Welcome to Tuesday, Athletics Nation!
On a recent morning, about 45 Castlemont High School students fanned out across the parking lot of the Oakland Coliseum Complex, taking pictures, writing notes, and making observations about what they saw.
The students are part of Castlemont’s sustainable urban design academy, where they learned elements of architecture, engineering, urban planning, and ecology and collaborated on projects to improve their neighborhoods in deep East Oakland. A few years ago, students from the academy worked with the Black Cultural Zone when the group was planning Liberation Park, an outdoor community space near Foothill Boulevard and 73rd Avenue that offers a skating rink and farmers market.