California education news: What’s the latest?

San Diego Unified, the state’s second-largest district, on Monday announced its next superintendent will be Lamont Jackson, an educator with 34 years of service in the district.

Jackson was previously serving as interim superintendent since May when former Superintendent Cindy Marten was appointed as U.S. deputy education secretary. Jackson’s interim status expired at the end of 2021, and the San Diego Unified school board voted unanimously to offer him the permanent position, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported Tuesday.

Jackson graduated from San Diego Unified schools, according to the district. During his career, he held the positions of teaching assistant, teacher, coach, principal, chief human resources officer and area superintendent.

Pamela Braunstein, a trustee at Capistrano Unified in Orange County, resigned last week due to public harassment she faced over her support for mask requirements, the Southern California News Group reported.

Braunstein was one of four trustees to vote last week in favor of following the state guidelines on indoor mask requirements, instead of lifting them immediately, according to the report. The state guidelines call for school districts to lift mask mandates after this Friday.

Capistrano board meetings have become so unruly that the district hired extra security guards, requested assistance from sheriff’s deputies and built a fence around the building to keep people from breaking windows.

“I don’t know about specific threats of violence, but meetings have been more attended and sometimes more volatile,” Ryan Burris, the district’s chief communications officer, told the newspaper. “There are a whole bunch of issues playing into it. It’s not just masks and Covid. It’s critical race theory, it’s sex education. People feel strongly about a lot of issues.”

Three new appointees of the State Board of Education will go to work Wednesday, on the first of a two-day meeting. On Feb. 28, Newsom announced his nominations to the 10-member board; they must be confirmed by the state Senate.

They are:

• Gabriela Gonzalez, 48, of Los Angeles. Gonzalez has been an elementary school teacher for Montebello Unified for 22 years. She earned a Master of Education degree in educational leadership from California State University, Dominguez Hills.
• Brenda Lewis, 61, of Bakersfield. Lewis was associate superintendent of instruction at the Kern High School District from 2014 to 2021. Before that, she served in several positions from 1988 to 2014, including principal, director of program improvement, assistant principal and a physical education teacher. Lewis earned a Master of Science degree in physical education from Oklahoma State University and a Doctor of Education degree in organizational leadership from the University of La Verne.
• Sharon Olken, 50, of San Francisco. Olken has been executive director of Gateway Public Schools since 2011. Before that, she held several positions at Gateway High, including principal, teacher and dean of faculty. Olken was a teacher at Homestead High School in Sunnyvale and campaign staff for Dianne Feinstein for Senate from 1993 to 1995. She earned a Master of Education degree from the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

Among the topics at Wednesday’s board meeting, members will discuss the state’s accountability plan for the federal Every Student Succeeds Act and revisions to the California School Dashboard (Item 4). Here is the agenda for the meeting.

Following a backlash from conservative community members and media, the Long Beach Unified Board of Education voted to postpone a plan to build a gender-neutral locker room at a high school aquatics center, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The plan, two years in the making, would have included private shower and changing stalls in the locker room at Wilson High School, accommodating all students regardless of their gender identity. But after conservative news outlets publicized the plan last fall, a small group of community members protested the idea and the board voted on Feb. 2 to gather more public input before making a final decision, the newspaper reported.

Students overwhelmingly support the idea, said Tiffany Brown, deputy superintendent for Long Beach Unified.

The controversy has echoed in other districts in California, even though the state in 2013 passed a law allowing transgender students to use bathrooms or locker rooms of their choice.

Following new Covid guidelines from Los Angeles County, the University of Southern California lifted its indoor mask requirement in most public spaces, effective Monday, the university’s administration wrote in a letter to students and staff last week.

“Coming two years after the pandemic first disrupted our operations, this is welcome news and a testament to how far we have come as a campus community,” Provost Charles Zukoski and Senior Vice President David Wright wrote.

Students, staff and visitors are no longer be required to wear masks in classrooms, laboratories, offices, libraries, recreation and athletic facilities and dining halls. Masks will still be required on public transportation and in health care facilities. If the campus experiences another Covid outbreak, mask requirements may be reinstated.

UC Berkeley will ask some incoming freshmen to attend online only this fall and transfer students to delay their enrollment until January 2023 in order to avoid any significant reductions to the number of students it offers admission to this spring.

Thanks to those measures, Berkeley now says it will be able to admit almost the same number of transfer and freshman students as it did a year ago, despite a court order that the campus must freeze enrollment at 2020-21 levels, according to Berkeleyside.

Berkeley officials had said Thursday that they will need to reduce their enrollment by 3,050 students to comply with the court order, which was upheld by the California Supreme Court. In order to reach that figure, Berkeley had planned to offer admission to 5,100 fewer incoming freshmen and transfers.

Now, Berkeley officials told Berkeleyside, the campus determined it only needs to reduce in-person fall enrollment by 2,629 students.

The campus said it plans to enroll more than 1,000 new students only in virtual classes and defer admission of 650 transfer students to January 2023. After many students graduate in December, there will be room for those students to physically be on campus in the fall.

