Education
Superintendent Tony Smith got personal while talking reform and student performance expectations Tuesday at the Oakland Unified School District’s Region 1 Teacher’s Dialogue. The meeting, which was the third in a series of teacher outreach meetings being held this month, brought roughly 25 teachers to North Oakland’s Sankofa Academy. The dialogues are supposed to give teachers a chance to understand the administration’s vision and talk directly to the superintendent.
Bud Cropsey is an institution on the Oakland music scene—a longtime middle school and private music teacher, as well as a patron of the Oakland East Bay Symphony. This week, shortly after Cropsey’s 99th birthday, the symphony is honoring Cropsey with a three-day series of concerts geared at helping children learn about classical music. Read the story of Cropsey’s musical life, and hear more from this week’s concert series.
In June, Oakland’s last two adult schools—out of five the city once supported—closed their doors. And at the start of this school year, the district announced it would no longer offer English as a Second Language (ESL) classes to adults.
Piedmont Avenue Elementary has garnered attention as an up-and-coming school in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). This year, Piedmont was one of 12 OUSD schools that raised their Academic Performance Index (API) by more than 50 points. That’s twice the average increase for the district.
Led by running back Jordan Sanford’s four touchdowns, the Fremont Tigers took down the Tech Bulldogs, 26-7, in opening weekend Oakland Athletic League (OAL) football action this past Saturday at Curt Flood Field.
Computer animation sprang into public consciousness in 1995 with Pixar’s film, Toy Story. Fifteen years later, the studio has turned out nearly a dozen feature length films from its East Bay headquarters, and now kids at an Oakland middle school are getting a chance to get in on act of animating. Listen to the full story on Oakland North Radio.
Oakland Tech head coach Delton Edwards, or Coach D, as he is warmly known among his program, is always around. 24-7 and 365 days a year, he likes to say. “Always,” says the 48-year-old. “You know how you bond with something? A lot of those coaches, they were a big influence on my life.”
“I put love into this food,” said Lawana Wyatt, who has worked with food services in Oakland for the past 13 years, as she instructed a member of her staff on how much food to add to each plate when the students arrived. Although Wyatt is enthusiastic about school lunch on any given day, she knew that Thursday’s meal was really something special. “It’s not every day that we can get organic food,” she said. “I think it’s a good idea. I really hope the kids come.”
Students and staff from Oakland Technical High School presented the school board with more than 700 signatures Wednesday night, asking the district to support tenured statistics teacher Evelyn Francisco, who faces deportation back to the Philippines if her visa is not renewed before December.