Education
The Oakland School Board is considering supporting a ballot initiative that would raise taxes to pay higher teacher salaries. But the proposal has encountered an obstacle on the question of charter schools.
After weeks of public meetings and intense discussion with parents and teachers, the Oakland Unified School District board voted unanimously Wednesday night to shut down three schools in the district by the end of June 2010.
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.
Neighbors and parents, some wearing headphones for language interpretation, listened to an Oakland officer explain certain colors, signs, and tattoos–like the numbers 13 and 14–that may be markers of gang activity.
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.
As health organizers around the globe assess the illness during the week of World AIDS Day, local officials say funding cuts and young people’s attitudes are contributing to new infections and the comparatively higher rates of HIV/AIDS among black teens and women.
Oakland North visits the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist library on Telegraph Avenue, whose catalog includes some 30,000 titles on political economy, revolutionary tactics and radical thought.