The campus will also deny admission to more than 400 students, most of them graduate students, who otherwise would have been offered admission, according to Berkeleyside. And about 200 students will be in off campus programs this fall in places such as Sacramento and Washington, D.C.

With those strategies in place, Berkeley can offer admission to almost the same number of freshmen and transfers as it did a year ago, the campus told Berkeleyside.

“With all of our mitigation strategies in place, the number of freshman and transfer students receiving offers is expected to be similar to our numbers that were in place before the court-ordered reduction in enrollment … therefore undergrad admissions offers will be very close to what was originally planned,” university officials told the news outlet in a statement.

A bill co-sponsored by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond could put 10,000 new mental health counselors in public schools.

The bill, which was unveiled this week by Thurmond, would set aside $25,000 grants to counselors who commit to serving two years in high-need communities, according to the Mercury News.

“Our youngest children crying, feeling emotional; older children acting out, showing behavioral needs; and all the while our schools struggling to find enough clinicians and counselors to provide the supports that our schools need,” Thurmond said.

The Los Angeles Community College District board voted Wednesday to drop its plan to petition the U.S. Supreme Court over a lawsuit involving blind students’ right to obtain textbooks and other materials in a format they can understand.

The case was originally filed in 2017 by two blind students who claimed the district discriminated against them under the Americans with Disabilities Act because it did not provide Braille or audio versions of classroom materials. As a result, the students could not complete courses required to transfer to a four-year college.

The district argued that the discrimination was not intentional, and therefore didn’t fall under federal disability rights laws. Lower courts mostly sided with the students, but the district announced last fall it planned to appeal to the Supreme Court by a March 3 deadline. The move sparked an uproar among disability rights activists, who argued the case would have far-reaching negative impact on the ability of disabled students to achieve an education.

“The board of trustees stands strongly united in support of the Americans with Disabilities Act and reaffirms our direction that the Los Angeles Community College District will always be a welcoming, inclusive higher education environment where all individuals of all abilities and backgrounds can pursue their goals of a quality, affordable college education,” said the district’s board president, Gabriel Buelna.

The board ordered its attorneys to continue negotiating with the plaintiffs in hopes of reaching a settlement by its April meeting.

Claudia Center, legal director for the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, described the board’s decision as a victory for “not just for the disability community, but all civil rights communities.”

“We’re pleased that the district has stepped back from the dangerous path they were pursuing that threatened the rights of disabled students,” she said. “We think there’s a creative solution here, and our hope is that the district becomes a national model for disability access.”

About 1,500 students ages 12 and older still haven’t verified their vaccination status with West Contra Costa Unified, prompting the district to push its vaccine mandate deadline to July 1 — in line with the state’s vaccine mandate deadline.

Originally, the district set its enforcement date for Jan. 3 but pushed it back to Feb. 18 because more than 7,000 students had not verified their vaccine status. Though the number has dropped significantly since then, the district still would not be equipped to offer independent study to a large influx of students. School board members voted unanimously with one abstention Wednesday to push the deadline back even further.

The state’s vaccine mandate will follow the federal Food and Drug Administration’s full approval of the Covid vaccine for each age group and is expected to go into effect in July.

Currently, only the Pfizer vaccine is fully approved for people 16 and older. The Pfizer vaccine also has emergency authorization for use in children aged 12-16. Los Angeles Unified, West Contra Costa Unified, Oakland Unified and others adopted even stricter timelines, only to push them back amid low vaccination verification rates.

The University of California, Berkeley, must cut enrollment by 3,000 students this coming fall after the California Supreme Court opted not to overturn a lower court’s ruling requiring the campus to freeze enrollment at 2020-21 levels, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

In order to reduce enrollment by that much, Berkeley will now withhold acceptance letters from about 5,000 incoming freshmen and transfers, the Chronicle reported.

The court voted 4-2 against lifting an enrollment freeze that was ordered by a judge in Alameda County. The ruling stems from a lawsuit brought by a Berkeley neighborhood group expressing concerns about the impact of enrollment growth at the campus on the area like the environment, housing and noise.

In Thursday’s ruling, two justices, Goodwin Liu and Joshua Groban, dissented. “California and our broader society stand to lose the contributions of leadership, innovation, and service that would otherwise accrue if several thousand students did not have to defer or forgo the benefit of a UC Berkeley education this fall,” they wrote, according to the Chronicle.

In a sharp shift in the district’s position, Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Alberto Carvalho indicated that he would take steps to settle a lawsuit by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles charging that LAUSD illegally withheld millions of dollars in federal aid for low-income students attending parochial schools.

The archdiocese filed the lawsuit in December on behalf of its schools serving 13,000 students in Watts and in south and east Los Angeles. Carvalho, who inherited the lawsuit on taking over the job as superintendent last month, told EdSource in an interview he has familiarized himself with the case, would take steps in response, “and in the process, I’m going to resolve this issue sooner rather than later.” Because the matter is in litigation, Carvalho declined to give more details.

The lawsuit pertains to Title I funding that low-income private and parochial school students are eligible for, just as public school students are. The money pays for tutoring, teacher’s aides, math and reading coaches, additional teachers, counselors and other services. However, instead of directly funding the religious schools, Congress steers funding for them to districts, which oversee it and directly or, through vendors, provides the services for eligible students in private and religious schools.

