California education news: What’s the latest?

The Orange Unified School District has selected Ernie Gonzalez to serve as the district’s next permanent superintendent, The Orange County Register reported.

The selection of Gonzalez as the next superintendent comes after the district’s school board in January fired then-Supt. Gunn Marie Hansen without no explanation. That firing was criticized by many district parents, teachers and other community members.

Gonzalez, the new superintendent, has worked at the district since 2012 in multiple roles, including as an assistant superintendent.

“Thank you to the district and fellow board members for supporting me through this time, and I am excited to ensure the OUSD students have a wonderful time in the district,” he said at a recent board meeting, according to the Register.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is on the verge of settling a case initiated by 14 girls who alleged they were molested by a former teacher’s assistant, Lino Cabrera, at North Hollywood Elementary School, Patch reported. 

The terms of the settlement have not been revealed, and the judge will have to approve each of the students’ settlements because they are under the age of 18. 

The majority of the alleged abuses took place in 2019. In February 2020, Cabrera was sentenced to eight years in prison in Van Nuys Superior Court. In exchange for the negotiated sentence, he pleaded no contest. 

“While Cabrera sexually abused, sexually molested and sexually harassed … (the) LAUSD … had knowledge or reason to know that Cabrera took an unusual interest and spent an inordinate amount of time with each plaintiff,” the court papers, filed in March 2020, read, according to Patch. 

LAUSD “failed to report and did hide and conceal from students, parents, teachers, law enforcement authorities, civil authorities and/or others the true facts and relevant information necessary to bring Cabrera to justice,” the papers continued. 

The district’s attorney denied any liability on the LAUSD’s part. 

“Because Cabrera’s abusive acts were outside the scope of his employment the plaintiffs may not recover damages for those acts from the LAUSD unless they have evidence that LAUSD employees knew or should have known that Cabrera posed a risk to students,” the defense attorney’s court papers stated, Patch reported. “There is no such evidence.”

The San Jose Public Library is offering a free program for adults to earn a high school diploma and a career certificate, ABC7 reported.

Since its launch in 2016, 165 have earned an accredited high school diploma. Nationally, it also has one of the highest completion rates in comparison to similar programs elsewhere, at 70%.

“I feel so proud of myself today. I feel excited about all this,” Viviana Suarez, a recent graduate of the program, told ABC 7 following a commencement ceremony Thursday night. “It was a dream. And the dream came true.”

West Contra Costa Unified’s Interim Associate Superintendent of Human Resources Camille Johnson presented a staffing update to the school board Wednesday, showing dozens of teacher vacancies.

Board members and district staff agreed that the district is in a better staffing position than it was last year as it grapples with the ongoing, nationwide educator shortage.

The district is still short 36 elementary teachers, despite hiring 69 for the 2023-24 school year, according to Johnson’s presentation. The district has 21 teacher vacancies for middle and high schools, despite hiring 57 for the school year.

The district also has 18 special education teacher vacancies this year, Johnson said.

The district is still in great need of paraprofessionals. Johnson’s presentation showed 204 paraprofessional vacancies. The district is contracting with an outside agency to fill those vacancies until the district is able to hire more staff.

Johnson said the district is currently discussing whether its current recruitment strategies are effective. While the district has tried to attract applicants at job fairs in the Bay Area and elsewhere, Johnson said the best candidates usually come from the local community.

“If we can start to shine a light on this being great place to work and West Contra Costa being a place you want to be, I think that can help us make a difference,” Johnson said.

An investigation by technology news website Gizmodo found that College Board sends information about students SAT scores, GPA and other data to big tech companies such as Facebook and TikTok.

A Gizmodo reporter used College Board’s search tool to look for colleges that might accept a student with a C+ grade-point average and a 420 SAT score. That data was then shared to TikTok using a “pixel” — which is invisible tracking technology used to facilitate targeted advertising, according to Gizmodo.

When Gizmodo first asked College Board about the practice, a spokesperson denied that the company shares SAT scores or GPAs with Facebook or TikTok. Gizmodo then shared a screenshot of proof that College Board did just that, and the spokesperson admitted that the website actually does share data about the GPAs and SAT ranges students use for searches.

“If a student uses the college search tool on CB.org, the student can add a GPA and SAT score range to the search filters,” the spokesperson told Gizmodo. “Those values are passed in the pixel, not because we configured the pixel that way but because that’s how the pixel works.”

Gizmodo found that College Board didn’t share information like names or phone numbers, which fall into the category of personally identifiable information. However, pixels and cookies typically contain unique stings of letters and numbers meant to identify users, Gizmodo said. This is a common practice on the internet, but some experts warn that it poses privacy risks.

With three weeks left for the Legislature’s deadline to pass bills for this session,  the California School Boards Association has listed its top half-dozen priority bills still in play – what it’s calling its Gold Star bills. All have passed one of the two houses of the Legislature.

Two, which propose placing school bonds before voters in 2024, will likely be combined into one after talks with Gov. Gavin Newsom. Another, which is being negotiated with the California Teachers Association, would temporarily lift the cap on earnings that retired teachers could earn by returning to the classroom. Senate Bill 765, authored by Sen. Anthony Portantino, D-Burbank, is intended to ease the teacher shortage. Currently, retirees can earn no more than half of a year of what a teaching job pays.

The bills proposing state-funded school bonds are AB 247, by Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, $14 billion for TK-12 and community colleges for new construction and modernization, and SB 28, by Sen. Steve Glazer, D-Orinda, $15 billion for CSU and UC as well as TK-12.

Other priority bills are:

• AB 414, authored by Assemblywoman Eloise Gómez Reyes, D-Colton, which would elevate extending high-speed internet to all California homes as a state priority by declaring access a civil right and essential service;
• AB 1023, authored by Assemblywoman Diana Papan, D-San Mateo, dealing with cybersecurity, which would ensure that actions undertaken by the California Cybersecurity Integration Center (Cal-CSIC) to assist local agencies would include and benefit school districts and county offices;
• AB 557, authored by Assemblyman Greg Hart, D-Santa Barbara, would extend the right of school districts to meet remotely during a declared emergency, such as a fire or flood; it would require access and transparency measures, including the ability of the public to comment on the proceedings. The current remote learning law, created during Covid, expires this year.

Tuolumne County public schools should make an effort to standardize the many different safety plans that currently exist due to the lack of a county-wide unified school district,  the county’s civil Grand Jury recommended, The Union-Democrat reported.

The 11 independent school districts and a public charter school in the county each have developed their own safety plan, which the report stated can complicate coordination and communication with law enforcement and first responders, the jury found.

“A unified approach would not only streamline safety procedures, but also promote shared responsibility, transparency, and communication among all involved entities,” the report stated, according to the Union-Democrat.

