Shweta Narayan, one of India’s leading environmentalists, paid the Bay Area a visit last week and presented information about the importance of environmental monitoring when it comes to toxic disasters. For the past nine years, Narayan, and Global Community Monitor, a group based in El Cerrito, have collaborated on air pollution awareness campaigns in India, where she coordinates Community Environmental Monitoring. Narayan spoke at the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco and Center for Environmental Health in Oakland. “It’s…
If smiles bought cheeseburgers, Salesian High senior guard Jabari Bird could sell a lot of Happy Meals. Bird, one of the nation’s top guards and a 2013 McDonald’s All American, donned an apron, stood behind a cash register and took Extra Value Meal orders from friends, family, teachers and teammates in San Pablo Wednesday. The restaurant’s owner and operator, Rachel Wong, donated $1,000 to the high school. Bird is one of 24 players selected from a field of more than…
Dozens of palm-sized faces hang from the ceiling in Steve Mainini’s art classroom at Kennedy High School. The ceramic reflections of former students dangle in wire cages and defy gravity as if trapped in some sort of bad dream. But for the hundreds of students that have enrolled in Mainini’s art classes the past eight years, the art teacher with a crew cut is no Freddy Krueger—instead his students and peers regard him as an inspiration. “Soul Cages,” Mainini called…
Richmond Oilers head softball coach Rosalind “Roz” Randle wore a long white blouse, blue stretch pants, baby blue ankle socks and shower slippers as she stood in the dusty third base dugout Wednesday evening at Salesian High School. More team uniforms were on order, she said, as the second-year coach shouted instructions through the chained linked fence. “Mo stop biting your nails,” she said to her third baseman, Moesha Samuel, as a Salesian runner danced off the bag ready to…
Kennedy High freshman English teacher Aaron Colacion does it his way. And because of that the school and the district may reap a financial reward. The third-year teacher is one of five finalists competing for the Bay Area’s 2013 Comcast SportsNet All-Star Teacher Award. Grand prize: $20,000. Colacion said if he won the twenty-grand he’d like to buy Kennedy High School small Acer computers called Nettops. He said because students are so strapped for computer lab time, that would help…
The Kennedy Lady Eagles basketball team traveled to San Francisco Saturday night and battled Sacred Heart Cathedral in what would be Kennedy’s last game of the season. Sacred Heart, the number one seed in the NorCal Division III playoffs, withstood a frenzied Kennedy first-half attack to win 86-70. Instead of drawing X’s and O’s on a dry-erase board prior to the game, Lady Eagles head coach Rae Jackson told his players the Bible story about David and Goliath. He explained…
Something must’ve been in the air yesterday as the Kennedy High Lady Eagles’ basketball team traveled south toward San Jose to take on the Branham High Lady Bruins in the first round of the NorCal Division III playoffs. After a quick stop at Panda Express to eat some pre-game rice bowls, everyone jumped back on the bus with full bellies, and sang Sponge Bob Square Pants and Dora The Explorer theme songs for the next five minutes. Lady Eagle’s head…
On Tuesday, UC Berkeley’s Seismological Laboratory director Richard Allen, who is British, sat quietly next to his Polish wife, Kasia Allen, Cal’s assistant dean for external relations. Together, along with 75 immigrants from 33 other countries, they raised their right hands at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Homefront National Historical Park in Richmond and took the 140-word oath of allegiance that made them naturalized U.S. citizens. The earthquake scholar said that the couple’s son had been born in the…
Wednesday night’s California Interscholastic Federation basketball game against eight-seed Branham High of San Jose, as the regional championships kick off, will be no joke. One more Kennedy loss and it’s sayonara, Lady Eagles. But don’t shrug off the nine-seed Lady Eagles just yet—head coach Rae Jackson wants to keep the charter bus running. “We just want to get on that bus and get down there,” Jackson said before Monday’s practice, explaining how Kennedy will approach the school’s first-ever NorCal game….
They say you can’t teach blistering speed. Don’t tell that to 68-year-old Donald Jackson. He and his Richmond Steelers youth football coaching staff had 10 boys out in Kennedy High’s grassy baseball field Sunday morning, pumping their knees and arms like runaway freight trains. Jackson said they’d be in right field every Saturday and Sunday until the last week of July, when football practice starts, from 10 a.m. until noon, working on speed training. “The purpose of the training is…
Sometimes life has its ups and downs. And on Wednesday night the Kennedy Lady Eagles’ basketball team got a big dose of down in an 85-21 loss to nationally ranked powerhouse Bishop O’Dowd of Oakland. But all was not lost for the Lady Eagles—the upside of the lopsided loss was that they still qualified for next week’s loser-goes-home NorCal state basketball tournament. “It’s time to get back in the lab and practice hard,” Lady Eagles’ assistant coach Dajuan Alexander told…
The Kennedy Eagles track and field team traveled to Pleasant Hill Saturday to compete in the Joe Stocking Super Seven Invitational at Diablo Valley College. Out of 18 schools, the boy’s team finished just north of the middle-of-the-pack, while the the girl’s squad finished right in the middle of 14 schools. Eagles head coach Carl Sumler said everyone that competed in an event, except for the shot put and discuss, came home with a medal. That didn’t seem to bother…
The energy prior to the Lady Eagles’ tip off against Hercules High Friday night didn’t seem like a winner-take-all atmosphere.