For years, parochial schools had no difficulty establishing students’ Title I income eligibility, but that changed in 2018-19, with bleak financial projections for the district. An investigation by the California Department of Education found that LAUSD arbitrarily changed the rules multiple times with unreasonable deadlines, then cut 90% of the funding, from $9.5 million to less than $1 million. Since undistributed Title I funding stays with the district, LAUSD had an incentive to shortchange private schools, an attorney for the archdiocese said. The department found that the district’s “hide-the-ball approach breached both the spirit and the letter” of the law.

“What I can tell you,” Carvalho told EdSource, “is that we need more objective, transparent tools by which we assess and fund this guaranteed federal entitlement that’s driven by poverty,” regardless of whether for a public or private school.

Jewish religious schools, which also have complained about the district’s handling of Title I funding, also would benefit from an out-of-court settlement.

California will lead a nationwide investigation of the risks to children of TikTok, a short form video-sharing app, state Attorney General Rob Bonta announced Wednesday.

“Our children are growing up in the age of social media — and many feel like they need to measure up to the filtered versions of reality that they see on their screens,” Banta said in a statement. “We know this takes a devastating toll on children’s mental health and well-being. But we don’t know what social media companies knew about these harms and when.”

A TikTok spokesman told the Los Angeles Times that the China-based company cares “about building an experience that helps to protect and support the well-being of our community,” adding that the company limits certain platform features by age and invests in ways for users to “enjoy content based on age-appropriateness or family comfort.”

Attorneys general from California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Vermont are also helping to lead the probe, and other states are also participating, according to Banta’s statement.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has forced the suspension of a 2022 study abroad program, while a U.S. college has recalled students from another program in Moscow, Inside Higher Ed  reported Thursday.

The Council on International Educational Exchange, an education nonprofit that supports study abroad programs, announced that it is suspending its spring 2022 programs in St. Petersburg and moving students to other locations in Eastern Europe, according to Inside Higher Ed.

Middlebury College in Vermont recalled 12 students from its school in Russia, three from Middlebury, and nine from other colleges and universities.

“Given the very limited availability of international flights out of Russia, and the U.S. Department of State’s authorization for family members and nonessential embassy staff to return to the U.S., we feel that it is time for students to leave the country,” Nana Tsikhelashvili, a professor and director of Middlebury’s Russia program, said in a statement to Inside Higher Ed.

In his State of the Union address Tuesday, President Joe Biden pledged to boost mental health services for young people, many of whom are suffering from escalating rates of depression and anxiety due to the pandemic and rise of social media.

Among other steps, Biden said he’d include $1 billion in his 2023 budget for schools to hire more school counselors, psychologists, social workers and other staff who work directly with students. The money would be in addition to mental health funding already included in the federal Covid relief bills.

“Let’s take on mental health. Especially among our children, whose lives and education have been turned upside down,” Biden said. “Children were also struggling before the pandemic. Bullying, violence, trauma and the harms of social media … let’s get all Americans the mental health services they need.”

Biden also promised to eliminate obstacles for schools to be reimbursed by Medicaid for student mental health services, a move that youth advocates have long worked toward. In addition, Biden pledged $50 million for pilot programs that would place mental health clinics in schools, libraries and other non-traditional locations.

He also urged social media companies to take more responsibility for the harmful effects of their platforms on children. Companies need to add more privacy protections, stop selling advertisements aimed at children and stop selling children’s personal data.

Depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts among young people have steadily increased the past few years, due to the rise of social media, economic uncertainty, gun violence and other issues. The pandemic exacerbated these conditions, as many students became isolated and fell behind in school. The U.S. surgeon general recently described young people’s declining mental health as a national crisis.

Decades of underinvestment in schools, culture battles over bilingual education, and stark income inequality have made California the least literate state in the nation, as Capitol Weekly reported. 

Nearly 1 in 4 people over the age of 15 lack the skills to decipher the words in this sentence. Only 77% of adults are considered mid- to highly literate, according to the nonpartisan data crunchers at World Population Review.

In New Hampshire, the most literate state in the country, only about 5 out of 100 lack English reading and writing skills. Its literacy rate hovers near 95 percent.

“It doesn’t surprise me at all,” said Niu Gao, a senior fellow who studies education issues at the Public Policy Institute of California, as Capital Weekly cited. “California in general does not do very well, and you can see this throughout the entire education pipeline.”

“We really haven’t been investing” for decades, she said. “We’ve been underspending the entire time.”

California, currently is sitting on a surplus bigger than many states’ entire budgets, has for years spent less — about 13 percent less — than the national average on K-12 schools. Recent research shows that even high-performing California students score lower on standardized tests than their counterparts in better performing states.

School spending, of course, is only one factor shaping California’s dismal literacy rate. The state has the most diverse population in the country. More than 200 languages are spoken here. California also has the biggest wealth chasm.

