At a meeting this summer, a small group of parents, teachers and students from West Oakland was simply given the name of BEST High School’s new principal.

It’s a different story for the much larger and more organized high school in the redwoods. Chris Dobbins, the school board member who represents Skyline High School, said that the district was allowing people at the school to interview and rank the candidates, as schools throughout the city once did.

At 6:30 p.m. Tuesday night, teachers, parents, students — and anyone else with a stake in the selection of Skyline High School’s new principal – meet in the high school library to elect the members of a 13-person hiring committee. Dobbins said the committee will include four parents (one from four different parent groups), three teachers, two students, two non-teaching staff members, one administrator who is not at Skyline, and one community member.

The goal is to hire someone by Read the rest of this entry »

Alice Spearman, the incumbent for the East Oakland-Elmhurst seat on the school board, has avoided a runoff in the three-way race against Doris Limbrick and Beverly Williams.

According to the official results released by the county registrar’s office, Spearman won 50.4 percent of the vote, just over the 50 percent-plus-one-vote she needed to win outright. Limbrick trailed with 32.3 percent, and Williams with 16.6 percent.

There were only 5,642 votes cast in this election, so each one carried a fair amount of weight. In fact, Spearman needed 2,822 votes to win, and netted 2,844.

Spearman said she aimed to push for a policy that would favor local contractors Read the rest of this entry »

I must say, summer has been pretty relaxing compared to the hectic school year. Although I have been catching up on some much needed sleep and “being lazy” time, I have also found ways to keep my mind stimulated, my teachers made sure of that.

For the AP English class I will be taking next year I have a summer assignment to read three books: All The Pretty Horses, Wuthering Heights, and Sula, as well as do some analysis for each book.

College application time is also just around the corner, and its something that I’ve been thinking about a lot this summer. Where do I want to apply? Do I stand a chance?

I was lucky enough to be chosen to be a part of a college prep program this summer, Experience Berkeley, and it has really eased my anxiety. Through this program I went to a three day college workshop at UC Berkeley where I got to stay in the dorms, live like a Berkeley student, and learn about what Berkeley had to offer. Read the rest of this entry »

No, I don’t have the answer.

But, as someone without kids of her own yet, I’ve been reading with interest your ongoing discussion about the things parents must do to keep their children challenged and stimulated.

If it’s that hard during the school year, how do your kids stay sharp during the summer months?

Do they go to camps, or summer school, or spend their days at the local pool with their friends? Are there enough reasonably priced options, or do you watch your checking account plummet at this time of year?

If you’ve come across any especially good summer programs, by all means tell us about them (unless you don’t want word to get out). Read the rest of this entry »

The East Oakland school of the Arts at Castlemont is losing 22 percent of its positions next year, according to a new district report. Westlake Middle School, United for Success Academy, Sankofa Academy and Fred T. Korematsu Discovery Academy — to name a few — also plan to make deep staffing cuts that exceed their enrollment declines.

For the first time since Oakland adopted its controversial school-based budgeting system, the school district’s financial department has made public school-by-school reports. The one-page documents include projected changes in enrollment, revenues, spending and staffing levels. In other words, they show the effects of the state budget cuts and enrollment decline at the school level.

Photo Caption: “Due to budget constraints, ALL employees are expected to grow their own pencils.”

A word of caution when looking through these documents: Read the rest of this entry »

Why let “Pomp and Circumstance” set the tone of a graduation ceremony when you can strut into the gym to an upbeat tune composed and played by your own classmates?

This year, a group of Claremont Middle School kids got together and composed a theme song titled “Celebrate (Jamba Juice),” which the full band played at the eighth-grade promotion.

A dad with production experience recorded the song. Click here to listen to it.

I think my favorite line has to be “We fresh/We groovy/We chillin’ like a Jamba Juice Smoothie.”

Renae Briggs, who jump-started Claremont Middle School’s music program two years ago, said the 14-year-old boy playing the electric piano in the recording Read the rest of this entry »

Andy Kwok can breathe a sigh of relief. We’ll no longer be text-messaging him, “dropping by” to observe his classroom, or interviewing his students about how he’s doing.

Kwok, 23, was a first-year teacher at West Oakland’s EXCEL High School who graciously allowed us to document his experience, “recording my every blunder,” as he wrote in a piece that ran in today’s Tribune. (Read the last installment and watch the latest video here.)

Kwok was candid about his shortcomings and his struggles — including his decision last fall to assign easier work to his students because so many of them were failing. Read the rest of this entry »

Starting in 2009, the brothers and sisters of children enrolled at a school will have top admissions priority, regardless of where they live.

The board just approved the new admissions priorities, 4-1 (Kerry Hamill, David Kakishiba, Alice Spearman and Chris Dobbins voted for it; Noel Gallo voted against it; Gary Yee and Greg Hodge weren’t at the meeting).

“Nobody, next year, is going to be pushed out of a neighborhood school because of a sibling,” said Kerry Hamill, who served on the special committee that recommended the policy change, which goes into effect in 2009.

Children with older siblings enrolled at their local school already had an admissions advantage over other neighborhood children, under the board’s previous policy. The main difference now is that the same advantage will apply to all younger siblings of existing students (if the older brother or sister has already moved onto middle school, it doesn’t count). Read the rest of this entry »

I only had part of the story yesterday on the leadership changes at BEST High School, when I wrote that “This spring, families learned that Principal James Gray would be sent packing at the end of the school year.”

Apparently, for a period of time this spring, Gray and others thought he might be allowed to stay on the McClymonds campus, after all. But on June 13, after most of the students had scattered for summer vacation, Gray told his staff that he was being reassigned to another Oakland school. (Jumoke Hinton Hodge, school board member-elect and the wife of board member Greg Hodge, said Gray was being sent to be an assistant principal at Roosevelt Middle School in East Oakland).

Most families don’t yet know what has happened.

“I was wondering when people were going to find out that there was going to be a new principal,” Malcolm Gattis, 17, asked Alison McDonald, the district administrator who supervises BEST High School, during a meeting last night. “Everybody right now is thinking Mr. Gray is staying.”

A group of McClymonds students, parents and teachers aren’t ready to let Gray go. Tomorrow, they plan to urge the school board to delay the appointment of Karen Todd, who has been tapped to replace him. Todd is the director of Project SOAR and the former principal at Merritt Middle College, an alternative high school that closed in 2007, apparently because Merritt College wanted to expand into the area occupied by the high school.

Here is a copy of the petition being circulated by the West Oakland Education Task Force, and Read the rest of this entry »

It seems the school board is trying to mend its loquacious ways; there are actual times posted next to certain agenda items for Wednesday’s regularly scheduled meeting. I’ll be there with my stopwatch. See full agenda here.

Come at 6 p.m. if you want to catch the performances of the Martin Luther King Jr. Oratorical Festival winners. Right afterward, while some of the feel-good sentiment still lingers in the air, the board is scheduled to discuss and vote on the new admissions priorities and middle school “megaboundaries” for elementary school kids who are redirected from their home schools.

The public comment session is scheduled for 7 p.m. (After just 30-40 minutes on the enrollment discussion? We’ll see…) At 7:30 p.m., a detailed presentation of the 2008-09 budget is supposed to begin.

Below are the responses I received today from the enrollment and admissions crew, based on questions some of you all have asked me about the proposed policy changes. Read the rest of this entry »