Oakland North Radio
Although fencing is often thought of as an East Coast sport for the elite, the East Bay Fencers Gym in downtown Oakland is helping to disprove this long-held understanding of this somewhat obscure sport.
For some, the holiday season starts with the first snowfall, or the lighting of a tree. But at Uptown Body and Fender on 26th Street, a new tradition may be taking shape: an elaborate puppet show performance of the fairy tale “Cinderella.” The show, which is performed by a team of puppeteers and technicians from Oakland’s Zanzibar Fairytale Puppet Theater, is now in its third year, and its second in Oakland.
Kate Hoffman spent the day as a poll worker at the Grand Lake Gardens polling station in Oakland’s Grand Lake neighborhood. As the final voters filed in Tuesday evening, Hoffman spoke about how the day went.
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.
We now turn to that age-old question: Why is BART so noisy?
It turns out there are specific reasons for the noise and BART officials know what they are. BART officials also say, however, that studies actually rank BART as one of the quietest public transportation systems in the country.
If you had to use ranked choice voting today, would you know what to do? That’s the question Oakland North asked voters in the lobby of the Grand Lake Theater last Sunday, and even after watching a two-hour spy flick, theatergoers explained the process admirably.
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.
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.
Listen to how Oakland residents spent a day surveying conditions of the city’s parks and other recreational areas, many of which have fallen into disarray.