Education
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.
Oakland will have a new charter school in the fall, but two schools that wanted to leave the Oakland Unified School District to become charters will have to stay. Meanwhile, two charter schools that already exist within the district will be around for at least five more years after the school board renewed their charters Wednesday night.
The bell rings— a prolonged buzzing signaling the end of class. Attention students: lunch is being served in the cafeteria, announces a female voice over the intercom. Lunch is being served in the cafeteria. There’s chicken wings and fries, pizza and fries, and salad bar. Within moments, hordes of students come rushing into the Oakland Tech cafeteria, sidling up in line in front of the kitchen and dropping their backpacks and jackets off at one of the circular red tables….
As the news events of 2011 unfolded, Oakland North photographers were there to capture the year’s most striking images. Click through the slideshow above to see the photography.
Jakada Imani has had to battle his entire life. As a child, he said, he was diagnosed with dyslexia, lived in a home with parents addicted to drugs, and was homeless for a brief period of time. He fought the odds to become a well-respected community leader, and strived to find ways to protect the rights of the disenfranchised. He said that was why he wanted to be a port commissioner – to fight for the people of West Oakland.
More than a hundred parents and teachers packed the Oakland Unified School District’s boardroom for Wednesday night’s meeting, with dozens more watching from the 4th floor overflow room, following a march from Laney College earlier that afternoon. The topic of contention: school closures.
CERI is a non-profit organization that provides mental health and social services to refugee and immigrant families, mostly Cambodians. All of the girls in its support group have parents who are Cambodian refugees, and they all live in high crime neighborhoods in the East Bay. Many of them know other girls—friends, former classmates—who have become involved in “the life,” a term for the underground world of prostitution.
Five Oakland school board members will be receiving more than season’s greetings from frustrated parents today. They’re getting news that a recall campaign has been launched against them for voting to close five Oakland elementary schools in late October.