Education
You never know what to expect from the Oakland Underground Film Festival. From Kung fu and female wrestlers to hip-hop and community gardens, this film festival has got it all. The event is being held this week, from Thursday to Saturday, in East Oakland.
The agenda for Oakland’s school board meeting on Tuesday, including a complete list of schools recommended for closure by superintendent Tony Smith, will be available online Friday afternoon, the schools’ spokesman said.
Kindergarten and first grade students gathered in the auditorium of Horace Mann Elementary Wednesday afternoon cheered as Oakland Police officers handed teachers a special community policing accessory—four brown teddy bears, with blue bows tied around their necks.
The Green Stampede was founded in 2001 by Oakland school board member Chris Dobbins, who designed the program, along with friends who were both teachers and A’s fans, as a combination recreational and tutoring after school program. “It gives a lot of kids a place to go,” says Jorge Leon, Green Stampede President and former Stampede student.
The sounds of nail biting, pencil tapping and head scratching filled the hot Oakland Tech high school classroom on Monday after school as students filled in the bubbles on their test answer sheets. While many of their classmates were headed home or were hanging out on the school’s front lawn, 18 Alameda County high school students were preparing for an exam that will help determine their futures—the SAT, also referred to as the college entrance exam.
Home movies are easy to define. According to Pamela Jean Vadakan, a former film collection assistant at the Pacific Film Archive, home movies are “personal moving images shot by an amateur (non-professional) of familiar subjects and familiar places.”
An OUSD facilities board meeting turned into an emotional protest Tuesday afternoon when parents, faculty and staff from Kaiser Elementary School showed up unannounced, rallying to keep their school open.
Parents, childcare providers and state officials on Tuesday urged Governor Jerry Brown to sign a controversial bill, AB 101, that would allow family childcare providers to collectively bargain with government agencies.
At the end of her tenure as an artist in residence at the San Francisco Dump, Sharon Siskin discovered a pile of old, Arabic language textbooks used to teach Muslim children the fundamental lessons of life, such as to love their parents, attend school and share.