“This centralization of responsibility would ensure a unified approach to safety measures, facilitating the standardization of safety procedures, and limiting errors or confusion,” the report stated.

A day after Temecula Valley Unified School District trustees passed a policy requiring teachers to identify transgender students to their parents, Attorney General Rob Bonta called the growing use of such measures a “grave concern.”

The Temecula board is the third in Southern California in recent weeks to adopt a measure requiring school officials to inform parents if a student identifies as a gender other than their biological sex, following the Chino Valley and Murrieta Valley unified districts. The Anderson Union High School District in Shasta County also adopted the policy.

In Orange County, Orange Unified School District Trustees are considering the same thing, The Voice of O.C. reported. So are school boards in Rocklin and Elk Grove.

“My office is closely monitoring the situation and will not tolerate districts compromising the safety and privacy of transgender and gender nonconforming students. We will remain committed to ensuring school policies do not violate students’ civil rights,” Bonta said in a statement his office issued.

Bonta announced opening a civil rights investigation into potential legal violations by Chino Valley Unified School District’s adoption of its mandatory gender identity disclosure policy earlier this month.

In the wake of a recent shooting of a Southern California business owner over the display of a rainbow Pride flag, Gov. Gavin Newsom is announcing an anti-hate campaign that includes a letter to school leaders outlining their responsibility to teach the adopted ethnic studies curriculum that will be required in two years.

The curriculum focuses on the history, culture, struggle and contributions of African Americans, Native Americans, Asian/Pacific Islander Americans and Latinx Americans. The model curriculum also includes lesson plans on other communities, including Filipino Americans, Jewish Americans, Arab Americans, Sikh Americans, Armenian Americans and others. School districts can adapt the curriculum to reflect the demographics of their community.

“California students are wonderfully diverse, and celebrating the contributions of our various communities in curriculum gives students a chance to ‘see’ themselves in the fabric of our state,” states the letter.

State legislation requires local school districts to offer high school students at least one semester in ethnic studies beginning in 2025. The course will be required for graduation in the 2029-30 school year.

The letter warned that some vendors promoting materials for ethnic studies did not meet the requirements of the legislation, which includes not promoting, indirectly or directly, discrimination based on disability, gender, gender identification, nationality, race or religion.

As part of the anti-hate campaign, Gov. Newsom also announced plans to launch a media campaign entitled “CA vs Hate,” that will include print, radio and digital advertisements in multiple languages, as well as the donation of $91.4 million to 173 local organizations that work to prevent hate and to support victims of hate crimes.

“An attack on any of our communities is an attack on everything we stand for as Californians,” Newsom said. “As hate-fueled rhetoric drives increasing acts of bigotry and violence, California is taking action to protect those who are targeted just for being who they are. We’re bolstering our support for victims and anti-hate programs and tackling ignorance and intolerance through education to prevent hate from taking hold in our communities.”

California State University Long Beach (CSULB) and California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH) today announced $33 million in funding from the Ballmer Group, a philanthropic organization, to support programs designed to address the shortage of early childhood educators (ECE). These grants are intended to help close the emerging ECE teacher gap as well as provide living wage jobs for these educators.

California school districts need an estimated 12,000-15,000 credentialed ECE teachers to drive California Gov. Newsom’s expansion of early childhood education such as TK, or transitional kindergarten, experts say.

CSULB and CSUDH both have key programs that train early childhood educators, a profession long dominated by women of color in California. Whereas preschool teachers often exist on meager wages, TK teachers are paid the same as K-12 teachers. That’s why these programs should increase the economic mobility of ECE teachers who can use their new credentials to access jobs with better pay and benefits.

One of the great paradoxes of American education is that children everywhere are sparkling with curiosity, but schools are constantly scrambling to rethink their strategies for student engagement, as The 74 reported. It’s like the famous lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” where the protagonist floats in the ocean, ironically cursing: “Water, water everywhere/Nor any drop to drink.”

How can this be true? How is it that children are so thoroughly, even exhaustingly curious, but so many teachers feel that they need to cajole, coax, even trick students into learning? Perhaps the disconnect stems from a misunderstanding of how curiosity works, experts suggest.

 In their book, “Curious Minds: The Power of Connection,” American University associate professor of philosophy Perry Zurn and University of Pennsylvania professor of bioengineering, physics and astronomy Dani S. Bassett suggest reframing the issue. They argue that curiosity is relational. It’s a connecting function, they say, instead of an “acquisition” function, which is the traditional view. 

Curiosity may be the glue that helps us connect information that we already have with information that’s new, or helps us make connections between pieces of information we already have.

Clearly this has implications for schools, other learning settings, and curricula — for, as they put it, “the architecture of what is learned and the arrangement of learners in the process,”  as The 74 reported.

Construction began today on 231 Grant, a 110-unit affordable housing complex for teachers and school staff, in Palo Alto.

The complex will include studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments. Rents will be 60% to 140% of the area’s median income.

Four Santa Clara County districts – Palo Alto Unified School District, Los Altos School District, Mountain View Whisman School District, and Foothill-DeAnza Community College District – are contributing funding to the development. Teachers and school employees in these districts, as well as multiple schools in southern San Mateo County, will be eligible to apply for apartments once they are completed.

Teachers throughout California struggle to afford housing in the districts where they work, and disparities between teacher pay and housing are most extreme in the Bay Area.

The project was proposed by Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian in 2018 to help attract and retain teachers and to allow them to live near their places of employment.

“No one wins when teachers have to commute from miles and miles away,” Simitian said. “It’s harder to attract and retain the best teachers when the cost of housing is so high. And time in the car is time not spent with students or preparing lesson plans. When teachers are forced out of the housing market, they become more and more remote from the communities where they teach. By having our teachers live and work nearby, we’re strengthening their role in the community.”

The project is being built on county-owned land through a partnership between the county, Mercy Housing California, Abode Communities, Meta, the San Francisco Housing Accelerator Fund, Century Housing and local school districts, among others.

Teachers and other staff in the Orange Unified School District could be forced to notify parents if their child identifies as transgender under a policy being considered by the district’s school board, Voice of OC reported.

The proposal, brought forward by board members Rick Ledesma and Madison Miner, will get a formal vote in September.

Miner claimed the policy is designed to protect students from self-harm, pointing to high rates of suicidal ideation among children who are transgender.

Miner said the policy is important to help protect children from suicide or self-harm since children that identify as transgender are more likely to suffer from suicidal ideation “A parent is a child’s best advocate,” Miner said, according to Voice of OC. “If we can save children from suicide by bringing their parents alongside them, I think it’s a great idea.”

But another school board member, Kris Erickson, told Voice of OC that the district already has policies addressing that issue and expressed concerns about the new proposed policy.

