(By D. Hanousek) Whether it's raffle tickets, silent auction items, gala tickets, or school carnivals, it seems that the San Francisco public school system runs on practically nothing but the blood, sweat, and the cash of parents' pocketbooks. I thought property taxes paid for education, but after contributing nearly $150 in cash and donations to friends' seemingly countless school fundraisers, I find myself wondering: How many raffle tickets does it actually take to run San Francisco public schools? more ›

Roosevelt Middle School (1926 East 19th Street) is on lockdown after somebody nearby carrying several guns fired shots at around 10:30 today. "The incident began about 10:30 a.m. in the 2100 block of 17th Avenue when the suspect came out of a house with multiple handguns and opened fire," reports Oakland Tribune. "All on-duty Oakland police officers have been called to the scene and officers are only responding to 911 calls at this time." more ›

Maxwell Park Elementary (4730 Fleming) in Oakland is on lockdown, with students being evacuated, after a neighbor reported seeing a man with a shotgun roaming around the area. No reports of any injuries or shootings. more ›

Jeremy Lin, now a member of the New York Knicks, played on the 2006 Palo Alto High School basketball team before attending Harvard. While at Palo Alto HS, he helped his team win the Division II state title after defeating Mater Dei of Southern California in a 51-47 game. Thus, a legend was born. Now that Linsanity has taken over the country — by the way, here's a pic of Lin shirtless — SFist thought we took a look back at his high school days at Palo Alto, a school with a shockingly impressive roster of noted alumni. more ›

An apparent amateur porn stylist turned into an assault suspect in the men's locker room at CCSF last weekend. Police are looking for a guy who was allegedly attempting to take video of another man undressing around 4 p.m. Saturday. When the probable hottie being filmed asked the suspect to turn the camera away from him, the suspect proceeded to assault the poor kid, punching him repeatedly in the face and giving him a concussion. more ›

On Thursday, Monsieur Moonbeam prosed slashing a jarring "$1.4 billion in welfare and child care aid for the destitute "while holding voters liable for $5 billion in education funding with a November tax measure." It's all part of Brown's (impossible?) effort to fill our $9.2 billion general fund deficit. more ›

Martinez police placed Alhambra High School in Martinez on lockdown to conduct a "safety search" around 11 a.m. this morning according to local news site Claycord.com. School officials later reported the lockdown was initiated after a teacher found an empty handgun case on school grounds. The search concluded just before 1 p.m. this afternoon when authorities failed to find any weapons. Today's lockdown comes after the school received a threatening email from an anonymous source last Thursday. more ›

Police chief-turned-District Attorney Gascón hasn't done a whole lot worth mentioning since our dreamy former Mayor put him in the DA's office. (Actually, up until this point, it's what he hasn't done that has made headlines.) Today, with less than a month to go before the city decides whether or not he gets to keep his post, Gascón's office has announced a pilot program designed to keep chronically absent 9th graders in school. more ›

Add another demonstration to the list of unhappy mobs around town: down in the quiet hillside hamlet of Bernal Heights, some twenty parents of children at the Paul Revere School gathered at the school this morning to protest strict new changes laid out by the school's recently installed principal. According to Bay City News, principal Sheila Sammon who is beginning her second year with the K-8 college prep school, has taken to punishing children for taking bathroom breaks and effectively banned parents from volunteering where their kids go to school. more ›

School districts around the Bay Area are mulling changes to their policies regarding homework assigned to students, because new evidence is emerging that we're raising a generation of over-stressed over-achievers who can't sleep. Parents these days are pressuring kids earlier and earlier with getting good grades and taking AP classes in order to get into better colleges, and as a result their childhoods are getting destroyed. more ›

California Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation today that would require state schools in include gay history in the curriculum. "The legislation, authored by Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, was approved in the Legislature along party lines, with Democrats in favor and Republicans opposed. The governor's office announced this morning that Brown had signed the bill," reports Sacramento Bee. This would include queer studies, if you will, into social sciences along with education about "disabilities and members of other cultural groups." more ›

The future school kids of California will soon learn the valuable contributions to history by members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community by reading about them in their textbooks. Yesterday, the Assembly approved a bill okaying the addition of the info to our state's textbooks, and that bill lands on the desk of Governor Jerry Brown today. more ›

UC Berkeley police are asking the public to help catch that man they think responsible for a series of robberies and sexual assaults. The latest incident occurred Friday morning. "Police say it happened near Haviland Grove around 12:30 a.m.," reports KGO. "The student says she was walking through campus when a man grabbed her from behind, sexually assaulted her and robbed her." The suspect is described as a white man in his 20s with short brown hair, 5'7"-ish, thin build, and was last seen "wearing blue denim overalls and a green sweatshirt." more ›

Be extra careful out there today, folks! It's the 3rd Annual Bike to School Day, in which approximately 3,000 students at more than 40 schools throughout town will be pedaling to school and back. Bay City News via SF Appeal reports that several San Francisco supervisors will be coming along for the ride, including Eric Mar, David Chiu, Jane Kim, Carmen Chu, John Avalos, and Scott Wiener. more ›

