Founding and History
Oakland School for the Arts is a college preparatory, arts middle and high school. It was founded in 2000 via charter from the Oakland Unified School District. It received 501(c)(3) nonprofit status in October 2001. In September 2002 OSA opened its doors to its first freshman class, the class of 2006. The school was the dreamchild of Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown and its first director was Loni Berry.
The school started at the Alice Arts Center building in downtown Oakland. It was moved to portables near the Fox Oakland Theatre during the 2004-05 school year, and moved to the Fox Oakland Theater building in January 2009. Mr. Loni Berry was director of the school for the first four years. Mr. Saul Drevitch replaced him in fall 2006. San Francisco School of the Arts principal Donn Harris replaced Drevitch in December 2007. Drevitch resigned because of "differences" between him and Jerry Brown and the School Board. As of the 2008-9 school year, Donn Harris holds the role of Executive Director on a full-time basis.
The first graduating senior class, the class of 2006, graduated with 100 percent of the class accepted to four year colleges.
Read more about this topic: Oakland School For The Arts
Famous quotes containing the words founding and/or history:
“... there is no way of measuring the damage to a society when a whole texture of humanity is kept from realizing its own power, when the woman architect who might have reinvented our cities sits barely literate in a semilegal sweatshop on the Texas- Mexican border, when women who should be founding colleges must work their entire lives as domestics ...”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)