“I have three concerns. One is the targeting and discrimination of trans and nonbinary students,” Erickson said. “Two is the high likelihood of expensive litigation that I think will come from this, and three is the blatant government interference in the family unit that this mandates.”

Los Angeles Unified is considering a plan to place new limits on what’s known as co-location, when charter schools and traditional district schools exist under the same roof, according to LA School Report.

The school board is expected this fall to discuss a resolution that would ban the practice at the district’s 55 community schools, at 100 of the district’s low-performing “priority’ schools and at schools targeted by the district’s Black Student Achievement Plan, LA School Report reported.

The California Charter School Association is already voicing its opposition to the proposal and, according to LA School Report, would consider suing LA Unified if the district approves the policy.

Currently, there are more than 70 co-located charter schools across the district, according to United Teachers Los Angeles.

Citing free speech, six professors across the Central San Joaquin Valley are suing the statewide California Community Colleges system and their local community college system, KVPR reported Thursday. 

The full-time, tenured professors, working at three of six campuses in the Fresno-area State Center Community College District, assert that a new requirement to implement diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) practices into their teaching violates the First Amendment, according to details of the lawsuit. 

The college classroom should be a place to debate and discuss how to overcome racial inequity, the lawsuit says, not a place where professors must conform to and teach anti-racist principles. 

Specifically, the lawsuit says, DEIA rules “forsake debate for top-down conformity, requiring faculty to endorse contested concepts such as ‘anti-racism,’ the view that individuals must advocate for race-conscious remedies in order to overcome systemic racism.” 

The professors’ complaint says they “should not be required to teach concepts they do not personally agree with,” KVPR reported. 

“Each instead supports race-neutral policies and perspectives that treat all students equally,” the complaint says. 

DEIA efforts push the 116-college, 1.8-million student California Community Colleges system to make its campuses “safer, more inclusive and accessible and more welcoming” for minority and underserved students, according to the system’s DEIA website. 

“As the largest and most diverse system of higher education in the country,” the website said, ”the California Community Colleges is continually working to break down barriers to racial justice and equity for the millions of students in our colleges.”

To do that, the statewide system, since 2020, has worked to develop equity-centered policies and practices, including holding employees accountable by using performance evaluations to judge DEIA implementation. 

Represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the Reedley, Madera, and Clovis Community College professors named California Community Colleges as well as State Center Community College District in the lawsuit. 

The lawsuit seeks to stop the community college system from enforcing the DEIA rules, which the professors consider unconstitutional. 

The lawsuit comes as parents, groups and school districts in the K-12 system also look to the courts to determine whether policies and decisions violate certain rights under state and federal laws.  

More than 35 schools, districts, colleges and universities across Southern California have either canceled or postponed the start of their school years as a result of Hurricane Hilary. 

Sunday evening, the Los Angeles County of Education released this list of school districts that announced closures: 

• Los Angeles Unified School District
• Inglewood Unified School District 
• Acton-Agua Dulce Unified School District 
• Pasadena Unified School District  
• Paramount Unified School District  
• Saugus Union School District 
• William S. Hart Union High School district 
• Castaic Unified School District  
• Newhall School District  
• Sulphur Springs Union School District  
• Westside Union School District  
• Eastside Union School District  
• Antelope Valley High School District
• Lancaster School District  
• Palmdale School District
• Rosemead School District 
• Hughes-Elizabeth Lakes Union School District

“This was not an easy decision,” LAUSD officials said in a news release. “Los Angeles Unified recognizes the unique, unprecedented nature of Tropical Storm Hilary, which has garnered city, county and state declarations of emergencies.” 

Despite the cancellation of classes, students will receive activities and resources from their teachers by 10:30 a.m. on Schoology. 

Outside Los Angeles, schools and districts in Riverside, San Bernardino and Orange counties also announced closures, the Press Enterprise and KTLA reported:

• Beaumont Unified
• California School for the Deaf, Riverside
• Coachella Valley Unified
• Desert Sands Unified
• Norco Elementary
• Palm Springs Unified
• Yucaipa-Calimesa Joint Unified
• Adelanto Elementary School District
• Apple Valley Unified
• Barstow Unified
• Bear Valley Unified
• Colton Joint Unified
• Fontana Unified
• Helendale School District
• Morongo Unified
• Redlands Unified
• Rialto Unified
• Victor Valley Unified
• Anaheim Union High School District

For some districts — such as the San Diego Unified School District — canceling classes Monday also means postponing the start of the 2023-24 academic year. 

“As eager as we are to welcome students and staff back to school, safety must come first,” said San Diego Unified’s board President Sabrina Bazzo in a news release. “I would like to thank our entire San Diego Unified community for their understanding as we work through this unprecedented weather event. To the staff who are working to keep our schools, students and employees safe, I thank you.” 

Beyond K-12 school districts, Cal State Fullerton and Cal State Long Beach also announced closures — along with community colleges including Cypress College and Pasadena City College campuses.

In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Unified superintendent Matt Wayne laid out his plans to stabilize the cash-strapped district over the next year.

Wayne will give a presentation on the district’s challenges and instability at the Aug. 29 school board meeting, explaining that enrollment has declined by 4,000 students in recent years while staffing has gone up, according to the Chronicle. The district anticipates enrollment to continue to decline, with an expected loss of another 4,600 students in the next 10 years.

The district is struggling to fill many of its positions, and is overspending by millions each year.

In December, the district will decide on its essential staffing levels. In May, the district will develop criteria to decide when and how to merge or close schools, according to the Chronicle.

Both candidates in a special election for Oakland’s District 5 school board seat were disqualified after receiving incorrect information about signature-collecting from the city, the Bay Area News Group and Oaklandside reported.

The city is holding a special election for the District 5 school board Nov. 7 to fill the remainder of Director Mike Hutchinson’s term that began in 2020, Oaklandside reported. The boundaries of District 5 were re-drawn last year, but both candidates were required to collect signatures to qualify for the ballot from residents who live within the old District 5 boundaries, since Hutchinson was elected to the District 5 seat before the redistricting.

Only that’s not what the city clerk told them to do. Instead, the candidates were told to collect signatures from residents who live within the new boundaries.

The Alameda County registrar determined that since neither of the candidates collected enough signatures from within the old District 5 boundaries, and since the Aug. 11 deadline to collect signatures had passed, both were disqualified from the race. As of now, there are no qualified candidates for the District 5 seat.

According to Oaklandside, the registrar’s office is now waiting for direction from the city of Oakland to move forward.

The FBI arrested a number of Bay Area police officers in raids Thursday morning as part of a corruption investigation that began when the officers were allegedly found to be cheating on college tests to obtain degrees that guaranteed them pay raises, the East Bay Times reported.

At least five officers had made appearances in U.S. District Court in Oakland Thursday morning, according to the newspaper.

