The night she was arrested, Maria Castillo fit the description. A petite, 49-year-old grandmother and home healthcare worker, Castillo is Latina in San Jose – and that ethnicity, in that city, makes her the most likely person statistically to be charged with resisting arrest.

Last week saw the Silicon Valley return of ETech, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, where programmers and philosophers pool resources with fringe technologists, CEOs, hackers, artists, marketers, urban planners, statisticians, garage software engineers and geeks from every part of the spectrum—all with the future in mind. It took place at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, and here are just a few of the things this tech nomad experienced during his traversal of the landscape.

There’s been a lot more chatter about the A’s moving (or not) to San Jose, but you would have to look in the San Francisco Chronicle to find it. Here are some highlights (and lowlights).

Commissioner Bud Selig visited Scottsdale Stadium on Sunday and met for an hour with Giants managing general partner Bill Neukom and President Larry Baer. Baer would not discuss the meeting but hinted Selig affirmed his public stance that he will not allow the A’s to breach the Giants’ territorial rights to San Jose. “From what we could tell, there is no change in his position,” Baer said. Henry Schulman, SF Chronicle, March 16

Once again an educational tsunami has wreaked havoc on the California Public School system.  All the small, incremental, yet significant gains that have been made in student achievement growth during the last few years will be summarily erased due to the state’s budget crisis and resultant reduction of revenue flowing to school districts.

What a very sad commentary for a state that enrolls 11 percent of all K-12 public school students in the United States, and was known to be the model for excellence in public education in the 1950s and 1960s.

On March 12, I hosted the second annual budget meeting in my district. My goal was to inform the community about the budget process, the size of our budget, where the revenues come from and different options on trying to deal with the current deficit.

The major message from the residents that attended the meeting was that the city needs to change employee policies and compensation (including sick leave payouts and pensions) before cutting services.

It’s SJI’s weekly open forum, and all lines are open.

Since it’s fun to shadow distinguished writers who put San Jose locales in their novels, and since the San Jose Police Department just can’t get enough attention these days, here we go again with another epic endorsement of Menlo Park author Barry Eisler.

By Diane Solomon
Last November, Californians approved a $9.95 billion down payment for the first electric-powered steel-wheel-on-steel-rail high-speed train system in the nation. They voted yes to an artist’s rendition of sleek tubular trains invisibly zooming through their neighborhoods, connecting California’s major cities and taking them from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and a new green future, in less than 2.5 hours.

As part of his War on Poverty, and his visionary effort to create a Great Society, Pres. Lyndon Johnson launched the Head Start preschool program in 1965. That program is designed to meet the early childhood education, health, nutrition, and parent education needs of many of our poorest children and families. Fortunately, Head Start was on the list for a significant increase in funding in the recent 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, just passed by Congress and signed by President Obama.

Last Saturday, a memorial mass was held at the Leontyne Chapel on the campus of Bellarmine College Prep to honor Greg Gray, who passed away on Feb. 27. Bellarmine’s chapel was not built large enough to fit all of Greg’s family and friends. The place was packed; people were standing in the entry halls

On Saturday morning, I went on my 5th Homeless Encampment “sweep” with the San Jose Police Department’s Metro Unit.  The Metro Unit is in charge of monitoring creeks for encampments.  These clean-ups have taken me to Districts 3,4,6 and 7, alongside the Coyote, Guadalupe and Los Gatos Creeks. When you climb down into the creeks you forget you’re in San Jose, as all you can see is nature.

We have hundreds of people in San Jose who live in the creek areas in temporary shelters. Some structures remind me of developing world shanty towns while other camps have a complete living room set up, with power operated from car batteries.  Some encampments are small and are set up underneath street overpasses, while other encampments are massive with many people.

This is San Jose Inside ’s open forum—open for discussion of a recent news event, local issue, or anything else.

I can’t think of any better reason to lurk in the Imperial Ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel in downtown San Jose than to listen to a keynote address titled “Jackhammers, Polymers and Diamonds: New Applications in Explosives.” Given by Dr. Christa Hockensmith, the speech will be one of 10 highlighting ETech, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, taking place March 9–12 at the Fairmont.

Now that the City of Fremont has struck out, it’s San Jose’s turn at bat to try and lure the Oakland A’s to town. Or is it? Last week, A’s owner Lew Wolff asked San Jose city officials to essentially calm down, and refrain from contacting Major League Baseball about moving the A’s to San Jose. “Such contacts are not recommended,” Wolff wrote in an e-mail to San Jose’s mayor.

As everyone probably knows, the San Francisco Giants’ territorial rights to Santa Clara County stand in the way of an A’s move to San Jose. But…everyone has their price. How much do you suppose it would take for the Giants to relinquish their claim to Santa Clara County?

Our K-12 public school system continues to wallow in mediocrity at a time when many nations are continuing to create a vastly more educated workforce, especially in mathematics and science. As a citizen of this great nation, I am more than a little scared about what this eventually means for us as we desperately attempt to recover as an economic superpower in this information-based economy.

In 1976, San Jose city leaders emerged from a retreat at the Asilomar Conference Center and declared that their number-one priority was to fix the jobs and housing imbalance in San Jose.  Since then San Jose has provided the most affordable housing in the state of California, and tens of thousands of market-rate dwellings; however, San Jose has not shared in the job growth. So while other cities have a “jobs surplus,” San Jose still has a “jobs deficit.”