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Richmond and surrounding cities have not escaped the teacher shortage facing the rest of California, but the problem here is different than in many other school districts: a shortage of bilingual teachers. In order to fill vacancies for bilingual teachers this school year, the district turned to a state-run visitor-exchange program.
Richmond is home to higher than average childhood asthma rates and a refinery responsible for some the highest emissions in the state. How are the two connected?
After the great recession of 2008, inequality widened along racial lines as people lost their homes, often their only major asset. Earlier this month the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington, D.C. think tank, reported in “Billionaire Bonanza: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of US,” that the average white family today has net assets of $141,900, compared with the $11,000 for African American families. This hollowing out of the African American family asset base is a nationwide phenomenon that can be explained by the shrinking African American middle class. It’s even more a factor in “strong market” regions like the Bay Area, where housing costs are soaring.
James Anderson has a habit of peeking out of his house, day or night, constantly checking on his unofficial front yard. From his front door or upstairs window, he can scan the half-acre park known as Elm Playlot, just to make sure there’s no trouble. He grew up in the Iron Triangle, a notoriously high-crime neighborhood in central Richmond named for the train tracks that create its distinctive borders. More than year ago Anderson started working at Elm Playlot, located…
Larnel Wolfe was released from prison six months ago after a 12-year sentence for a robbery. The former San Quentin inmate is now a Live Free Fellow at Richmond’s Safe Return Project.
It wasn’t quite dark in central Richmond, a little before 5 p.m. the day before Thanksgiving. A 13-year-old girl was walking down a flight of stairs, two people were driving north in a white sedan on Carlson Boulevard “when they shot into the direction of the Pullman Townhouses, and kept on driving,” police said. The 13-year-old was shot in the leg, just above the knee. Police said the girl, treated and released at a local hospital, “was not the intended…
Editor’s note: This is Part One in a two-part series on the departure of Richmond Police Chief Chris Magnus, who leaves after this month to become police chief in Tucson, Arizona. In Part Two tomorrow, staff writer Matt Beagle looks at a recent rise in Richmond homicides and the unfinished agenda facing Richmond’s next top cop. When Chris Magnus came to Richmond in 2006, gun violence by all accounts was out of control. Many people considered Magnus an unlikely choice to do much…
Old opinions about Richmond often seem set in stone, but at least some of the worst may be on the way out.
That’s what we tried to document in “Agents of Change,” a series of photographs and feature stories by Richmond Confidential’s Brittany Kirstin, a photojournalism student at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
Our plan was simple: Richmond Confidential student journalists would pick a spot and observe, just watch and take notes, for the same hour, recording everything seen, heard, smelled.