Each May, some 4,000 teens graduate from San Francisco public schools. But while the annual pomp and circumstance of high school commencement might feel routine, for some students, graduation is an achievement they had to fight for.
Makda Beyene, 18, graduated from Mission High School on Wednesday. Less than three years ago, when the recent immigrant from Eritrea was sleeping in church basements with her mother and three younger siblings, that goal seemed impossibly far away.
Jenn Bowman taught Beyene history in 10th grade, the year she arrived in America.
Read More
Teachers, parents and staff at Martin Luther King Academic Middle School are unhappy with the school district’s refusal to give the troubled campus new administrators, even though the district says recent changes meet its expectations.
A complaint filed Monday with the state Public Employment Relations Board alleges violations of rules requiring safe and healthy work environments, said the United Educators of San Francisco union.
Read More
Does this principal lack principles?
Sheila Sammon Milosky, 51, the Paul Revere PK-8 School chief who was accused last fall of harshly punishing students, might end up in the adult version of detention after a May 12 arrest on misdemeanor DUI and hit-and-run charges in San Francisco.
Read More
One of the toughest things Kayla Daniels ever had to do was give up on her parents and focus on herself.
“My parents would get clean for a few months, I would go back with them, and they would relapse,” said Daniels, now 23, who said she spent most of her childhood in and out of foster care while her mother and father struggled with addictions to methamphetamine and other drugs.
Read More
Spartacus the robot was officially retired from the competition circuit, but Lisa Vlaovich and Catya Padilla couldn’t bring themselves to let repairs slide. As they tightened screws and adjusted gears on the 2-foot-tall mobile robot, Vlaovich considered how far she had come over the past year.
“I actually never thought I’d be able to build a robot,” she said. “I thought it would be really difficult, like, only smart people can build robots. I guess this makes me smart!”
Read More
City College of San Francisco could net $1.1 million in unclaimed credits if former students don’t step forward by June 25 to claim their money.
While cash-strapped community college officials would be happy to keep the money to help plug their own budget gap, they are required by law to seek out the nearly 16,000 former students who never collected reimbursements for dropped classes and other cash left in their school accounts.
Read More
When National Guardsman Nelson Gonzalez was deployed to Iraq four years ago, it was hard on his four daughters.
Their dad missed birthdays, Thanksgiving and Christmas, and although he called whenever he could, the girls were afraid he might never come home.
“They got used to him calling often, and when he didn’t, they would worry,” said Nelson’s wife, Jennifer Gonzalez. “Generally, deployment is hard on kids”
Read More
As schools across California continue to wrangle with state budget cuts, voters in three San Mateo County school districts will have their say in June about funding measures.
The Jefferson Union High School District in Daly City is proposing a $48 annual parcel tax that would run from July of this year until June 2016. The district calculates that it has lost $3.4 million in funding since 2008, and it stands to lose another $1.5 million. Measure Y would net $1.5 million for Jefferson Union’s five schools.
Read More
Joel Talkoff is an experienced driver, but sending a text message from behind the wheel proved too much for the 17-year-old Gateway High School senior Tuesday.
“It was challenging,” he said. “I was able to get the message out, but then I hit the biker.”
Freshman William Pitts, 15, also ran into trouble.
“A dog jumped out at me and I killed it,” he said. “I was focusing on texting, and it was kind of hard at the same time.”
“I crashed two seconds out,” confessed sophomore Cynthia Guzman, 16.
Read More
People with HIV are four times more likely to suffer sudden cardiac death than the general population, according to a new study by researchers at UC San Francisco.
The 10-year study, published Monday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, looked at nearly 3,000 HIV patients at San Francisco General Hospital between 2000 and 2009. Among the 230 who died, AIDS was the most common cause, accounting for more than half the deaths. But 13 percent suffered sudden cardiac death, when the heart stops beating unexpectedly.
Read More
URL: http://www.sfexaminer.com/archive/17506/17506?page=11&type[story]=story
