Education
Although three of the seven board members are up for re-election in November, only one seat is being challenged. Incumbents David Kakishiba and Christopher Dobbins have no opposition, and so will automatically retain their school board seats. But Gary Yee, the current board president, has an opponent who is also a longtime adversary—former teachers’ union president Ben Visnick.
Two dozen toddlers played on a jungle gym outside an Oakland childcare center late Tuesday morning as State Schools Chief Jack O’Connell led a press conference inside, decrying the failure of his efforts to save childcare funding for low-income families.
On the stat sheet, the play looks like any other four-yard gain, a positive but unremarkable advancement on the football field. But it was how Laney College running back C.J. Anderson gained those four yards last Friday night that shows why he is one of the best junior college running backs in the state.
A little rain didn’t keep Oaklanders away from the first annual East Bay Mini Maker Faire on Sunday. The fair, which was an indoor and outdoor exhibition of over 100 Bay Area businesses and tech projects, was held at Temescal’s Park Day School.
In Oakland, the school district had to cut $122 million from its budget this year, and teachers have not gotten a raise in nearly a decade. Some folks are trying to change that. They’ve put a measure on the ballot that would create a 54-cent per day property tax to raise teachers’ salaries. To learn more about how the measure would work and what the benefits to Oakland students might be, Lillian Mongeau caught up with one of the measure’s biggest champions, Jonathan Klein of Great Oakland Public Schools.
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.