Jakob McWhinney

6 days ago | voiceofsandiego.org | Jakob McWhinney

On a sunny Thursday morning, a troop of young children excitedly dipped their hands into small fish tanks. They squealed as they ran their fingers over mussels and sea snails. Six-year-old Diego Cortez’s favorite animal was the hermit crab.  â€œI like how the shell feels when you touch it,” he said with a bashful grin. Cortez and his kindergarten classmates from Rosa Parks Elementary in City Heights — just a 15-minute walk away — were there to visit the Ocean Discovery Institute’s Living Lab.

1 week ago | voiceofsandiego.org | Jakob McWhinney |Tessa Balc

For the first time in half a decade, the county’s annual homeless census showed a decrease in the number of people staying in local shelters and living on the streets. Countywide, there was about a 7 percent decrease in homelessness. That elicited relief from leaders who’ve long grappled with a steady beat of bad news on the front.  Local education officials, on the other hand, were not treated to such good news.

1 week ago | voiceofsandiego.org | Jakob McWhinney

San Diego Unified Watered Down Graduation Requirements A decade after a major overhaul that increased San Diego Unified’s graduation requirements, the district created an alternate graduation pathway that waters down those requirements. Some students now may not qualify for admission in California’s public universities. In 2011, San Diego Unified officials voted to do something big: They made it harder to graduate high school.  That may strike many as odd.

2 weeks ago | voiceofsandiego.org | Jakob McWhinney

California school districts have long faced an unenviable bind: the collective price tag to maintain the structural integrity of their facilities, let alone to modernize or rebuild them, amounts to billions of dollars each year. State aid, meanwhile, makes up only a fraction of the funding needed for such projects. So, districts have increasingly turned to local bonds to fund the majority of their facilities needs.

2 weeks ago | voiceofsandiego.org | Jakob McWhinney

I’d never heard of birthdayboy, but was immediately hooked by the band’s description of their music being “bedroom pop but the bedroom is kinda dirty.” I’ve always been obsessed with bedroom pop. I think a lot of that has to do with the subgenre’s often personal and meditative nature feeling like the spiritual successor to the indie songwriter fare I adored growing up.