Education
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…
Wednesday marked International Walk and Roll to School day. Alameda County’s Safe Routes to School program coordinator Nora Cody said the event was being celebrated by 99 schools county-wide. Peralta Elementary was one of 22 Oakland schools participating.
As Norman Ospina, the school attendance clerk and a translator at Castlemont High School in East Oakland, crossed the courtyard on a crisp overcast fall morning, he spotted a young man he believed had been involved in a campus brawl on September 21. Ospina, whose students call him “Mr. O,” placed his index finger over his mouth, and nodded in the direction of the student on the other side of the courtyard. The student instantly revealed a smile that was…
In a crowded boardroom and to strong applause, the OUSD board unanimously passed an agreement yesterday that resolved to address the Office of Civil Right’s (OCR) compliance review of the district’s discipline of African American students.
At Lincoln Elementary School and nearly 50 other Oakland schools, the custodians, nutrition staff and faculty have banded together to use lunchtime as an opportunity to teach students how to compost.
From September 17 through October 4, most of Oakland Unified School District’s middle and high school students will view the documentary “Bully.”
				

