Education
Bay Area residents celebrated Valentine’s Day a little early… by traveling to Mars. Lauren Callahan reports.
A newly released poll of 600 young Californians shows that kids today are as optimistic about their futures as ever. The poll, conducted by New America Media and published on Monday, found that 82 percent of respondents believe their lives will be better in 10 years than they are now, and 95 percent believe that if they work hard they will achieve their goals. At the same time, the 16- to 22-year-olds polled said it was taking them longer to…
When the first 45 minutes of public commentary were exhausted at Wednesday night’s school board meeting, there were still 37 speaker cards on file with the board secretary. The most popular message? “No more budget cuts.”
Students at Oakland’s ARISE High School will soon have all the equipment they need to access the Internet at home; on Monday they received a donation of 220 wireless routers from Cisco. They’re also eligible to get free computers from Oakland Technology Exchange West (OTX West), a non-profit that offers refurnished PCs and computer training to all Oakland students in grades 6 to 12.
The Oakland Based Urban Gardens organization — or O.B.U.G.S. — provides healthy food options for Oakland youth ages two to fourteen in six local school gardens. Reporter Lauren Callahan joined West Oakland Middle School students as they harvested greens and learned to make kale salad.
Hundreds of after-school program coordinators and instructors from seven Bay Area counties gathered Friday and Saturday at Oakland Technical High School for a conference focused on improving the quality and range of regional after-school programs.
At a time when local governments talk more about cutting public services than providing new ones, Oakland’s newest library branch bucks the trend. No modest affair, the new 81st Avenue Library opens its doors Saturday in one of the city’s most troubled areas.
Teachers in Oakland can expect a 2 percent raise next year, but that was the only positive budget news from Wednesday night’s school board meeting. The district is expecting to lose more of its state funding this year, is running low on much of its one-time-use federal funding and continues to struggle with low enrollment.
Only one generation ago, almost half of all children in the United States walked to school. But today a look at the car-jammed streets outside of schools in the morning and afternoon tells a different story. Only one in ten children now walk to school regularly, with the number of walking and bicycling trips to school made by children down by 65 percent over the last 40 years, according to the U.S Department of Transportation. Parents’ concerns about traffic safety are…