THURSDAY UPDATE: I meant to link to a recent blog post on the issue of school food in Oakland: “The Schoolyard Foodie: Props to the People.” The author, Melrose Leadership Academy teacher Gehry Oatey, writes for Teacher, Revised.

photo of Glenview Elementary School students by D. Ross Cameron/Staff.

A story in tomorrow’s Tribune looks at grassroots efforts to give every child access to fresh produce and a healthy meal, as well as the Oakland school district’s progress on that front. What are your ideas?

Sports4Kids at Manzanita Community School/Tribune file photo

From a lively, uh, discussion tonight between Oakland school board member Alice Spearman and Chief Academic Officer Brad Stam about Sports4Kids (now Playworks) emerged the beginnings of a philosophical debate about what is “necessary” for Oakland schools in the context of severe and ongoing budget cuts.

Earlier in the evening, the board had discussed the superintendent’s proposed priorities — a set of goals that will theoretically help the board and staff know where to cut $27 million-plus from next year’s budget.

Spearman had also singled out, from a long list of vendors, a few Sports4Kids contracts with individual schools. What she didn’t realize was that in June, before the school district emerged (mostly) from state control, State Administrator Vince Matthews approved a $727,500 master contract with the organization, which runs games and activities at 25 elementary schools in the mornings, after school and at recess.

According to Cindy Wilson, Playworks’ communications director, the organization charges each school a flat fee of $23,500. Since the number of participating Oakland schools went from 40 to 25 this year, Playworks will receive $587,500, less than the total amount allowed under the master contract.

(Side note: An old Sports4Kids Web page lists Oakland Superintendent Tony Smith Read the rest of this entry »

Mission figs, anyone? Every Tuesday afternoon, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., Glenview Elementary School kids crowd a tent with locally grown fruits and vegetables. (These lovely photos from parent Joseph Bansuelo are so last week, but we took some new ones during a visit today.) The PTA started the new produce stand, which is run by volunteers, including Carol Kuelper, a woman from the neighborhood who doesn’t even have kids at the school.

I saw one little boy tear into a red cabbage like an apple (makes for a great photo, but a rather challenging interview), and another buying greens that his mom requested for dinner tonight. He told me that grapes were so sweet — and cheap — that he ate them “for fun.”

About 10 more of these weekly farmers markets are opening at Oakland schools this year, thanks in part to funding from the East Bay Asian Youth Center. What kind of nutritional progress are you seeing at your school (and at your school’s cafeteria)? Are you noticing an improvement? Tell us about it.

Some more of Bansuelo’s photos of Glenview’s stand below: Read the rest of this entry »

Steven Weinberg retired in June after a long career in Oakland’s public middle schools. His wife, Georganne Ferrier, also retired from OUSD; she taught English at Oakland High. (True story: They met in 1967, on their first day of student-teaching at McClymonds). Weinberg will share his insights with us, from time to time, as a guest blogger. -Katy

When someone retires after 40 years of teaching, it is only fair to expect that he be able to offer some insight into the changes that have taken place over that period of time. There seems to be a general feeling that things are getting worse in American schools, but when I look back at the really dramatic changes in the past 40 years, all of them have been positive:

When I began teaching in 1969, there were students in my regular eighth grade English classes who could literally (or illiterately) not read 10 words. These were students who entered school before President Johnson’s War on Poverty had set up the Head Start Preschool program and Title One funding for schools in low income areas. Although we still have many students who read far below grade level, the complete non-reader has disappeared from regular classes at the schools where I have worked.

In my early years of teaching, I would have to send students on a daily basis to the nurse’s office to have essence of cloves put on their gums to give them relief from untreated dental problems. Between the fluoridation of water and the Medi-Cal dental program, these problems no longer interfere with students’ abilities to learn.

In the late 60s and early 70s, our school had to call ambulances regularly (certainly several times a month) to take students to the hospital for drug overdoses. Read the rest of this entry »

Students with flu symptoms should be immediately sent home from school – or sent to a designated room until they’re picked up.

But except for some rare exceptions, schools should remain open, federal health officials said today. You can read a story about the latest guidelines here.

The Contra Costa health department is setting up vaccination clinics at more than 40 schools this fall for the seasonal flu and, most likely, the swine flu.

Do you think Alameda County should do the same? Read the rest of this entry »

file photo by Karen T. Borchers/San Jose Mercury News

Once again, health professionals and researchers asked Oakland’s fifth-graders whether they felt safe at school, if they drank alcohol or used drugs, and whether they had caring relationships and other important things going for them at school and at home.

The findings of the 2008-09 California Healthy Kids Survey included the responses of 77 percent of the school district’s fifth-grade class. While the results haven’t changed much since 2006-07 — or maybe because they haven’t —  they are definitely worth noting.

Here’s what never ceases to alarm me, even though I’ve seen these stats before: About 5 percent of the children surveyed — mind you, they are 10 and 11, for the most part — said they had brought a gun or a knife to their elementary school in the past year. And that about 33 percent of the students, one in three kids, said they had seen a gun or knife at school in the past year.

Not surprisingly, just 46 percent said they felt safe at their school all of the time.

But it’s not just Oakland. Read the rest of this entry »

Sports4Kids, the nonprofit that runs activities during recess and after school at more than 30 Oakland schools, has decided to pull out of middle schools and focus solely on elementary schools.

A group of eighth-graders at Ascend, a K-8 school in Fruitvale, were concerned about what this would mean for the younger students. They got together and wrote a petition to keep “Coach Josh” next year. One of those students, Jose Jauregui, wrote this piece about why they did it. -Katy

The new depression, it’s hard and confusing even for kids. Oakland, like most of California, is poor and losing money.

It’s understandable why Sports4Kids would have need to leave middle schools. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey everyone!

I haven’t been posting anything lately because the school year is close to ending and everyone we’re trying to finish their end of the year projects and such.

The Swine Flu has been dominating the media for the past two-three weeks. Coincidentally, the 10th graders at our school are doing a project about different diseases. It’s actually amazing how our project fell into perfect synchronization with the outbreak of the swine flu.

One of the first things we learned was how to prevent the influenza from spreading. However, some students are reacting strongly about the swine while others aren’t worried at all. We’ve had students go home early on school days because their parents were afraid that they can catch the flu, we’ve had students wear masks to school, etc. If anyone shows a symptom of the flu last week, they were usually sent home and stayed home until the symptoms are gone regardless if they had the flu or not. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, as schools from San Francisco to New York were closing temporarily to avoid the spread of the H1N1 virus, I kept waiting for the swine scare to hit Oakland.

So far, it hasn’t happened. And today, the CDC says it’s no longer recommending school closures in response to the virus — just for schools and families to be vigilant about sending sick kids home. Read the rest of this entry »

I actually found a science experiment on the subject (in addition to numerous hand washing songs that, frankly, I wouldn’t recommend).

Has anyone used vegetable oil — or something called GloGerm — to show kids all the hot water, soap and scrubbing that it takes to free their hands of germs?

Sounds like a timely science lesson to me…

Here’s a story my colleague Kim Wetzel wrote on the flu virus and a document outlining the procedures schools should follow (from the California Department of Education). The state health department wants schools with even one case of it to close.

image from NickNguyen’s photostream at flickr.com/creativecommons