The Times reported in December that officers from the Pittsburg and Antioch departments allegedly recruited a woman to take online college courses and pass tests in their names, in an attempt to gain pay bumps the departments give to officers who obtain college degrees.

The officers were able to get pay raises varying from 2% to 10% once they had the degrees. The cities reimbursed the officers for tuition.

Some of the officers took classes online at California Coast University in Orange County in August 2019 and March 2021, the newspaper reported. The private for-profit online school, advertises in the Police Officers Research Association of California’s magazine, among other law enforcement publications.

As the degree probe unfolded, the FBI found what the newspaper has reported as thousands of racist text messages on the officers’ cellphones, deeply riling the eastern Contra Costa County cities and widening the investigation.

The educational culture wars hit the Bay Area this week when a far-right group protested against policies passed by the San Ramon Unified School District in Contra Costa County that included celebrating Pride Month and holding a day of silence to combat the bullying of LBGTQ+ students, the East Bay Times reported.

The group Moms for Liberty recently began circulating social media posts claiming several LGBTQ+ initiatives had been implemented by the school district which it claimed sexualized students such as secret LGBTQ+ alliance clubs, the expansion of curriculum to include LGBTQ+ education, and gender transition counseling on school grounds,” the newspaper reported.

The Southern Poverty Law Center lists Moms for Liberty as a hate group. In June, the group’s Indiana chapter quoted Adolf Hitler in promotional materials, causing widespread condemnation.

At what the newspaper described as a tense meeting, members of the group blasted the school district’s inclusionary practices.

“It may be too late for California, but many of the people here have come to do their best to support parents and children who do not want to go down this road of insanity,” said Marlane Huttaker, who doesn’t have children in the district but expressed concern about board policies.

Opponents, including 11-year-old student Scarlett Breton-Lake, blasted the group.

“I hear ignorant adults telling me that I don’t know what I’m talking about when I talk about my own feelings. And it really sucks to be told that I’m not smart enough to know about my own sexuality,” the newspaper quoted Breton-Lake as saying. “It might not seem like it hurts us, but it does. It hurts us badly.”

Former San Jose State University athletic trainer Scott Shaw will spend as long as two years in federal prison after admitting to a judge this week that he groped two former student athletes under the guise of treating injuries, the Mercury News reported.

Shaw pled guilty to two counts of violating the constitutional rights to “bodily integrity” of athletes as part of a deal with federal prosecutors after a trial ended with a hung jury earlier this month. U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman is scheduled to sentence him in November.

Shaw voluntarily left the university in 2020 and is collecting a state pension, the Mercury News reported.

“It’s a little bit maddening to go through a whole trial, and 12 years of this person vehemently denying everything, then all of a sudden he shows up and admits to that,” Caitlin Macky, a swimmer who was the first to complain about Shaw in 2009 and testified against him during the trial, told the newspaper.

Along with others, she watched him admit guilt over a Zoom video conference from her home in San Diego. “Everyone called us liars for so long. It does feel better that it’s out there and it’s public record,” she said.

Grim scores from the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress rattled the education sector, underscoring deep learning loss in math and reading on a national scale during the pandemic. Pundits have tied the test score declines to prolonged school closures, student mental health issues and an easing of academic rigor in many schools, as The 74 reported.

But a new analysis by a former senior federal education researcher suggests another contributing factor: the number of students who missed substantial amounts of school. We know from state data that chronic absenteeism, frequently defined as missing 10% of the school year or roughly two days a month, has increased since the pandemic, doubling in some states. Plus, we know from research that students who are chronically absent are less likely to master reading by the end of third grade and more likely to drop out of high school.

We can’t know exactly how many students taking the NAEP were chronically absent. But each time the test is administered, students are asked how many days they missed in the previous month.
Education researcher Alan Ginsburg, a former director of the U.S. Department of Education’s Policy and Program Studies, analyzed the results of that question from the past several years and found that the rate of low-income fourth-grade NAEP test-takers who reported missing three or more days the month before taking the exam climbed from 22% in 2015 to 41% in 2022.  

It should be noted that this bump in absences also held for more affluent students, those who don’t qualify for free and reduced-price meals. The absenteeism rate in the month before taking the NAEP went from 15% to 29% in the same period. 

American teens spend more than eight hours a day on screens, amid mounting concern over how social media affects their mental health, as KQED reported.

A new study by the American Psychological Association validates what some parents have experienced when their teenagers cut back: They feel better about themselves. 

Social media can feel like a comparison trap, says study author Helen Thai, a doctoral student in psychology at McGill University. Her research found that limiting screen time to about one hour a day helped anxious teens and young adults feel better about their body image and their appearance. Her research arose from personal experiences.

“What I noticed when I was engaging in social media was that I couldn’t help but compare myself,” Thai says, as KQED reported.

Scrolling through posts from celebrities and influencers, as well as peers and people in her own social network, led to feelings of inferiority.

“They looked prettier, healthier, more fit,” Thai says. While she is well aware that social media posts feature polished, airbrushed and filtered images that  alter appearances in an unrealistic way, it still affected her negatively.

Thai and a team of researchers decided to test if cutting down time on social media platforms including Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat would improve body image. They recruited a few hundred volunteers, aged 17-25, all of whom had symptoms of anxiety or depression — making them vulnerable to the effects of social media.

Half of the participants were asked to reduce their social media to 60 minutes a day for three weeks, Thai says. The other half continued to use social media with no restrictions, which averaged about three hours per day.

The researchers gave the participants surveys that included statements such as “I’m pretty happy about the way I look,” and “I am satisfied with my weight.” Among the group that cut social media use, the overall score on appearance improved from 2.95 to 3.15 on a 5-point scale. This may seem like a small change, but any shift in such a short period of time is noteworthy, researchers say.

“This randomized controlled trial showed promising results that weight and appearance esteem can improve when people cut back on social media use,” wrote psychologist Andrea Graham, co-director of the Center for Behavioral Intervention at Northwestern University, who reviewed the results for NPR.

While summer school may be more popular than ever among educators trying to address unprecedented declines in student learning, the impact may be modest, as Chalkbeat reported.

With the help of COVID relief money, schools across the country have expanded learning opportunities over multiple summers. Officials say summer school is no longer just for kids who need to make up classes to move up a grade, but for a broader swath of students who have fallen behind since the pandemic began. The question arises: Does summer school work as a learning loss recovery strategy? 

A new study, perhaps the most comprehensive analysis to date of pandemic-era summer learning, says the answer may be underwhelming. Students who attended school over the summer of 2022 saw their math scores improve, according to the research. This offers some of the first concrete evidence that a key learning loss strategy is working. However, those gains were modest, and there were no improvements in reading. Since only a fraction of students went to summer school, it barely made a dent in total learning loss. 

