Archive for the ‘Eve Pearlman’
Alameda’s school parcel tax: What is unfair?
Some opponents of Measure E, the school parcel tax that Alamedans will vote on by mail between May 26 and June 22, complain that the measure is not fair.
Hmm, fair? Is it fair that one child is born into a rich family in a rich country – with access to everything he or she needs [...]
Eve Pearlman: May flowers
On a sunny Saturday morning a few weeks ago I arrived at the home of a nearby family for what their Evite billed as a garden work party in the old-fashioned, barn-raising/many-hands-make-light-work tradition. Drinks and sandwiches and babysitting provided. The goal? Transform the water-guzzling grassy patch of earth in front of their home into a [...]
Eve Pearlman: Expertise matters
A pleasant feature of working as a reporter is that you very often interview people who are experts. An entomologist, say, who has spent a lifetime learning about moths and butterflies. An MD whose entire professional career has been spent studying how babies and toddlers acquire language. Or a veteran administrator who has spent decades [...]
Eve Pearlman: What is 54,840?
A couple of years ago on a mid-February afternoon with a heavy winter rain pounding against my windows, a seven-year-old Girl Scout named Gracie — from whom I’d already bought a couple of boxes of Thin Mints and Samoas — put her sweet face right up close to mine and said, “And would you like [...]
Eve Pearlman: The way we were
Despite last week’s rainstorms, it sure does feel like spring has sprung in Alameda. Doesn’t it seem that way? The magnolias are all pink and white, the orange poppies are starting to bloom, and the blue marguerites are making their little composite flowers with yellow centers.
One piece of good news is that last weekend’s Alameda [...]
Eve Pearlman: Swim together, right now
As you may have heard, come next fall there will be a new charter school opening its doors in Alameda.
The Academy of Alameda Middle School will almost certainly be housed in the current site of Chipman. The West End middle school is right now in its fourth year of ‘program improvement,’ a designation given to [...]
Eve Pearlman: A field of their own
For many children with disabilities, that 8 x 11 flyer that comes home from school in their backpack inviting them to Alameda Little League tryouts is a nonstarter. You can’t play baseball in a wheelchair! With a walker! If you can’t swing a bat!
Right?
But then there’s Miracle League baseball, a league of its own with [...]
Eve Pearlman: Turn around, put your feet on the ground
You probably haven’t watched Footloose lately. If ever. It’s a 1984 movie staring Kevin Bacon as a high school senior who moves from big-city Chicago to fictional Beaumont (loosely based on real-life small-town Elmore, Oklahoma). In Beaumont, Bacon’s character, Ren, finds himself in a place where dancing – as well as rock and roll itself [...]
Eve Pearlman: Building strength with Amy Fasso
It’s 9:30 a.m. on a recent Saturday morning and Amy Fasso lies prone on a blue exercise mat on the tile floor of the Ruby Bridges Community Center. The dozen or so of us who have enrolled in her circuit training class through the Alameda Recreation and Park Department stand about as we prepare to [...]
Eve Pearlman: A question, Alamedan to Alamedan
The Internet is a good place to seek guidance and wisdom. You can find out all manner of things – how to best cultivate peas, for example — or opinions on the absorbency of diapers, Huggies v. Pampers.
So here’s today’s question: Say – hypothetically, of course – you or someone you know has a neighbor [...]
Eve Pearlman: Class size reduction on the chopping block
The number of students in most public school classrooms in California (at least in kindergarten through third grade) has been locked in at a maximum of 20 children per class since 1996, when Gov. Pete Wilson launched the popular ‘class size reduction’ program. (Though even with this program, California has ranked 48th among states in [...]
