Education
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.
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.