Overall, this latest research suggests that some catch-up efforts are paying off, but may be insufficient to return students to their pre-pandemic trajectories.

“It’s a glass-half-full, glass-half-empty story,” said Dan Goldhaber, coauthor of the study and a professor at the University of Washington, as Chalkbeat reported. While summer school had a positive impact, he said, “only a small slice of the damage that was done from the pandemic is recovered from summer school.”

Automatic discharges are now beginning for 804,000 federal student loan borrowers who qualify for a combined $39 billion in relief, the U.S. Department of Education announced Monday.

The announcement came soon after a federal judge upheld Biden’s plan to forgive those debts.

Borrowers having their loans forgiven are individuals who have made payments under income-driven repayment plans. Those eligible for forgiveness are borrowers who have accumulated either 20 or 25 years of qualifying monthly payments, the department said.

Federal statute states that borrowers are eligible for loan forgiveness after making either 240 or 300 payments as part of an income-driven repayment plan, but according to the Biden administration, “historical failures in the federal student loan program” resulted in payments for some borrowers “to go unaccounted for.”

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardon said in a statement that those borrowers “did everything right” but were failed by past administrations.

“From day one, President Biden has focused on fixing the broken student loan system, and we will not back down or give an inch when it comes to fighting for debt relief for working families,” Cardona added.

The San Diego Community College District is anticipating increased enrollment this fall at each of its three campuses — City, Mesa and Miramar.

Overall, enrollment across the district is up 12% compared to this time last year, according to the district. Classes for the fall semester begin Aug. 21, so those numbers could still fluctuate.

Andrew Menchaca, the district’s dean of student affairs, said in a statement that students are becoming more interested in career training programs, such as those offered in cybersecurity and welding.

“To assist, we are providing even more support services in person and online, at various times during the day and evenings, such as counseling, financial aid, access to technology, tutoring, physical and mental health services, career preparation services, and basic needs support such as food, and clothing to ensure students can eliminate any barriers that may impact the ability to be successful in their college classes,” he added.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom defended the state’s record on local control and parental engagement at a news conference at an Elk Grove school Monday, the same day parents’ rights activists rallied at the Capitol.

“There is no state in America that supports local control and parental engagement like the state of California,” Newsom said from the school library at Miwok Village Elementary. “No one comes close.”

The protesters at the Capitol are opposed to proposed legislation that would make it more difficult for school districts to ban textbooks and other instructional materials. If passed, districts could be fined if they do not provide books and materials that accurately reflect the diversity of the state’s students.

The governor and first partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom were at the school to talk about California education policies, including implementation of universal transitional kindergarten, mental health programs, community schools, investments in literacy, free summer school and universal free lunches.

“While states across our country attack academic freedom, California is leading on parental choice and participation, creating a place where every student has a chance to thrive and every family has access to an education system that fosters opportunity,” Newsom said.

“In California, parents have the right to actively participate in their child’s learning, and we’re transforming education so all students can learn on a safe campus where they can receive quality education, healthy meals, mental health care, and have the freedom to learn without political censorship,” he said.

 California requires parental engagement as part of each school district’s Local Control Accountability Plan, Newsom said. The plans require parental involvement, including onsite parental advisory committees.

Protesters who want to ban a social studies curriculum that includes references to gay rights, are actually protesting parental engagement, he said, citing the effort to ban textbooks in Temecula Valley Unified.

“They’re protesting the fact that for one year, 1,300 families engaged in the new social studies curriculum and 98.8% of them approved or were neutral about the adaptation of that curriculum,” he said. “And they wanted to throw that all out at the last minute and change it. They came up to oppose parental engagement while we’re here celebrating it.”

The Temecula Valley Unified School Board voted in July to reject textbooks recommended by a committee of its teachers and reviewed by parents because it included “sexualized” issues in elementary grades and mentioned gay activist Harvey Milk in supplemental materials. The board later reversed its decision and approved the textbooks, while voting to exclude a chapter that highlights civil rights, including the gay rights movement.

Newsom also talked about Republican efforts to eliminate free school lunches nationally, as well as the transformation of libraries in a Texas school district to discipline centers for students.

”The governor of Texas and the governor of Florida, in particular folks out there in Florida, did worse in every category in terms of learning loss in the state of California during the pandemic, which is an interesting fact that, again, I don’t think is present out there in our public discourse, nor is parental engagement,” he said. 

Having lost 26% of its student population, the Pajaro Valley Unified School District has announced partnerships with major companies that would help students expand their engineering, technology and construction skills, KSBW reported.

Two of its new partnerships are with Joby Aviation — which will help students develop as young engineers and could lead to certificates and apprenticeships — and Granite Construction, where students will build accessory dwelling units to help aid the community’s housing crisis.

“The district made a decision in 2019 to take the CTE (career technical education) funding from the state and, instead of having it go through the county, come to us. We own it, we hire the teachers, they’re part of our district and the integration. Because of that move, before I got back here, it’s just perfect,” interim Superintendent Murry Schekman told KSBW.

The district is hoping that by adding more career and technical education, more students will enroll. Engineering, music, entrepreneurialism and education are among those currently offered.

Amid an increase in Covid-19 cases, the Los Angeles Unified School District is beginning its new year encouraging parents to send their children to school even if they have a minor cold.

“If we’re just talking about, you know, mild cold symptoms, you can send your child to school maybe with a mask, maybe with some light meds,” said district Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. “But children need to be in school. There’s an over the cautious approach to mild symptoms. That needs to be rectified.”

LAUSD’s chief medical officer, Smita Malhotra, released a message to the district community and said “schools are some of the safest places for children to be” and that Covid risks for younger children remain lower.

However, if a child has a fever of above 100.4 degrees — or vomits, has diarrhea, severe pain, or labored breathing — they should stay home, the message states.

“The greatest effect from the pandemic that I have seen in children has been the emotional trauma from missing school,” Malhotra said in the message. “Schools are foundations of resilience, and I look forward to ensuring that schools continue to be the safest places for children to be so that all students thrive academically, are engaged and are ready for the world.”

California’s Legislature will likely hold hearings on Title IX compliance across the state’s higher education segments, said Mike Fong, chair of the Assembly’s Higher Education Committee.

Specific dates for the hearings have not yet been determined, but they could be held next spring, according to Fong’s office.

Last month, a long-awaited report by a law firm described a broken system of Title IX compliance across the 23-campus California State University system, finding that sexual harassment and discrimination complaints are often ignored across the campuses.

Fong has said that he wants to address Title IX compliance at CSU but also at the University of California and the state’s system of community colleges. The hearings will focus on all three segments.

“This is something we’re going to take a closer look at,” he said.

East Oakland organization Homies Empowerment will open its first Freedom high school on Sept. 11, despite losing laptops, projectors and other equipment in a burglary, Oaklandside reported.

