Women and hip-hop: A discussion in downtown Oakland

On Friday, the Betti Ono art gallery in downtown Oakland hosted a panel discussion about women and Hip-Hop. The “My Art, My Culture: Women, media, and Hip-Hop” three-part discussion was the product of the combined efforts of a number of Bay Area arts organizations including Beats, Rhymes, and Life, which uses Hip-Hop to empower young people, and the Daughters of Dilla Project, which offers media arts programs for girls.

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OUSD votes to revoke American Indian Model Schools charters

At a long-awaited special school board meeting, and after over six months of hearings and notices, Oakland Unified School District board members voted to revoke the three American Indian Model Schools’ (AIMS) charters. The 4-3 vote came after Superintendent Tony Smith recommended the board revoke the charters, and after a particularly emotional and dramatic series of public comments and discussion.

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Oakland by the ZIP code: Photos from the 94607

Enjoy the photo gallery for our weekly series, The Pulse of Oakland. This week’s featured ZIP code is 94607. The area includes the waterfront, Chinatown, West Oakland and the Port of Oakland. Oakland North reporters will be taking photographs documenting each of the ZIP codes in Oakland over the next few months. Every neighborhood is…

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An AIMS graduate returns to help her school through challenging times

Karely Ordaz remembers the first time she realized that good grades had good consequences. She was an eighth grader at Oakland Charter Academy and she had just found out that she was one of ten middle school students chosen for an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C. “Never in my wildest dreams as an eighth grader did I think I’d be able to go to the capitol for free just because I had good grades,” she recalls. “That’s when I decided that I’d keep doing it.”

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Children celebrate Black History Month at Ile Omode Elementary

Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and a number of famous African Americans ancestors made an appearance at an elementary school in East Oakland on the final day of Black History Month. Ancestor Day 2013 at Ile Omode, a pre-kindergarten through eighth grade school in East Oakland, consisted of four and five year-old students dressing up as…

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Oakland by the ZIP code: Photos from the 94603

For the third installment in a new photography series, here is this week’s photo gallery for The Pulse of Oakland—the featured ZIP code is 94603 in East Oakland. The area includes Elmhurst, Brookfield Village, parts of the industrial district and more.

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Reggie Bailey’s Barbershop

“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.”

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Oakland by the ZIP code: Photos from the 94601

Welcome to the debut photo gallery for The Pulse of Oakland. Oakland North reporters will be taking photographs documenting each of the ZIP codes in Oakland over the next few months. Every neighborhood is diverse and different, and we want to capture that. This week’s featured ZIP code is 94601 in East Oakland. The area includes…

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Oscar Grant family reaches out to mother of Kenneth Harding

On a Saturday afternoon in July, 2011, Kenneth Harding Jr., 19, lay stomach down in his own blood, fighting for his life on the corner of 3rd Street and Palou Avenue in the heart of the Bay View Hunters Point neighborhood in San Francisco. Some say San Francisco police officers shot Harding after he allegedly evaded…

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One Oakland teacher’s lesson on discipline

Martel Price listens to students from his leadership class.

Price has a special vantage point on the Resolution Plan, given the fact that he was once a disobedient student, and now sometimes works with students with behavioral issues. He’s a little ambivalent, he said—because he understands how tough classroom teaching can really be.
On the one hand, he said, monitoring their own disciplinary actions more closely will push teachers to find resolutions to kids’ problematic classroom behaviors, without kicking them out so readily. “It will cause teachers to deal with students,” Price said.
On the other hand, it will leave some students with the opportunity to “steal the education” from their classmates, Price said, referring to students who are disruptive to the point that it disturbs the class and ruins the lesson.

Price grew up in East Oakland, graduated from Montera Middle School and Skyline High – and was a self-admitted troublemaker throughout his teens.

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