Education
Oakland high schoolers listened to school board and city council hopefuls speak at a Youth Vote Forum on Tuesday evening at Castlemont High School and placed their votes for their candidates of choice.
From Fruitvale to Rockridge, Oakland North reporters spoke recently to residents about the city council elections. We asked everyone the same question: If you could speak directly to the candidates, what would you like to know? We delivered the most frequent of the residents’ questions, in person to the seven candidates for the District 1 City Council seat. Their edited answers, one question at a time, will appear in Oakland North every week between now and Election Day.
This November, four seats on the Oakland Unified School District board are up for election. In three of the district races, incumbents face new opponents, while in District 5, candidates are vying for the seat being vacated by longtime board member Noel Gallo. Gallo, who has represented Glenview and Fruitvale since 1992, is currently running for the Oakland City Council. Click on the photos of the candidates above to read brief profiles and listen to their responses to three questions…
For the third consecutive year, the Oakland Unified School District’s Department of African American Male Achievement honored students who earned perfect scores on their STAR exams, but this year’s ceremony honored both young men and women. To celebrate these students’ achievements, a boisterous crowd of parents, educators and other students attended an evening event at Frick Middle School in East Oakland on October 11.
PD Active, a local nonprofit that offers programs for people with Parkinson’s disease, has partnered with Danspace in Rockridge to offer weekly Dance for Parkinson’s classes that give participants a chance to challenge their minds, bodies and creative abilities.
This story was last updated at 5:44 pm. A two-hour safety lockdown at Holy Names ended early Thursday afternoon after reports that a man with a gun had been on campus. No such person was found, police said. The Oakland Police Department responded at 10:30 Thursday morning to reports of a man who a witness said had a waist holster with a gun in it. Some witnesses had a conversation with the suspect and described him as “disheveled,” according to…
Oakland residents will vote on November 6 whether to allow the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) to issue $475 million in bonds to repair school facilities and start new projects.
Parents, teachers and students wearing green Kaiser Elementary t-shirts and holding colorful banners gathered outside the Paul Robeson building before the Oakland school board meeting Wednesday evening, in protest against the combining of the school’s kindergarten and first grade classes.
In 2009, Tomás Alvarez III sat at his desk as a group of nine teenagers filed into his classroom at Oakland High School. This was the fifth year of his Beats, Rhymes and Life program, which uses hip-hop music as a form of therapy for at-risk teenagers. Alvarez began the class in the usual fashion, playing instrumental beats on a boom box. As the class gathered in a circle and began to freestyle, Alvarez recalls, he recognized something particularly special…