The organization received an outpouring of community support following the break-in, according to Oaklandside. They garnered more than $13,000 in donations to replace the stolen items and upgrade security measures.

Homies Empowerment has been planning the Freedom School for several years, according to Oaklandside. The small, free school is not affiliated with Oakland Unified or any charter group and aims to serve students who aren’t adjusting well to the large comprehensive high schools as well as youth who have been involved in gangs or in the criminal justice system.

The school also aims to fill a gap left by the absence of expulsion school Community Day, which Oakland Unified closed in 2022.

Six of the seven bus drivers for the Miller Creek School District’s bus service and a mechanic have retired, resigned or gone on medical leave in the past year, the Marin Independent Journal reported Thursday.

Despite their efforts, the district has not been able to hire replacements, the IJ reported, forcing the district to cut some of its bus routes.

Last year, the district operated five routes serving three elementary schools and one middle school, as well as a driver for preschool students and students in special education. This year, the district is contracting with an outside school bus transportation provider to offer two bus routes serving mostly Miller Creek Middle School and Mary E. Silveria and Vallecito elementary schools. The district will also have a smaller van for transporting students in special education.

National education leaders gathered at the White House to discuss keeping schools safe from cyberattacks at the Back to School Safely: Cybersecurity Summit for K-12 Schools this week.

Terry Loftus, chief information officer for the San Diego County Office of Education, joined U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, First Lady Jill Biden, and educators and representatives of private sector companies to discuss best practices and the resources available to strengthen schools’ cybersecurity. 

Under Loftus’s guidance, the San Diego County Office of Education has been a cybersecurity leader in the K-12 education community. San Diego COE was the first in the state to fully implement multi-factor authentication, which acts as an additional layer of security to prevent unauthorized users from accessing accounts. The county office is also the creator of Red Herring, a training and testing platform that enables school districts to simulate phishing attacks and train staff to identify suspicious emails and other security threats.

The United States has experienced an increase in cyberattacks targeting the nation’s schools in recent years. Sensitive personal student and employee information – including student grades, medical records, documented home issues, behavioral information, and financial information – has been stolen and publicly disclosed.  “We know that our nation’s K-12 system makes high-quality education accessible to all, and is an institution that is key to the future prosperity of the United States,” Loftus said. “Unfortunately, our K-12 sector is deeply under-resourced and outmatched when it comes to evolving and increasing cybersecurity threats.”

Loftus said K-12 school districts, charter schools, county offices of education, and state-level agencies must work together to develop and share best practices while building partnerships between the U.S. Department of Education and other state and federal partners.

Students at Modesto City Schools now have to scan in when boarding school buses, The Modesto Bee reported.

The district is using a program called Zonar Z Pass that allows parents, guardians and authorized district staff, to track students’ bus rides on a digital app, the newspaper reported. Students will be issued cards that they will scan when getting on and off buses, according to the newspaper.

It was not immediately clear how many other school districts in the state use similar software to track students on buses. The Bee reported similar systems are in place in the Twin Rivers and Clovis districts in Sacramento and Fresno counties.

The union representing teachers in the Chino Valley Unified School District has filed labor complaints with the state over recently enacted policies that require the identification of transgender students to their parents and ban gay pride flags in classrooms, The (Riverside) Press-Enterprise reported.

In the complaint filed Tuesday with the California Public Employment Relations Board, the Associated Chino Teachers alleges the district failed to negotiate with the union before enacting the new rules, one of which limits protected union speech, the complaint charged.

“Unfortunately, our Board is creating headlines by focusing on things that don’t benefit students and that divide our community,” said ACT President Brenda Walker in a news release about the union’s action, The Press-Enterprise reported.

A district spokesperson said officials learned of the complaint Wednesday and were gathering more information about them, the newspaper reported.

The district, in San Bernardino County, is being investigated by the state Department of Justice for potential civil rights violations after passing the transgender identification policy, Attorney General Rob Bonta announced earlier this month. The school board president has called the investigation an “intimidation tactic.”

The debate over whether the college admissions process discriminates against Asian Americans has persisted for decades, as Higher Ed Dive reported. One of the two lawsuits that led to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling against race-conscious admissions alleged that Harvard University sets a higher bar for Asian American applicants.

The National Bureau of Economic Research report found that the admissions gap between white and Asian American admission rates is actually separate and “conceptually distinct” from affirmative action. Indeed, common institutional policies, like legacy admissions favoring alumni’s family members, disproportionately hurt Asian American students, the paper found.

Researchers analyzed the test scores, grade point averages and extracurricular activities of almost 686,000 college applications from roughly 293,000 Asian American and white students. They further disaggregated Asian American student data by South Asia, East Asia and Southeast Asia subgroups. The data spans five admission cycles, beginning with 2015-16.

Legacy is one of the key issues. Both white and Asian American legacy applicants were more than twice as likely to be accepted than applicants without legacy status. But East Asian and Southeast Asian students were roughly three times less likely to have legacy status than white students. The likelihood for South Asian students plummeted almost six times lower than white students.

To make matters worse, Asian American applicants can not simply outperform their competition, the paper said. Even though they had higher average standardized test scores than white students, they faced worse odds of being admitted. Among students in the 99th percentile of test takers, South Asian students were 43% less likely to be accepted to a selective college than white students.

A court of appeals in San Francisco decided in favor of immigrant parents’ right to vote in the city’s school board elections.

San Francisco voters first passed a measure in 2016 allowing all parents of children living in the city to vote in school board elections, regardless of their citizenship status. Prior to that measure, only U.S. citizens could vote in school board elections, and not permanent residents, or green-card holders, immigrants with work visas, or undocumented immigrants. Only U.S. citizens can vote in federal, state and most local elections.

The San Francisco Superior Court had struck down the measure after a conservative group United States Justice Foundation and its president, James V. Lacy,  contested immigrant parents’ right to vote, arguing that it violated California’s constitution. Lacy said that allowing parents who are not U.S. citizens to vote “dilutes” the vote of U.S. citizens.

The city and county of San Francisco then appealed. Proponents of the San Francisco measure say that all parents should have a say in who runs their children’s schools, regardless of their immigration status.

“As a parent of a high school student heading back to classes next week, I am very relieved that the Court ruled in our favor,” said immigrant parent Amos Lim in a press release sent by the group Chinese for Affirmative Action. “Having a voice at the ballot box to decide the educational goals for my daughter is very important to me. I look forward to registering to vote again at the next SFUSD School Board election.”

Lacy, who filed the original lawsuit challenging the measure, said in an email, “The ruling of the Court of Appeals denigrates the integrity of elections for the San Francisco school board by devaluing citizenship as the key qualification for voting, and opens the door for further erosion of election integrity throughout the state.”

