Public Policy

In Oakland, 76,000 people—that’s 19 percent of the city’s population—live at or below the federal poverty level. This is a statistic that the City of Oakland wants to lower.

In April, Rebecca Kaplan, Oakland city councilmember at large, announced that she was considering running for mayor this fall. Oakland North reporter Ayako Mie sat down for an exclusive interview with Kaplan to talk about how she hopes to change the city.

In this special report, we have created an audio-visual map of the learning resources in Oakland’s Golden Gate neighborhood.

The three schools in the Golden Gate neighborhood are Santa Fe Elementary, a traditional K-5 public school; Civicorps Elementary, an environmentally focused K-5 charter school; and Berkley Maynard, an Aspire K-7 charter school. Each school has its own character and its own focus, according the principals of the schools and the many community members we spoke with.  Above you will find slides that take you through the raw data for each school, and below you’ll find a little information about…

The Oakland Unified School District is set to cut $85 million from its budget next year.  Inevitably, this will include some cuts to staffing.  The infographic above reflects the projected staffing cuts in the Oakland Unified School District for the 2010-2011 school year. Staffing cuts in the district are allocated based on the idea of “Full Time Equivalencies” or FTEs. One FTE is the equivalent cost of one full-time job, but it does not necessarily make up an individual position….

A number of people interviewed for the Learning in Golden Gate project said that many of the 1,100 students attending Golden Gate neighborhood schools* do not live in the area. To see where students were coming from we collected the zip codes of students attending the three Golden Gate neighborhood schools: Berkeley Maynard Academy, Civicorps and Santa Fe.  We then mapped the zip codes (see above) so that we could see the population density of enrolled students per zip code….

We wanted to test what percentage of students attending school in the Golden Gate neighborhood have home Internet access.  Over 70 percent of students attending school in the neighborhood are low-income, so we thought this would give us a basic picture of whether the digital divide—a situation in which low-income populations have less access to the Internet than middle- and high-income populations—was at work in Golden Gate. We distributed a simple survey asking students whether they have Internet access in…