Category: Featured

  • Fourth Grader: I Feel So Sad About What’s Happening

    By Will Carless As an added bonus to my coverage of the layoff crisis at San Diego Unified this week, here are five videos I shot with my iPhone at Central Elementary School. I spent three days at San Diego schools this week, trying to understand what impact the school district’s decision to lay off…

  • Where Layoffs Destroy a School’s Fabric

    Laura Barragan has known her son Nathan’s preschool teacher, Athena Gonzalez, for six years. That’s because Gonzalez also taught Barragan’s 5-year old daughter, Joanna, and her 9-year-old son, Angel. Barragan has a lot of uncertainty in her life. She doesn’t know whether her husband will keep his job as the recession continues to roll on.…

  • City Heights Students Learn by Running Their Own Micro City

    Haga click aquí para leerlo la en Español It’s a typical Wednesday afternoon for Veronica Lias’ fifth graders at Joyner Elementary School in City Heights. She’s reviewing everything the students have learned about the respiratory system before the test they’ll take the next day. “You breathe air in through your . . .” she prompts.…

  • A Park Mural Goes Up Without the Park

    [oqeygallery id=11] The AjA Project collected photos from City Heights residents and baked them onto tiles for a large-scale mosaic at 43rd Street and University Avenue. | Photos Courtesy of The AjA Project By Tom Fudge It’s an artwork impressive in scope: A tile mosaic of 1,000 photographs of the City Heights neighborhood that were…

  • What Layoffs Do to a City Heights Classroom

    I visited Central Elementary School in City Heights on Tuesday morning as part of a three-day reporting project to see the impact of San Diego Unified’s layoff crisis at the school level. With one in five teachers at city schools currently being laid off, I wanted to see how the financial mess is affecting teachers,…