KALW reports on Visitacion Valley Middle School's implementation of the innovative Quiet Time program, which sets aside fifteen minutes at the beginning and end of each school day for students to meditate. All but a few of the kids practice the voluntary activity and report finding it enjoyable. The school has experienced a small but encouraging rise in test scores and attendance rates so far. more ›

A100-year-old time capsule was opened yesterday at Cleveland Elementary School, much to the delight of current and former students and faculty. The time capsule, which was in the form of a copper box, had been discovered a few months ago embedded behind the cornerstone inside the front wall of the school. It took a while to dig it out of the concrete. more ›

In a national survey released yesterday, schools in California received an overall grade of a 76.2 out of 100, putting the quality of education in the Golden State just below the national average of 76.3. The annual Quality Counts survey, conducted by the folks behind the non-profit Education Week magazine, ranks California schools 30th in the nation based on six criteria including "Chance for Success", "K-12 Achievement" and "Standards, Assessment & Accountability". more ›

Students in one algebra class at Presidio Middle School got lucky enough to be chosen for a pilot program by Houghton Harcourt Mifflin publishing in which they get a free iPad with a full curriculum algebra app. The intention is for the kids to use the iPads to help them solve tough math problems through tutorial videos, etc, and for each to be able to customize their algebra education. more ›

Five teenage boys showed up at school yesterday at Live Oaks High in Morgan Hill wearing American flag t-shirts in order to express their "patriotism" on Cinco de Mayo. The school principal called them all out and told them they were going to have to turn their t-shirts inside out, calling the shirts incendiary, and concerned that they were trying to start a fight with a group of Mexican-American students. more ›

Parents picketed outside Lazear Elementary School in Oakland yesterday over an allegedly unfit teacher. Parents claim the teacher in question "took a smoking break during class, leaving his students unattended; that he locked a student in the classroom this past fall and recently grabbed a child by the collar; that he has fallen asleep in class; and that he made the children write, over and over, 'I will learn how to shut my mouth.'" (In the teacher's defense, children are annoying at times.) During yesterday's protest, which also went down at the school district headquarters, "only about 60 of the school's 300 students came to class." more ›

As efforts to legalize marijuana for recreational use are underway in Sacramento and possibly on the ballot, a large gathering of student activists from... more ›

Billed as a Day of Statewide Action for Public Education, public education students, workers and supporters from Pre-K through PhD are expected to protest the glaring lack of funding aimed at California public schools. Thursday's SF rally, to be held at the Civic Center, will boast "more than 30 speakers from schools and universities as well as musical, dance and spoken word performances." The goal of this, according to the California Faculty Association, "is to raise awareness about the crisis in public education and the need to fully fund our schools, colleges and universities." Find out out what's happening in your neck of the woods, visit calfac.org. [via BCN/SF Appeal] more ›

In that *super controversial* address to school children that had conservatives nationwide saying he would turn our kids into an army of health-care-reform-endorsing zombies, President Barack Obama today advised kids to "be careful what you post on Facebook" because it could come back and haunt you someday. Sound advice. He also made the *super controversial* statement, "Every single one of you has something to offer," and said that of anyone dead or alive who he could have dinner with, he'd choose Ghandi. No word yet on the number of glazed-over, socialist automatons later seen wandering the nation's school yards. more ›

CBS5 reports that despite the California Department of Education's strict laws that sex education programs be medically accurate and objective, abstinence-only group Free to Be has been teaching their scientifically-inaccurate curriculum in Sonoma County Schools for the past seventeen years, up until this past May. more ›

Twenty-four Isabelle Jackson Elementary School students in Elk Grove, near Sacramento, went home on the last day of school last Friday with a DVD that was supposed to contain a year in review of the class. The DVD turned out to be full of inappropriate images involving the teacher, about six seconds of which at least two students watched. The teacher has since contacted all of the students' parents warning them of the DVD and asking them to throw it away. It is unknown whether the teacher still has a job. more ›

Parents of students in the Alameda School District are split down the middle regarding the district's decision to proceed with a new set of classes aimed at curbing anti-gay bullying. Starting next year, students in kindergarten through fifth grade will take one 45 minute class per year based on the GroundSpark curriculum. Fifth graders will read And Tango Makes Three, the true story of a pair of male penguins at the Central Park Zoo who successfully hatched an egg and raised a chick. more ›

Natalie Jones, a sixth-grader in Ramona, California, created a Powerpoint presentation about Harvey Milk's life and activism, for which she received a near-perfect score. The day before the presentation, Jones' principal said that although her project was as good as a high school student's, because of the "sensitive material," she might be unable to show it. more ›

Muni Diaries just came out with this appalling account via the Noe Valley Voice about Noe Valley resident R. La Rose's encounter with an abusive teen on the J Church on the morning of April 1st. more ›

After a weary battle to permanently remove Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) from San Francisco schools, the school board voted 4-3 Tuesday night to reinstate the program. If you recall, the army training service was supposed to be phased out in less than a month at all SF public schools. Many argued that the 90-year-old military recruiting program shouldn't be allowed in public schools. "The kind of leadership it teaches is classic military leadership ... It's intended for war, not for civilian life," said Michael Wong, who graduated from Galileo High as a first Lt. in the JROTC. Getting rid of JROTC would have made San Francisco the country's only school district to ban the program based on political bias. more ›