Labor
“My last trip in the penitentiary, I had to make a decision on what I wanted to do with my life,” said Reggie Bailey, sitting in the swiveling barber chair in his small shop in the heart of downtown Oakland. “I just decided to go to barber college.”
When you’re in high school, it can be difficult to envision what you’ll be doing in 10 years, five years or even one year after you graduate. But Oakland Tech parents and teachers wanted to emphasize how important it is for students to start thinking about their futures.
For the first week of February, Oakland Unified School District is celebrating National School Counselor Week, but few remain in on-site school counselor positions.
The Crucible’s second Hot Couture: A Fusion of Fashion and Fire will run on Friday and Saturday evenings, January 11 and 12. The show features works created by nine teams of fashion designers and artists who have partnered to make fashion pieces out of industrial arts materials.
Among the answers: an airport tower, police officer salaries, and a lot of repaved roads. This end-of-year roundup by reporter Aaron Mendelson examines the trail of the federal stimulus money that arrived three years ago in Oakland–recipient of the tenth largest stimulus grant in the country.
Oakland is offering $160,000 to help fund a new day labor program for 2013. Various organizations are vying for the funds, and day laborers say the center will be essential to helping them get jobs.
On a rainy Friday afternoon, Andrew Lewis is patrolling the crammed, dark aisles of his warehouse. “In this business,” he says, stopping in front of a few faux-phonebooths, “you just acquire stuff.” In close quarters with the booths, under the orange sodium lights hung high from the dark wood rafters, are street signs from The Matrix sequels, a hollow jukebox from Milk, plaster radiators from RENT, and stacks of fake lobster traps from the recent Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman…
One by one, in the pre-dawn darkness Tuesday, delivery trucks exited Oakland’s 980 freeway at Adeline and headed toward Middle Harbor Road, prepared to pick up or drop off shipments at the Port of Oakland. Each truck came to a halt as the drivers faced picketers blocking the entrance to the international container terminals at the Port.
Over a month into the new school year, Kaiser Elementary teacher Douglas Feague found himself in his principal’s office at lunch, digesting some difficult news: His position was being “consolidated.” In other words, the school could no longer afford an eleventh full-time teacher, and Feague, the least senior staff member, would need to relocate to a different school.