And programs to teach English to children whose parents speak another language at home have shown little success. Only 10 percent of students in English acquisition programs display grade-level proficiency. That’s a significant problem in a state with 1 million English learners among a student population of about 6 million.

“There’s only so much schools can do,” said Gao.

Academic success depends on a lot of things that schools don’t control, experts say. Parental education might be the biggest factor. Income disparity plays a role as well. States with large percentages of highly literate parents unsurprisingly had highly proficient eighth graders, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

The latest wave of Covid cases this winter has disrupted even the best-laid plans for child care. But low-income parents have been hit disproportionately with a double whammy in recent weeks — losing both child care and income at much higher rates than their well-heeled peers, according to the Washington Post’s analysis of census survey data.

Day care closures and other disruptions increased from December to January, as cases of the omicron variant peaked, but they were most common in households that make less than $25,000 a year, data from the Census Household Pulse survey shows. 

“We’ve just barely been scraping by,” said Hannah Watland, who makes $14 an hour at her retail job in Rapid City, S.D., and can’t afford to stay home without pay, as the Post reported. “Every day we don’t work is a lot of money that isn’t coming in.”

In the meantime, Watland’s expenses pile up. She owes $500 in rent and $600 a month for child care, whether it’s open or not. Her bank account is down to $20.

When child care centers closed, lower-income families were more likely to take unpaid leave or to quit jobs altogether. That’s in contrast to higher-income families, who often used paid vacation and sick leave, supervising their children while working or cutting back on work hours. Households making $50,000 or less a year were far more likely to experience a pay cut than those making $100,000 or more a year.

Only a third of the country’s lowest-paid workers had access to paid sick leave as of March 2021, compared with 95% of workers in the top 10% of wages, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

An Oakland nonprofit that drew national notice when it created a virtual learning hub for Black children during Covid is the latest unexpected beneficiary of MacKenzie Scott’s philanthropic binge.

Oakland REACH announced this week it received an unrestricted $3 million gift from Scott, a novelist who has promised to give away half of the fortune in Amazon stock she received in the divorce settlement with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. She is reported to have given away $8.5 billion since 2020 of her $48 billion net worth, as of February, to organizations working on climate change, gender equality, racial equity and education.

Oakland REACH founder and CEO Lakisha Young said Tuesday she will use the money, the largest contribution since its founding five years ago, to expand and replicate its literacy tutorial program and broaden it to include early grades math. In the program, REACH trains parents and neighborhood adults to tutor elementary students up to third grade.

Young started its City-Wide Virtual Hub during the spring and summer of 2020 and continued it during 2021-22 for Oakland families dissatisfied with Oakland Unified’s remote learning. It trained and provided family liaisons and K-12 enrichment programs in martial arts and science. This school year, it is offering virtual programming to 950 children through the district’s Sojourner Truth independent study program, Young said.

As with all of Scott’s recipients, the money was a surprise. Young said she received a call last fall notifying her that an anonymous donor wanted to know more about Oakland REACH. Months later, she got an email announcing Scott was making a contribution. The message was to continue the good work you do, Young said.

Scott’s 0ther recent gifts include $133.5 million to Communities In Schools, a network of nonprofit groups with an operation in Los Angeles that work in low-income K-12 schools across the country; $35 million to Oakland-based NewSchools Venture Fund, which funds innovative district and charter schools in California, and $800 million to a number of historically Black colleges and universities.

Around 200 Rocklin Unified School District teachers and school staff called in sick or didn’t show up to work Monday to protest the district school board’s decision last week to stop enforcing the state K-12 mask mandate while it remained in place.

Prior to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement Monday that California will no longer require masks in schools after March 11, the Sacramento-area Rocklin Unified School District’s board held a last-minute meeting to make masks optional for its students, the Sacramento Bee reported.

The board’s decision outraged the local teachers union, Rocklin Teachers Professional Association, which said teachers were only given a day’s notice of the meeting during the President’s Week break, according to the Bee.

Other Sacramento-area districts have also planned to defy the mandate over the next few weeks, including Roseville Joint Unified, El Dorado Joint Union High School District and Nevada Joint Union High School District.

As Los Angeles Unified weighs removing its mask mandate, its teachers union, United Teachers of Los Angeles, is calling on the district to keep it.

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Monday that California will no longer require masks in schools after March 11, though state health officials “strongly recommend” masking in schools. The decision is ultimately left to local health officials and individual school districts.

In a statement to KTLA and other media on Monday, UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz said that though Covid-19 cases have been declining, there are still many unvaccinated children in schools and early education programs, so discussing dropping the mandate would be “premature.”

The district’s contract with the union calls for masking through the remainder of the school year, so an end to the mandate would need to be negotiated with the union.

Richard Blum, a longtime regent of the University of California and husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, died Sunday of cancer at his home in San Francisco, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. He was 86.

A successful financier and philanthropist, Blum was a regent for 20 years, and is credited with curbing spending at the Office of the President and helping choose Mark Yudof as UC president in 2008. A graduate of UC Berkeley, Blum created the Blum Center for Developing Economies at Cal in 2006. The popular center, which focuses on global poverty and other pressing problems, now operates on all nine UC campuses.

