The Nate Newsletter

As a resident of Oakland, I am feeling increasingly inclined to write about this. I attended a city council meeting on February 5, 2019, and what I saw shocked me. Oakland's school district, OUSD, is quickly falling apart. They have a $30 million deficit and the school board is scrambling to find a way to recover from this. Meanwhile, Oakland schools are not seeing much improvement. Two weeks ago, OUSD voted to close Roots Academy, a small middle school of ~100 students in East Oakland. This is a horrible, inequitable disaster. Many of Roots Academy's students will have to find a new school for next year, and Roots Academy is located in one of the less wealthy neighborhoods. Not everyone has the ability to get too far for school, due to various financial and personal reasons, and we should not be closing down schools to save money, for we need all of them. OUSD's policy is as follows: they want to close down schools to save money while also  decreasing class size...

Today, January 19, 2019, I undertook a rather large community service project in Oakland. This project, above all others, was one I found very meaningful because it is relevant to something I am very interested in: music. Above all else, congratulations to Jordan of my troop of Scouts for organizing and carrying out this project. For the rank of Eagle Scout, it is mandatory that each candidate plan and execute a massive service project from scratch. His project will have a huge impact on a local middle school that will only increase throughout time. Essentially, this project was to revitalize the music room and general music program at a local middle school. An itemized list of everything I helped do was as follows: we were going to repair every music stand in a school of 600 students, clean gum off the carpets (a gross job), clean the cabinets, repaint the doors to existing cabinets to make them nicer, and build two new shelves from scratch, each designed for a different ...