Education
Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Bay Area, a local chapter of one of the nation’s biggest youth mentoring organizations, has about 750 children and teenagers in the Bay Area waiting for a mentor.
There actually is a verb for keeping warm, but it’s in a dead language, one that’s close to Latvian, said Kristine Vejar, the owner of the Golden Gate district shop that goes by that name.
“Educating Oakland,” an exhibit on the history of the city’s public schools, is now open at the main branch of the Oakland Public Library, and proves that Tom Hanks once wore a grass skirt in a school musical, and Castlemont did indeed look like a castle.
On January 19, Suneal Kolluri received an envelope in the mail from the California Attorney General’s office. Inside was the official title and summary for the College for California ballot initiative, a proposal to give every Californian a free college education, that was drafted by the high school students he teaches in East Oakland. The clock started ticking: Kolluri has 150 days to get 807,615 signatures.
About 20 concerned citizens, activists and advocacy leaders debated the mayor’s new budget proposal Monday night at a town hall meeting organized by Councilmembers Patricia Kernighan and Nancy Nadel.
Conceived as a preventative branch of the hospital’s already booming Sports Medicine Center for Young Athletes, the athlete development program centers on training kids and teenagers involved in a wide swath of sports. The goal is to not only make them more efficient and improve their performance, but to keep them injury-free.
The idea behind the concept of “mutual matching” is to find the best fit between a teacher and the school community in which they work. That concept is on the bargaining table now in discussions between the officials from the Oakland Unified School District and Oakland Education Association, as they discuss a proposal that would change the way teachers are assigned to schools in the district.
At Yu Ming School in Oakland’s Chinatown on a recent Thursday morning, a teacher writes on the board in slow lettering, and an eager bunch of students slowly sounds out the words in a collective chirp. Unlike most other kindergarten classrooms across the country, though, the writing isn’t in English, or even in Spanish. It’s in Chinese characters.
Every year, from early December till late January, the Oakland Unified School District has what it calls its “options enrollment window.” Parents of incoming kindergarten, sixth grade and ninth grade students can pick a school for their child outside their neighborhood. But it’s a more complicated process this year, because five elementary schools are scheduled to close this spring and an extra 1,000 students were thrown into the mix.