Education
Three weeks after the OUSD board voted 5-2 to close five elementary schools—Lakeview, Lazear, Marshall, Maxwell Park and Santa Fe—and relocate or merge several other schools, parents and staff affected by the closures are working to figure out what they will do. Their array of “options,” which will be handled by “transition coordinators,” includes no guarantees.
On Tuesday afternoon, about 400 people marched to the UC Berkeley campus from Frank Ogawa Plaza, which was the home of the Occupy Oakland camp from its inception October 10 until November 14, when the camp was shut down by police in an early morning raid.
As the Oakland School Board moves forward with its plan to close five elementary schools in order to save $2 million, the California Supreme Court is considering whether redevelopment agencies should be required to give up some of their funding to support school districts and county services.
East Bay Agency for Children’s Circle of Care program started in 1982 as a way to deliver basic illness and grief support to the community. Over the last three decades, the program has evolved to include individual and family counseling, as well as support groups.
Oakland Community and Economic Development Agency has partnered with service organizations to create job opportunities for out-of-work youth while mitigating blight in the city’s commercial corridors. The city’s partnership with Men of Valor, a non-profit re-entry program in East Oakland that provides housing, job training and other services to high school drop-outs, recovering addicts and the formerly incarcerated, has proven so successful since it began in June—removing about 114 graffiti markings from 88 businesses along Foothill and International boulevards—that in October CEDA decided to expand the program and take on new partners.
All 22 teachers from the Bridges Academy at Melrose elementary school, plus six parents, one infant and one middle-schooler, represented their school as they marched in support of Occupy Oakland’s general strike on Wednesday morning. Toting protest signs, tambourines, maracas, and a giant banner they walked from their school, near 53rd Avenue and International Boulevard, to downtown Oakland.
Oakland Strokes is a co-ed junior rowing program with about 200 kids on its roster from schools around the East Bay. The Strokes are one of the top youth rowing clubs in the country, boasting six national titles for the girls’ team and two for the boys. There’s a non-competitive middle school program, a novice team for first-year rowers, and a varsity team.
On Friday, parents, kids, and community leaders came out to Youth Uprising, a youth center in East Oakland, to help build a community playground. In six hours, the play area at Youth Uprising transformed from a slab of concrete to a playground that includes swings, monkey bars and artwork made by the kids who volunteered. “If you would have showed up here at 7:00 this morning, you would have seen an empty lot with a bunch of concrete,” said Manuel…
Frick Middle School’s new on-site health center, which has been open to students since mid-October, is the newest addition to the Oakland Unified School District’s nine school-based health centers, all providing medical, mental health and health education services for students and their families—at no cost, and in a place that is already part of their daily lives.