In addition to Feinstein, he is survived by three daughters.

“My heart is broken today,” Feinstein said. “My husband was my partner and best friend for more than 40 years. He was by my side for the good times and for the challenges. I am going to miss him terribly.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state won’t get involved in Oakland Unified’s decision to close or merge nearly a dozen schools over the next two years, according to KQED.

In an interview with the public radio station, Newsom said that decisions to close schools, while gut-wrenching, are ultimately local decisions and the state should not intervene.

“As a mayor in the past, I understand those local decisions need to be made and stay local,” Newsom said. “But at the state level, I know what we are doing, which is providing unprecedented support for our schools and record-breaking per-pupil investments that should provide more flexibility to Oakland [Unified] School District than they’ve ever had in their history to address some of their financial challenges.”

The Oakland Unified school board voted recently to close or merge 11 schools as a way to cut costs. The district is facing declining enrollment as well as a structural deficit. The decision spurred an impassioned public outcry, including a hunger strike by two Oakland teachers.

The Pfizer vaccine against Covid is significantly less effective among children ages 5 to 11 compared with adolescents and adults, according to the New York Times.

The findings are based on a December study in New York state of more than 365,000 children ages 5 to 11 and 852,000 children ages 12 to 17. The study showed that the Pfizer vaccine — the only one authorized for children in the 5-11 age group — prevents serious illness, but “offers virtually no protection against infection, even within a month after full immunization,” according to the newspaper.

“It’s disappointing, but not entirely surprising, given this is a vaccine developed in response to an earlier variant. It looks very distressing to see this rapid decline, but it’s again all against omicron,” said the lead author of the study, Eli Rosenberg, deputy director for science at the New York State Department of Health.

The study follows a December study showing that two doses of the Pfizer vaccine are ineffective among children ages 2-5. The drugmaker is continuing to research whether a third dose is necessary.

Students in most counties in California would no longer have to wear masks in schools, effective immediately, under new guidance released Friday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. The new criteria, with a revised rating system, would apply to wearing masks indoors, including K-12 schools.

The announcement came three days ahead of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s expected announcement Monday laying out a timetable for ending the mask mandate in schools. The California Department of Public Health said Friday it was evaluating the latest recommendation from the CDC.

The CDC’s new policy would allow removing the masking requirement, in effect since July 2020, for school districts in the majority of California’s 58 counties. The requirement would remain in Los Angeles, Kern, San Diego Fresno and most rural counties until their high Covid rating, shown as orange on CDC’s color-coded system, lowers to medium (yellow) or low (green). (Go here for a recording of CDC’s press conference and here for a map of California counties, with current Covid ratings,)

The CDC’s new criteria mark a shift in strategy from measuring the Covid positivity rate and caseload to factors that examine Covid’s threat to the health care system in a county. It would be measured by three factors: hospital admissions of Covid patients, a hospital’s capacity to handle additional Covid cases, and new Covid cases in a county.

Thirty counties, including nearly all of the Bay Area and much of Southern California, including Orange and Riverside counties, currently fall into the low or medium categories, removing the indoor mask mandate unless their county health officers, using local measurements, decide that masking should continue.

Although Los Angeles and San Diego counties alone make up a third of the state’s population and Los Angeles Unified and San Diego Unified are the state’s two largest school districts, most of the 28 counties with a high ranking are in rural counties with the lowest Covid vaccination rates. They include Humboldt, Lassen, Shasta, Sierra and Yuba counties, where opposition to the mask mandate has been fierce and where several school boards have voted to defy the requirement. Merced, Solano, Napa and Monterey counties also have a high Covid rating.

On Tuesday, the board of the Nevada Joint Union High School District, which falls in an orange zone, became the latest district to adopt a policy of voluntary masking. Two days later, teachers at Nevada Union High School called in sick to protest the action, forcing the school to close for the day.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said CDC pivoted to new criteria that reflect the growing immunity across the nation due to Covid vaccinations and individuals with prior infections, as well as the Omicron variant, which, while more contagious, was less severe than the previous Delta variant. Nationwide, 37% of counties have a high rating, with 40% medium and 23% low, according to the CDC.

Greta Massetti, from CDC’s Covid Response Incident Management Team, said in a press conference that CDC included schools because experience has shown that “schools can be safe places” and so should fall under the same guidance as the wider community. Most children who have become infected with Covid have been asymptomatic, she said.

Walensky emphasized that high-risk, immunosuppressed people and other individuals should decide, based on their own circumstances, whether to continue to wear masks.

The CDC may modify the system in the future, based on new strains of Covid, and other factors, Walensky said.

In a statement Friday, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said with the CDC’s updated guidance, “we can continue to keep schools safely open while allowing for educators and parents to get back to focusing on what is most important: our students’ futures.”

“Moving forward, districts should continue to work with local health experts, parents, and educators to identify what works best for their communities and consider the appropriate mitigation strategies needed to keep students and staff safe,” he said.

Almost two-thirds of California voters support mask and vaccine mandates in schools, according to a poll conducted in early February by the Institute of Governmental Studies at the UC Berkeley and co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times.

