakland Unified School District elementary school across from the Grand Lake Theater on Thursday, holding classes like gardening, art and social justice for the dozen or so adolescents present.
With the looming deadline for a $242 million state grant, and after more than a decade of false starts, a $1 billion development project at the former Oakland Army Base got the OK from the Oakland City Council to move forward on Tuesday night.
On Tuesday a second “stay away” order was issued by the Oakland Unified School District to protesters currently occupying the Lakeview Elementary School property but a small group of people continued to camp on the school grounds overnight as well as hold classes and community speak outs there during the day.
“We reserve the right to remove protesters from the premises,” said OUSD spokesperson Troy Flint.
By 7 p.m. on Monday night, the encampment at Lakeview Elementary School that drew over 200 people from the community had quieted. Parents, teachers, and activists who had taken over the school in protest of the district’s plans to close it and four other elementary school campuses were preparing for the night’s rest and having two roundtable meetings outside of the school.