Lacy has ten days to file an appeal with the California Supreme Court. He said he may decide instead to file a federal court case against allowing non-citizens to vote.

San Francisco is not the only city to allow non-citizen parents to vote in school board elections. Oakland also passed a measure allowing parents who are not U.S. citizens to vote in school board elections in 2022. Before the pandemic, the Los Angeles Unified School District began considering the idea as well.

Chicago also allows non-citizen parents to vote in local school council elections. New York City allowed non-citizen parents to vote in school board elections from 1968 to 2003, before the city began appointing instead of electing school board members. New York City and some cities in Maryland and Vermont allow permanent residents and those authorized to work in the U.S. to vote in city elections.

The cost of child care has been rising steadily, a new report shows, and many families now spend more than the government considers affordable, as CNBC reported. Coupled with the sharply rising costs of housing and food, experts say, many families are being squeezed hard. 

Two-thirds of families, 67%, spend 20% or more of their household income on child care, according to a recent report by Care.com that surveyed 3,000 parents. That’s up from 51% in 2022.

While 79% of families expect to spend more than $9,600 per child this year, many are spending significantly more than that. On average, families spend 27% of their household income on child care. For 59% of parents surveyed, that means shelling out a whopping $18,000 a year per child, researchers found. 

It should be noted that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services considers 7% of income to be affordable for child care.  

“Child care is claiming a disproportionate amount of household incomes, and a decade of rising child care costs should be a wakeup call that the system as we know it completely fails the vast majority of families,” wrote Tim Allen, CEO of Care.com, in a statement.

Education leaders and policymakers aren’t doing enough to increase teacher diversity, according to a report released today by the National Council on Teacher Quality.

The report, “State of the States 2023: Policies to Increase Teacher Diversity” found that seven states have set public goals for increasing diversity in their teacher workforce; 14 have passed initiatives to retain teachers of color, and only a few states offer either financial incentives or career pathways explicitly to attract teachers of color.

Research has shown having teachers of color in the classroom increases academic outcomes for all students.

“We know the importance of teachers of color for all students, and we need to put state policies in place to attract, support and retain them,” said Heather Peske, NCTQ president. “The good news is that state policymakers don’t have to start from scratch. There are many examples of states leading the way. We need more bold action to scale these efforts.” 

The report credits California for spending $350 million on its teacher residency program, a pathway teachers of color rated highly in a Rand Corp. survey. California schools primarily teach students of color — 79% — but just 39% of educators are teachers of color. 

The report recommends increased pay, better benefits, loan forgiveness and scholarships for teacher candidates, expanded teacher preparation programs at minority-serving institutions, teacher licensing reciprocity agreements, leadership pathways for teachers, teacher residencies and more supportive school administrators, to diversify the workforce.

The school board for the Murrieta Valley Unified School District this week will consider a policy to notify parents if their child identifies as transgender, The Press-Enterprise reported.

The consideration comes weeks after Chino Valley Unified’s board passed a policy to notify parents if their child asks to be identified by a different gender or a name other than their legal name, or if the child accesses a bathroom or takes part in programs that don’t align with the gender on their student records. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has announced he is launching a civil rights investigation into that district.

A copy of the policy approved by the Chino Valley school board is included in the agenda items for Thursday’s Murrieta Valley board meeting, according to The Press-Enterprise.

Paul Diffley, the president of the Murrieta Valley board, told The Press-Enterprise that the board won’t use Chino Valley’s policy “word for word” but said it could serve as an “interesting guide” as the Murrieta Valley board considers taking action.

The University of California admitted a record number of California resident first-year students for this fall, extending admission offers to 88,285 of them, a 3.5% increase over last year.

The increases come after this year’s state budget included a 5% increase in UC’s base funding, which Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers awarded UC with the expectation that the system of nine undergraduate campuses would enroll more California residents.

UC also admitted slightly more transfer students from California community colleges.

UC also accepted more Latino students. By admitting 33,198 Latino students, those students represented 38% of the admitted first-year students, up from 37% a year ago.

Among campuses, the biggest increase in admission offers was at UC Santa Cruz, which admitted 44% more first-year California students than it did a year ago.

Whether the higher admission numbers result in more students actually enrolling at UC won’t be known for months. Most UC campuses don’t resume classes until September, and the university system typically doesn’t announce fall enrollment data until months after that. But the system’s president, Michael Drake, said in a statement Tuesday that the latest admission data reflects UC’s “commitment to expanding opportunity.”

“We’re pleased to support thousands more Californians who wish to pursue a higher education, benefitting themselves and communities across the state,” he added.

Over the past four years, the University of Southern California, Pepperdine University and Vanguard University admitted students who had donor or alumni connections but failed to meet minimum admissions requirements, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

USC admitted eight students who did not meet admission requirements — including two who did not meet minimum math requirements and two who failed to prove they graduated from high school.

At USC, applicants with ties to alumni or donors are given a “special interest tag,” which does not “guarantee an applicant’s admission, nor does it shift an applicant to a fast-track admission process,” the university said in its reports.

“Like other highly selective universities, we use a holistic admissions approach that considers all aspects of each individual applicant’s qualifications and achievements,” Lauren Bartlett, a spokesperson for USC, said in a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle. “Federal law does not permit us to discuss individual admissions decisions.”

Meanwhile, Pepperdine University admitted fewer than 10 legacy students who didn’t meet their admission requirements in the 2020-21 and 2021-22 academic years.

Vanguard University, however, reportedly accepted less than 10 of these students in three of the past four academic years.

“In the most recent academic year, Vanguard University did not enroll any legacy students who were below standard requirements,” Michael J. Beals wrote in a statement to the Chronicle, noting that the school includes 68% students of color, 51% Pell Grant-eligible and 35% first generation.”

Nine San Diego Unified School District police officers are planning to sue the district, the department’s police chief and the superintendent, alleging they have faced corruption, retaliation and favoritism, CBS8 reported.

“It quickly became apparent there were now two camps within the same police department,” John Gomez, the attorney representing the officers, told CBS8.

He noted that many of the challenges faced by the officers came from an alleged personal relationship between the chief, Alfonso Contreras, and one of his subordinates.

“If you approved of the relationship between the chief and the sergeant, according to the evidence, you were afforded favoritism, better opportunities, better treatment. If you disfavored or did not support this relationship, you were subject to retaliation, intimidation and bad treatment,” Gomez said.

According to Gomez, the officers presented their allegations to Superintendent Lamont Jackson — but claimed nothing was done.

Gomez said the officers would like Contreras to be placed on administrative leave and for an investigation to take place.

“We are asking them to protect those who serve and protect our students. Not just sit back and protect those who serve the chief of police … and his club,” said Jesus Montana, one of the officers.

Meanwhile, San Diego Unified said in a statement that “the district is precluded from disclosing the details of personnel matters and does not discuss pending litigation. All allegations received by the district are taken seriously and investigated.”