Among parents, 61% approved mask mandates in schools and 55% approved vaccine mandates, the paper reports. The poll also found that a significant number of Black and Latino parents did not feel their children were safe from Covid at school.

Approval for these mandates was divided along political lines, with the vast majority of Republicans disapproving and the vast majority of Democrats approving.

Last week, California lifted its mask mandate for vaccinated people in most indoor places but kept it for schools, child care centers, hospitals and doctors’ offices, nursing homes, homeless shelters, jails and public transportation. Unvaccinated people are still required to wear masks in indoor public settings.

Superintendents of school districts in Alpine, Amador, Calaveras and Tuolumne counties are calling on state officials to change Covid rules for schools.

In a letter addressed to Gov. Gavin Newsom, state legislators and public health officials, the superintendents and the Tuolumne Joint Powers Authority, which administers insurance coverage for districts in the region, said that administrators are spending so much time making sure Covid-19 rules are being followed that they don’t have time to focus on education and support services, according to local newspaper The Union Democrat.

Specifically, the letter asks state officials to “align safety requirements for isolation and quarantining among students and staff; reduce or transfer the responsibility of Covid-19 testing, isolation and quarantine to health care providers, insurance companies, or public health authorities; reduce the complexity and number of reports that school districts must produce; establish criteria allowing school districts to shift safety to an endemic response; and make masking requirements the same across all public sectors,” according to the paper.

After Covid closed schools in March 2020, charter schools reopened in remote learning on average in four days in California, three days in New York and only two days in Washington state. For public districts throughout California and much of the nation, it often took weeks.

To Macke Raymond, director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, or Credo, and a distinguished senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, this quick turnaround underscored the advantage charter schools had in responding to sudden change during the pandemic.

“Charter schools rapidly built a structure in a time of chaos, taking just three school days, on average, to provide a remote learning program,” she said. “Their response to Covid is a natural experiment in how leaders and educators embrace the flexibility granted to them so that schooling continues and students are learning.”

Earlier this month, Credo, which has studied the performance of charter schools nationwide for two decades, released results of an extensive survey of charter schools in California, New York and Washington State on how they responded to the pandemic in the spring of 2020 and 2020-21. The 524 schools responding, which enroll 220,000 students, include 64% of New York’s 354 charter schools, all 13 of Washington’s charter schools but only 21% of California’s 1,351 charter schools. The report cautions California’s low response prevents applying the findings to charter schools as a whole in the state.

Nonetheless, the results indicate that the  charter schools surveyed were able to set clear priorities and achieve them going into remote learning and the following school year.

California charter schools listed communicating with families their top priority after switching to remote learning, and more than 60% reported increasing contacts somewhat or substantially, and about half reported increasing student feedback.

What can’t be determined by the surveys is whether charter school students fared better or worse than students in traditional schools during the pandemic. Of California charter schools, 39%  reported considerable (23%) or a substantial (16%) loss of learning time by the end of 2020-21.

Some Nevada Union High School teachers pushed back against a decision by their school board to defy state mask mandates by staying home, resulting in the closure of the school on Thursday.

The school board voted Tuesday to make wearing a mask optional for students despite state law and an agreement with their teachers union that masks would be required.

In an interview with CBS13, Brett McFadden, superintendent of the Nevada Joint Union High School District in Grass Valley, said he felt forced to write the policy approved by the school board because students and parents were protesting the mask requirement, making it “untenable.”

Teachers chose to call in sick because the school board is asking them to ignore the state mask mandate, potentially putting their credentials at stake, said Eric Mayer, president of Nevada Joint Union High School Teachers Association. Certificated school staff, including administrators, can be disciplined by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing if they violate state law.

“They are put in a position by the board’s actions where they have to choose between defying the board or defying state law,” Mayer said, stressing that this was not an organized action by the union.

Mayer said the school board also bypassed the collective bargaining process by passing the resolution without an agreement with the union. Mayer said the district has a memorandum of understanding with the district that states that decisions related to Covid would be based on public health guidelines.

The state will likely drop its school mask mandate sometime after Feb. 28, California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly said earlier this month. State health officials are reviewing student vaccination rates, Covid case numbers, hospitalization rates and national and global trends to determine an appropriate time to drop the mandate, he said.

“I don’t understand why they would damage their trust with the collective bargaining units — with us and the classified union — days before the state is set to revise the laws,” Mayer said. “Our position isn’t about masks. Our position is about defending the collective bargaining process.”

On Wednesday the staffing shortage at Nevada Union High School resulted in a school auditorium packed with students — masked and unmasked — watching movies, according to the Nevada Union newspaper.

Nevada Joint Union High School District is one of the latest school districts to make wearing a mask in classrooms optional in defiance of a state mandate from California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Since Feb. 13, when Roseville Joint Union High School District made wearing masks optional, about a dozen other school districts have followed suit, including Clovis Unified in Fresno County, El Dorado Union High School District in El Dorado County, Wheatland Unified in Yuba County and Rancho Sante Fe School District in San Diego County.

State officials have warned that violating the state mask mandate could carry significant legal and financial risks. By violating the state requirement, districts are opening themselves up to lawsuits and could potentially lose their insurance.

