Economy

School board confronts rally, budget shortfall, school closures

Enraged teachers rallied before the OUSD school board meeting last night demanding just contracts. At the meeting the board addressed a $14 million district shortfall and the potential closure of Tilden Elementary School, BEST High School, Paul Robeson School of Visual and Performing Arts, and Explore Middle School.

Three ingredients travel across the country

A container of pasta. A 10-pound tube of ground turkey. A can of tomato sauce. It was a Monday in November at a central kitchen in East Oakland and dozens of cardboard boxes were being unloaded, revealing the three main ingredients for a pasta and meat-sauce dish that would be served to elementary school kids in the Oakland Unified School District that Thursday. In a matter of hours, stainless steel racks filled with clumps of pasta, each in open-faced cardboard…

How three well-traveled ingredients end up as lunch in Oakland’s public school cafeterias

The lunchroom at Hoover Elementary School has a long metal counter built into the wall between the lunchroom and the kitchen. There’s an industrial-looking sliding metal door that can be opened for serving food directly from the kitchen, but this serving arrangement is no longer used. In terms of food preparation devices, the kitchen now boasts only a refrigerator and an “oven” that is not equipped to do anything old-fashioned, like bake; it only reheats trays of already-cooked meals. Despite the fact that there is no cooking at Hoover, there are still 325 mouths to feed at breakfast and lunch every day.

AC Transit cuts less drastic than originally planned

This fall, AC Transit officials announced a proposal to reduce bus service by 15 percent. A reshuffling of agency funds has brought the reduction down to 8 percent. At a Tuesday evening meeting, riders were invited to learn more about how service cuts will affect them.