Here is some news that might make you want to hold the birthday cake: Nearly one in five 4-year-old kids is obese, according to a public health study published in the April issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

The obesity rates reported in the study, based on height/weight ratios, are particularly high for Native American children (31 percent). I don’t believe the paper is posted online yet, but you can read a research brief here.

image from two stout monks’ photostream at flickr.com/creativecommons

This Wednesday may fall right in the middle of spring break, and on the first night of Passover, but the Oakland school board plans to meet anyway.

A couple of major issues appear on this week’s agenda, including details of dramatic adult school cutbacks and the closure of some of the school district’s preschool classrooms and programs.

Given the timing of the meeting, I wonder how many people will be there make it. You can find the full agenda here, the adult school presentation Read the rest of this entry »

photo of Tilden classroom by Sean Donnelly/Oakland Tribune

Tilden School is a fascinating study in special education — and, more broadly, in promising and potentially short-lived Oakland school district experiments. You can find today’s Tribune story here.

Tonight, the board is expected to vote to close the 125-student elementary school (a plan that might entail relocating its students to one of six different schools) at the end of the 2009-10 year because of facilities and enrollment concerns. It was originally slated to close this June, but parents quickly organized and pushed for another year to craft a stronger plan with more community input, which two board subcommittees approved.

One of the school’s biggest challenges Read the rest of this entry »

A national study by the preschool advocacy group Pre-K Now found that hundreds of thousands of middle-income families across the country can’t afford preschool, and that the situation’s only worsening with the economic crisis.

According to the Associated Press story on the report:

A middle-class family of four in Massachusetts needs to earn $94,500 a year to afford rent, food, health care and pre-k – $50,000 more than the state pre-k program’s eligibility threshold. That means nearly 32,000 of the state’s 3- and 4-year-olds are caught in the middle. Read the rest of this entry »