The University of California received a record number of applications for fall 2022 admission, thanks to a jump in applications from incoming freshmen, the university system announced Thursday.

However, the system also saw a decline in the number of students seeking to transfer from a California community college to one of UC’s nine undergraduate campuses.

Freshman applications increased by about 3.5% or 7,140 students. That included a 3.3% increase among California freshman applications. Latino students made up 38.1% of applications, the most of any ethnic group.

“The University of California remains an institution of choice for so many hardworking prospective undergraduates,” said President Michael Drake in a statement. “This diverse group of students has shown their commitment to pursuing higher education and we are thrilled they want to join us at UC.”

Meanwhile, UC received 30,936 applications from students seeking to transfer from a California community college, a 13% decline compared to last year. California’s community colleges and community college have suffered dramatic enrollment declines since the onset of the pandemic in 2020, and UC said in a statement that those declines have “decreased the available pipeline” of transfer students.

“UC is aware of the decrease in transfer applications and California Community College students across the system and is working to ensure that this critical group is supported in their efforts to apply at our campuses,” Han Mi Yoon-Wu, UC’s executive director of undergraduate admissions, said.

As Covid-19 cases drop, the state’s largest school district is considering scaling back the massive coronavirus testing program it has led through the majority of the pandemic. Everyone on campus, including students and staff members, must currently be tested on a weekly basis regardless of vaccination status.

The school board president, Kelly Gonez, stated that the program will continue in its current phase “into next week at least,” according to reporting from Los Angeles Daily News.

The district first proposed reducing the frequency of testing last year before the fall semester, but a surge in delta and omicron Covid-19 cases prompted officials to avoid any changes to the testing program.

During a school board meeting Tuesday, the district’s new superintendent, Albert Carvalho, joined in considering a change to the program.

“Is it still necessary to test at the intensity and frequency that we have been testing, considering the extreme cost?” he asked. He then requested a recommendation to update the testing program be presented soon to the board.

Even as consensus builds that the country needs to prioritize early childhood education, some higher education leaders are reluctant to forge new paths to jobs in early learning, as EdSurge reports. They are ambivalent about recruiting and training more early childhood educators, and a key reason is economic equity. 

Even though there’s great demand for people to enter the profession, some argue that the career track doesn’t provide the workforce — predominantly women of color — with a living wage. That’s why they argue that it’s not in the best interest of their students or their institutions to direct graduates to jobs in preschools and child care centers.

This tension is playing out largely at community colleges, many of which traditionally offered entry-level certificates in early childhood education. Even as these colleges seek to meet local labor market demand for workers, their leaders are increasingly concerned about how well students fare after they graduate.

“Early childhood puts those things into tension. We need talented early childhood education workers, and community strength depends on talented early childhood education workers. On the other hand, average wages are $12 an hour,” says Josh Wyner, founder and executive director of the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute, as EdSurge reports. “You’re not enabling economic mobility at $12 an hour. An individual probably doesn’t need to go to college to earn $12 an hour — that’s a low-wage job.”

The pandemic may have worsened equity issues in the child care sector. That’s one of the takeaways in a new report, “Equity in Child Care is Everyone’s Business,” released by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and The Education Trust.

The report notes that 94% of child care workers are female, and 40% are people of color. It examines how these child care workers are heavily impacted by racial inequalities and sexism — including pointing out inequities exacerbated by the pandemic. Black child care providers earn an average of 78 cents less per hour than their white counterparts, for instance, even when controlling for education level.

“While the pandemic and economic downturn have had repercussions for everyone in child care, they have hit female child care providers of color especially hard,” said Cheryl Oldham, senior vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. “This report helps put a human face on the troubling data we’re seeing within the child care industry — and illuminates the opportunities for state and local chambers to help ensure that these often-overlooked businesses not only survive but thrive.”

One key finding in the report is that the stress and strain of the pandemic are pushing providers to leave the workforce. Providers described significant physical and mental strain from working during the pandemic—some of it caused by racism and sexism, isolation from social connections and an overall lack of emotional support.

White House officials — stinging from the loss of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan and the nearly $2 trillion in social spending it would have provided — are testing the viability of one policy priority stripped out from the massive package: universal child care, as U.S. News and World Report noted.

“Most of us understand that quality child care, whether it’s you or someone you hire, is not cheap. It is not easy to find, and today, with the pandemic, even more difficult,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said during an event at the White House that featured parents and children.

The White House event highlights the seriousness with which the Biden administration wants Congress to address the country’s child care and early learning crisis, which existed long before centers began closing due to the pandemic.

“What we don’t often say is what Build Back Better really represents,” the secretary said, speaking about the president’s $1.75 trillion plan to tackle child care, prekindergarten, climate change and other social issues, as U.S. News and World Report noted. “It would be the greatest investment our country will have made in giving parents peace of mind.”

In its last round of Covid aid, the American Rescue Plan, Congress appropriated $122 billion for K-12 and all but left it up to states and school districts to decide how to spend it.

