InBerkeley

A friend was complaining the other day about the experience of being in downtown Berkeley at lunchtime. It’s a madhouse with all those students milling about, she said. “And some of them are really not that attractive.”

Now, having a son who attends Berkeley High, and is of course very attractive, my immediate reaction was to go on the defensive. However I admit I have never actually experienced the lunchtime rush — I do know around 3,000 teenagers need to find a place to buy lunch and be back in their classrooms in about 40 minutes.

And I can appreciate that having huge numbers of big — for they are invariably big — possibly unruly, teenagers bearing down on you when you are just popping into town to get a replacement battery for your camcorder at RadioShack might be intimidating and a tad unpleasant.

But Berkeley High has been at its current location for 108 years. (The first public high school classes in Berkeley were held in 1880 at the Kellogg Primary School at Oxford and Center Streets adjacent to the campus. In 1901, construction began on the northwest portion of the present site of the high school.)

If anything, the rest of downtown has evolved around it and the UC campus. And, I ask myself, is it not healthy for educational establishments to be at the heart of cities? Or should they be banished to the outskirts so good citizens don’t need to encounter teen spirit up close and en masse on a daily basis?

Berkeley High School, Downtown

Last time InBerkeley looked, Google Maps had a bizarre error in the center of Berkeley. Berkeley High School was called Armstrong University.

Yesterday Google announced that it was using a new dataset for its maps, and whatever other benefits it may have, it looks as though it corrected this one major error for downtown Berkeley (hat tip: @jmccyoung). There still, however, is the oddity of placing Armstrong University just east of BHS, on Harold Way. That was the last location of Armstrong University, but it has been a vacant building for a number of years.

Berkeley High School, Internet

Berkeley High School has been selected as one of five schools in California for a program to prepare students for green jobs, as announced by PG&E at a launch event yesterday.

The New Energy Academy is the result of a partnership between PG&E, the California Department of Education and CaliforniaALL, a nonprofit education group.

Read the full story in The Daily Californian.

Photo: tenasillahe.wordpress.com

Berkeley High School, Education, Environment Berkeley High School