Development
Roughly one hundred teachers, parents and children marched Wednesday afternoon in protest of the Oakland school board’s decision to close five elementary schools next year, walking from Mosswood Park to the Oakland Tech campus, where the school board meeting and scheduled vote on the closures was about to start.
Occupy Oakland protestors clashed with police forces last night at the intersection of 14th Street and Broadway beginning around 7:00pm and going late into the night. A number of reporters from Oakland North and Richmond Confidential were on the ground to cover the events.
By 6:30 Wednesday morning, only about 10 protestors remained near Oakland’s Frank Ogawa Plaza, the site of a clash between Occupy Oakland protesters and police that began Tuesday evening and carried late into the night, but more people were slowly trickling in.
After a day of clashes with police, approximately 150 Occupy Oakland protesters remained outside of Frank Ogawa Plaza as midnight approached. There were at least five new arrests as of 9:15 pm this evening, according to police, and 97 were arrested during the day after police raided two Occupy Oakland encampments at Frank Ogawa Plaza and Snow Park near Lake Merritt.
Around 4:30 am Tuesday, police raided the Occupy Oakland camp in front of City Hall that was created on October 10 and grew in size to over 100 protesters and tents. This is a slide show of the best photographs that Oakland North reporters took throughout the course of the day as events unfolded.
Vowing to reoccupy Frank Ogawa Plaza, hundreds of Occupy Oakland protestors marched through the streets of downtown Oakland late Tuesday afternoon.
This video was shot by John Osborn of Mission Local during the initial part of the police raid on the Occupy Oakland campsite in downtown Oakland, from around 4:30 am to 6:30 am Tuesday morning.
The Oakland Unified School District spent a week in October hosting meetings at each public schools recommended for closure: Lakeview, Marshall, Maxwell Park, Lazear and Santa Fe Elementary Schools. These meetings were a chance for parents, teachers, students and concerned community members to ask questions about what their future might look like.
The Oakland Unified School District’s controversial proposal to close five elementary schools this fall, and more in coming years, follows a multi-year program of encouraging small small schools–subdividing bigger facilities into multiple smaller ones, each with fewer students and a more intimate climate. But funding and enrollment changes have pushed the district to what promises to be an emotional meeting and vote Wednesday night.