Education
story by MARTIN RICARD audio slides by ISABEL ESTERMAN Sept. 7—About a dozen girls huddled in front of the boathouse at the Jack London Aquatic Center Sunday afternoon giggling and chatting away as though they’d known one another for years. Who’s the cute new crew instructor? Who’s afraid of the water? Is rowing really that hard? they asked one another. Above them, on the second floor of the center, the girls’ parents were hammering away with questions of their own…
By MAGGIE FAZELI FARD Renee Cheney-Cohen, the coordinator of Alameda County’s immunization program, says the words with conviction. The phrase is her mantra as she reaches out to community groups, organizes free immunization clinics and works through the busy back-to-school vaccination season, insisting to parents that just because a disease isn’t common doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. Cheney-Cohen’s assertion is echoed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statistics, which placed incidences of vaccine-preventable diseases at all-time…
story and audioslides by LINNEA EDMEIER Sept. 21 — Reading, writing, arithmetic and recycling? For students of Civicorps Elementary School, in North Oakland, Saturday’s Coastal Cleanup Day wasn’t just another day at the beach. It was another day of fulfilling Civicorps’s mission of “participating in the life of the community.” At Saturday’s event, Resek, a third grader at Civicorps giggled while he worked alongside his cousins and mother, Ashley Allison. They were cleaning up around the Lake Merritt Boathouse in…
Put into state receivership five years ago, the Oakland Unified School District is close to regaining full authority. The Board’s agenda for Wednesday’s 4:00 meeting is packed with programs and initiatives intended to improve student performance and district financial stability. By focusing on those two goals, the Board moves closer to being completely out of state receivership by the end of the school year.
Plenty of people were eager to talk about Berkeley’s new sports fields complex. Mayors and city officials from five East Bay cities – Berkeley, El Cerrito, Emeryville, Richmond and Albany – lined up on Saturday to address the crowd of two hundred onlookers who came to celebrate the grand opening of the two new multi-purpose fields. The celebration had all the trappings of an opening ceremony: a podium, folding chairs for the crowd, a ribbon waiting to be cut. But…