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Drop in immigration clouds future of S.F. school for Spanish speakers

By Grace Rubenstein, California Watch
English and Spanish alternate seamlessly in the classrooms at the Mission Education Center in San Francisco. Decorative signs identify objects that in other schools would seem too basic to name: “clock” and “door.”
This public elementary school has for 40 years served children who have just arrived from Latin America and speak only Spanish, who beyond its walls are out of their element in almost every way. Those students are dramatically fewer now. As the flow of immigrants from Mexico has dwindled in recent years, the school’s enrollment has plummeted from a high of 264 students in the mid-2000s to 72 this past spring. Read the complete story at California Watch.  California Watch, the state’s largest investigative reporting team, is part of the independent, nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting.

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Accrediting agency questions S.F. culinary school’s job placement rates

By Erica Perez, Bay Citizen
One of the agencies that accredits San Francisco’s California Culinary Academy is questioning the veracity of the college’s reported job placement rates – ordering the school’s parent company to provide audited placement data by September in order to maintain its accreditation status. The Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges issued the order to Career Education Corp., a Schaumburg, Ill.-based for-profit college company, earlier this month. California Culinary Academy is one of 10 schools included in the directive, according to a recent company filing. Read the complete story at Bay Citizen. 
 

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Ever-changing population predictions frustrate Bay Area smart-growth planning

State, regional forecasts vary widely, generating uncertainty about long-term housing needs
State and regional planning agencies have produced differing predictions of how many people will migrate to the Bay Area in coming decades. The disagreement is frustrating efforts to forge a consensus on how many hundreds of thousands of new homes to build across the region, and where. » Read more

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Map: Where we live now — 2010 household density and priority development areas

Part of the challenge facing regional planners, who wrote the 30-year Plan Bay Area, is that it is hard to predict future population growth. The current list of more than 200 potential priority development areas in the plan tracks established high-density zones closely, indicating that the Association of Bay Area Governments, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and other regional agencies want to fill in developments in areas that are already highly urbanized or near mass transit lines, instead of in undeveloped or underdeveloped suburban settings. » Read more

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Muni asks drivers to hold it in while new bathrooms get approvals

Bus operators looking for a toilet after hours sitting in the driver’s seat will have to hold it just a little longer. That’s because Muni’s plans to build seven new free-standing bathrooms needs to be approved not just by the transit agency, but also Public Works and the Arts Commission. » Read more

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Battles with urban wildlife in the Bay Area — meet the raccoon

By Hadley Robinson, KALW News
You don’t have to be outside for long to realize that here in the Bay Area, we are surrounded by wildlife. Long before houses and roads and cities popped up, wild animals reigned supreme. As we negotiate our relationship to the remaining members of that wildlife, there’s bound to be some tension. One particularly sneaky animal is on the prowl in almost every neighborhood – digging up garden beds, living in attics, scavenging through garbage …
They’re raccoons, one of the most common urban animals in America. But just because they’re everywhere doesn’t mean our relationships with them are peaceful.