This is suppose to be a learning institute, remember the educators are suppose to be educating the kids…instead the chiefs are fighting all the darn time, throwing their weight around, and have totally lost sight of what the hell is really suppose to be going on. It is not all bad, but the bad outweight the good.

It is time for a drastic change and overhaul on that campus starting with the cheifs first and working the way up the ladder..did you hear me..working your way up the ladder…if the top can’t look down to see what is happening underneath them or condole what is going on, then our babies are not going to receive the education they deserve..how many kids passed the CAHSEE, how many kids are going to graduate, what type of intervention was taken early on, and I am not talking about afterschool programs, what has been done to make sure these kids graduate!

Given all respect to the violence in the community which is not acceptable….if you can respect and rally around the dead, then you better find a way to rally and respect around the living making sure our kids are good citizens..sick and tire of politics and adult issues..

Community help us save our school..we all know it is prime property..just found out that adult day has space on the campus..hell the kids can’t even use the new swimming pool..my children’s education is important and if it takes working two jobs, then that is what I am going to do…parent running away from Oakland Public School!!!

McClymonds Educational Complex has been give a triple bypass heart surgery, and the arteries are shutting down one by one, we are only operating with one Kidney, one Lung, one Arm, and one Leg. It looks like we are headed to being put on a Life Support System -

As it stands now, starting in the new year – BEST – will not have any incoming 9th graders, all 9th graders that have been recruited have been assigned to EXCEL. BEST will engage 10th, 11th and 12th grades for the school year 08/09. EXCEL will engaged 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grades for the school year 08/09. We did not receive any status on the open position for a principal at BEST, nor did we get a count of how many teachers have or will receive PINK SLIPS due to the budget cuts..all we can confirm is that we will make sure that our children will be educated by any means necessary. What does this mean for our school – McClymonds – is this a way for the district to slowly take over the campus for other purposes, will it be charter schools, trade schools- I don’t know, but we need to get some very clear answers really soon.

History has been made at McClymonds and we need to make sure it stays that way. It is imperative that all concern parties get involved in this process to make sure we keep McClymonds High School doors open in our community.

The overhead costs alone boggle the mind. McClymonds now has two principals and two sets of office staff where it once had one. At Fremont High and Castlemont, which now house three or more small schools, the administrative salaries and other overhead have multiplied even further. That in itself is ridiculous, and the students at the small schools are not learning any more or behaving any better than were their large-school predecessors. Any sense of school community has been sold down the river, and the kids at the small schools can wind up feeling extremely claustrophobic (especially if their school is located in an interior area with no windows, as was the old YES Academy before they moved off the Fremont campus to go terrorize the King’s Estates neighborhood). They’re also stuck in classes with the same students year after year, and if they happen to make Bad Influence friends during freshman year, they don’t have the opportunity to get out among a larger student population and trade up.

The faculty at Best and Excel do the best they can, but the whole setup stinks. McClymonds now has two separate bell schedules! The teachers upstairs don’t know the students downstairs, and vice versa, so anyone can wander in off the street and say “I go to the other school.” Class cutting is RAMPANT at Mack, because if a kid wants to ditch he can just wander up or downstairs and hide out in the john, or find a class with a substitute teacher who doesn’t know anybody, and those are the kids who bother to stay in the building. On a sunny day there are groups of kids wandering the campus and the surrounding neighborhood, and that beautiful building stands two-thirds empty.

It’s a damn shame.

The fear of being called a punk at lunch in 20 minutes and having to fight is immediate; the fear of being 23 and homeless, or 19 and in jail, less so. A lot of these kids can’t see past next week, or don’t think they’ll be alive that long. If they are doing any planning, it is sometimes planning to become tough enough that they can survive — even thrive — in prison.

Teenagers in the best situations are not known for their ability to act for long-range goals. And these kids are hardly in the best situation.

But for all of us, our flaws seem to originate as childhood survival techniques.

When you look at it that way, it makes total sense from the kid’s point of view, and teachers’ efforts to change the behavior are doomed to fail.

But it’s not possible to get everyone to read the book! So instead, people just see a lot of “ghetto” kids acting out and disrupting class, and teachers and administrators making ineffectual efforts, then getting bashed for the failure of those efforts.