Economy
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.
Mayor Ronald Dellums and members of his staff appeared before the City Council Tuesday night to present a report on the status of federal stimulus dollars Oakland has received through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
This weekend, the school district published recommendations for “focus schools” that have been singled out for their struggles with low enrollment, low academic performance, or both. The possibilities for all the schools on this list included closure, restructuring or conversion to charter.
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…
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.
Music lovers might be comforted to know that North Oakland is still a great place to look for vinyl LPs and singles, whose popularity has taken a surprising upturn.
Despite recent consternation in the blogosphere and rumor mill, no cutoff looms yet for Oakland’s bid to be a host city for the 2018 or 2022 World Cup, the worldwide soccer championship, according to a USA Bid Committee spokesperson.
The Oakland Raiders and Mrs. Fields Cookies helped the Oakland Children’s Hospital celebrate its 50-year anniversary Tuesday morning. Raiders players paid a visit to the hospital’s atrium, where patients and staff were treated to cookies and snuggly, eye-patch-wearing teddy bears.
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.