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has launched a civil rights investigation into Chino Valley Unified, whose board passed a policy in July that requires district staff to notify parents if their child asks to be identified by a different gender, a name other than their legal name or accesses a bathroom or takes part in programs that don’t align with the gender on their official records.

The investigation follows a letter sent by Bonta to the Superintendent Norman Enfield and the board on July 20, the day of the school board vote, expressing his concern about the proposed policy. Bonta cited California Department of Education guidance warning that a district may violate the state’s antidiscrimination laws and a student’s right to privacy if they disclose that the student is transgender.  Gender identity is a protected privacy right under the California and U.S. Constitution, Bonta said in the letter.

The letter also warned that “outing” students to parents could result in emotional, mental and physical harm and subject them to discriminatory harassment. 

“Students should never fear going to school for simply being who they are,” said Bonta, in a press release Friday. “Chino Valley Unified’s forced outing policy threatens the safety and well-being of LGBTQ+ students vulnerable to harassment and potential abuse from peers and family members unaccepting of their gender identity. Today’s announcement stresses our commitment to challenging school policies that target and seek to discriminate against California’s most vulnerable communities. California will not stand for violations of our students’ civil rights.”

San Jose mayor Matt Mahan held a press conference Thursday where he spoke in favor of an ordinance that would ban homeless encampments and vehicle dwellings within 150 feet of San Jose preschools, day cares and K-12 schools.

The San Jose Spotlight reports that the press conference was held at KIPP San Jose Collegiate, a public charter high school. Students from the school spoke in favor of the measure. KIPP Principal Kim Vo said addressing homelessness has been costly for the school, prompting it to hire private security.

“Many of these students standing behind me this morning … spoke out because homeless neighbors were sleeping on school grounds and in school bathrooms. They spoke out because they were finding needles on their lunch tables,” Mahan said. “Our students should not have to face the ramifications of our failure on homelessness.”

Last year Los Angeles passed a highly contest similar measure that banned encampments within 500 feet of schools.

Gene Block, who has served as UCLA’s chancellor since 2007, will step down from the position next summer, the university announced Thursday.

“Since I became chancellor 16 years ago, UCLA has been my community and my home, a source of endless inspiration, and an indelible part of who I am,” Block said. “Serving as the leader of our university has been the greatest honor of my life.”

In a news release, UCLA touted a number of accomplishments the campus achieved under Block’s leadership, including increasing student enrollment by 24%, growing research funding to $1.7 billion and ranking as the top public university in the country in the U.S. News & World Report rankings.

With Block planning to step down, that means that both UCLA and UC Berkeley will be searching for new chancellors at the same time. Carol Christ, UC Berkeley’s chancellor, announced in June that she plans to retire next summer.

A jury deciding the fate of a former San Jose State athletic trainer accused of sexually assaulting female athletes is scheduled for a fourth day of deliberations on Thursday, powering on after declaring they were deadlocked over some of the charges in a trial in U.S. District Court, the Mercury News reported.

The case involves former trainer Scott Shaw, 56,  who is facing six federal charges of violating the constitutional rights to “bodily integrity” of four women. He has pleaded not guilty. He left the university voluntarily in 2020 — some 11 years after 17 members of the women’s swim team first complained that he touched them inappropriately under their sports bras and underwear, the newspaper reported.

U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman instructed the jury to “continue your deliberations” Tuesday after a juror wrote in a note to the judge: “We are deadlocked with at least one, and quite likely more, unmovable jurors on each side (guilty vs. not guilty,). What do we do now?” according to the Mercury News. Jurors deliberated Wednesday, reviewing the testimony of an athlete who said Shaw inappropriately touched her breast.

A legal analyst who has been following the case told the newspaper the deliberations were entering “a critical state.”

“At some point, the judge, after consultation with the parties and jurors, has to decide whether to pull the plug on deliberations and declare a mistrial,” said legal analyst Steve Clark, a San Jose defense lawyer who has been following the case, “Thereafter, the jurors will be free to discuss the case, which will be very helpful to both sides in how this case moves forward.”

The parents of a student who was beaten in a classroom in March have filed a claim against the Newman-Crows Landing Unified School District in Stanislaus County claiming it didn’t protect their daughter despite years of bullying, The Modesto Bee reported.

The claim — a precursor to a lawsuit — alleges a teacher who witnessed the March 6 assault did nothing to stop it. It occurred at Westside Valley High School in Newman and was captured on video, The Bee reported.

A voice on the video, presumably the teacher, can be heard saying “Stop,” “Stop it” and “You need to stop.” The teacher is never shown in the video coming to the student’s aid. The person who took the video is heard laughing. The video later was sent out over the internet, according to The Bee’s report.

The alleged assailants were two females who were not students at the school. Modesto attorney Adam Stewart, who served the district with the legal claim Monday, said the district was negligent in supervision and did not ensure the girl’s safety, despite prior knowledge of bullying and harassment.

Fresno Unified School District will expand outdoor Wi-Fi access at 94 of its school campuses, the school board approved earlier this summer. 

The move will provide students as well as staff and campus visitors with internet access in more areas across the school campuses, specifically in outdoor spaces that students use during lunch and after school, district spokesperson Nikki Henry said via email. 

“This gives students access to online educational resources across their daily journey on campus,” Henry said. 

Pacific OnSource, located in Simi Valley, will install the equipment to support the outdoor wireless access, which is expected to be available by the middle of the school year.

The $205,000 costs are a part of the 2023-24 school year budget — a $2.3 billion spending plant that prioritized students’ social-emotional and physical health, campus safety, and facility improvements, The Fresno Bee reported. 

The teachers’ union in Temecula Valley Unified, students and parents are suing the district’s board of trustees for banning the teaching of “Critical Race Theory and other similar frameworks.”

The group that filed the lawsuit says the resolution has “chilled many teachers into silence” on many different topics, from LGBTQ history to the history of civil rights.

“As a teacher, my role is to introduce my students to a broad range of viewpoints so they can learn to think critically and form their own opinions about the world,” said Dawn Sibby, teacher at Temecula Valley High School, in a release announcing the lawsuit. “This ban has created a climate of fear in our classrooms, and it is preventing my students from learning about the history and diversity of our nation. I’m proud to be a plaintiff in this case to fight for my students, who deserve an education not censored by Board members’ ideological beliefs.”

The students, parents and educators are represented by the nonprofit organization Public Counsel and the law firm Ballard Spahr LLP. They also have the support of the statewide union, California Teachers Association.

According to the Los Angeles Times, “if the suit overturns the ban, it could have a broad effect in California, where a small number of districts, including Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified, have passed similar bans or restricted instruction on race.”

District officials were not available to comment to the Times.