Education

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.

The Oakland Unified School District board voted 5-2 to close five elementary schools — Lakeview, Lazear, Marshall, Maxwell Park and Santa Fe — and transform or merge several other schools at its meeting at Oakland Technical High School on Wednesday night.

Thi Bui has just begun her fifth year teaching at OHIS. During her time here she has worn several hats. She taught social studies for one year, then art, reading and literacy for another; for the past two years she’s been the art and media teacher. As she begins her third year teaching a combined comic book and oral history curriculum, she finds she is doing a little bit of everything.

The aftermath of Tuesday’s Occupy Oakland eviction escalated into a street confrontation in the city’s downtown, with tear gas and multiple arrests. The story unfolds in this video by Dylan Bergeson and Byrhonda Lyons.

Roughly one hundred teachers, parents and children marched Wednesday afternoon in protest of the Oakland school board’s decision to close five elementary schools next year, walking from Mosswood Park to the Oakland Tech campus, where the school board meeting and scheduled vote on the closures was about to start.