Features

Bank of America announces layoffs in Bay Area 

SAN FRANCISCO – Bank of America has announced it is eliminating 900 information technology jobs, including 232 in the Bay Area, and the bank expects more next year. 

Tim Arnoult, who heads the bank’s technical and operations division told employees Monday in a memo that 500 workers would be laid off this week and the remaining employees would lose their jobs in December. 

The memo cited a bleak business outlook for 2003 as a reason for the job cuts. The bank expects next year’s national and global economy to be similar to this year’s, the memo said. 

“It is obvious that we can’t meet our 2003 budget without affecting the personnel line,” Arnoult wrote. 

Bank of America, which is headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., gave pink slips to 163 employees at a large information technology center in Concord and another 69 at its San Francisco operations, said Juliet Don, a spokeswoman for the bank. 

The bank has a work force of more than 134,000 employees, including 14,000 in the Bay Area, and is one of the largest banks in the country. 

Nonprofit wants to take over Richmond school 

RICHMOND – A nonprofit group is proposing to take over Nystrom Elementary School, a downtrodden campus where academic achievement and family income rank among the lowest in the county and turn it into an alternative public school. 

The proposal from the Richmond Children’s Foundation, a nonprofit created from leftover settlement money from a 1993 General Chemical explosion, would maintain Nystrom’s status as a neighborhood school in the West Contra Costa school district, but free the campus from some union rules and financial constraints that other district schools must uphold. 

The foundation spent a year studying neighborhoods around four Richmond schools before settling on Nystrom as a base for their project. The goal is to open the newly formatted school in fall 2004. 

Foundation members want to use Nystrom as a resource center for neighborhood families, giving them access to social workers who can help with health issues, drug addiction, unemployment and bilingual needs. 

Teachers who choose to work at the school will team with social workers to make home visits, checking on the welfare of at-risk students and families. 

Cops say teen cut heads off mom, dog and bird 

SAN JOSE – A 19-year-old decapitated his mother, a dog and a bird before calling authorities and surrendering to police, the San Jose Mercury News reported. 

Pablo Francisco Hernandez is scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday on a murder charge, police said Tuesday. 

Hernandez called 911 early Monday afternoon and told the dispatcher he had killed his mother, police said. The line then went dead, and when authorities tried to call back they received an answering machine. 

Officers went to Hernandez’s home in East San Jose, and he walked calmly out of the house and surrendered without incident. Police said they found his 38-year-old mother inside, stabbed to death. 

The Mercury News reported Tuesday that the woman, and the pets, had been decapitated.