Three national education nonprofits have teamed up to identify promising and innovative practices that “have the potential to help schools recover stronger and all students benefit.” The site Ed Recovery Hub, is a collaboration of the Collaborative for Student Success; Edunomics Lab, a research center at Georgetown University; and the Center for Reinventing Public Education, now affiliated with the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University.

The site is organized around seven topics: accelerated learning; facility and technology; using data to drive decisions; promoting family engagement; supporting students, family and staff; new school delivery options, and strengthening the educator workforce.

Examples include Baltimore City Schools’ plan for increased small-group instruction and individualized education plans for all students, as well as Arizona’s Virtual Teacher Institute, providing free, on-demand professional learning for teachers statewide.

Initial ideas were gleaned from plans for Covid funding from states and districts. Ideas were taken from 19 states so far; none are from California. The site does welcome submissions.

A team of experts, who include John White, former Louisiana superintendent of education, and Leslie Villegas, senior policy analyst at New America, reviews each submission.

At a time of Covid fatigue, frustration and political hostilities, organizers hope that the project will inject some optimism by showing what is working with the new funding. “While there are challenges, there are also bright spots where schools are innovating,” leaders of the three organizations wrote in a commentary announcing the site.

Around 400 San Francisco Unified teachers and school staff have received notices that they could be laid off as the district seeks to cut millions of dollars from its workforce budget, NBC Bay Area reported Tuesday.

The district’s school board is scheduled to vote tonight on which jobs to eliminate. Administrators are proposing cutting 151 credentialed teacher positions, as well as 150 other school staff positions.

The cuts come in response to an estimated $125 million structural deficit, due in large part to dropping enrollment. District officials in December told KTVU that enrollment has declined by around 9,000 students over the past five years, with the biggest drop having occurred during the Covid pandemic as many families have left the city or the district.

State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, is expected to introduce a bill Tuesday that would allow the UC, CSU and community college systems to bypass the state’s required environmental review process in order to streamline the development of housing projects, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Tuesday.

The proposal comes about a week after a California Court of Appeals reinforced a ruling forcing UC Berkeley to admit 3,050 fewer incoming freshmen in fall 2022 than previously anticipated. The ruling stems from a lawsuit against the university over its environmental impact review.

Exempting college systems from the environmental review process would inevitably speed up the construction of campus housing projects.

Two Oakland educators agreed to end their hunger strike Friday after more than two weeks, but said they felt cheated into doing so since the district is still moving forward with two school closures and at the end of this year.

Westlake educators Moses Omolade and Maurice Andre San-Chez said they struck an agreement with the district on Thursday to end their hunger strike in exchange for a special board meeting Friday and a proposed amendment to the school closure plan. The new proposal would push the immediate closures of Community Day School and Parker Elementary to next year, as well the as the reduction of grades 6-8 at La Escuelita TK-8.

However, the board voted 3-2, with one abstention and one absence, to follow through with the plan. Some board members were worried that pushing the closures back would disqualify the district from a $10 million apportionment of grant funds under Assembly Bill 1840.

Students, teachers and parents at the meeting were outraged at the vote, and several students said they plan to start hunger strikes themselves as well as other actions now that the Omolade and San-Chez’ hunger strike is over.

San-Chez went to the hospital Sunday in order to end their hunger strike after 20 days.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has urged the California Supreme Court to suspend a lower court’s order that would force the University of California, Berkeley to accept thousands fewer students in its fall 2022 freshman class than previously anticipated.

In a statement to the Los Angeles Times, Newsom said the state can’t allow a lawsuit to “get in the way of the education and dreams of thousands of students who are our future leaders and innovators.”

“I urge the Supreme Court to step in to ensure we are expanding access to higher education and opportunity, not blocking it,” he added.

Newsom has also filed an amicus letter to the Supreme Court, submitted by state Attorney General Rob Bonta, in which he told the court that thousands of students would have their lives “irrevocably altered” if they can’t attend Berkeley.

Last week, the California Court of Appeals issued a ruling requiring UC Berkeley to follow a lower court order that requires the campus to freeze enrollment at 42,437 students, the same number of students that enrolled in 2020-21. UC’s board of regents is appealing the ruling to the California Supreme Court.

To get its enrollment to 2020-21 levels, Berkeley has estimated that it would need to reduce the incoming freshman class by at least 3,050 students than it previously expected to admit. To achieve that, the campus would also need to offer admission to about 5,100 fewer students than it had planned to.

Nine out of 10 Los Angeles voters support increased public funding for child care and preschool, according to a new poll released Friday by the LA Partnership for Early Childhood Investment. Access to child care for working families ranked alongside racism and injustice as the most serious issues facing the county, the poll found. Other key issues include housing, homelessness and crime.

“This poll is proof that LA County voters get it,” said Parker Blackman, executive director of the LA Partnership. “They understand that investing in early care for infants and toddlers leads to healthy growth and development. They understand that investing in early education providers and the workforce improves quality and their impact. And they want our elected leaders to put more money into these essential programs.” 

Equity is a key concern, and 94% of those polled say child care workers should be paid a living wage with benefits, while 85% believe access to early childhood education prevents later problems in life.

This poll of 801 likely voters, people who voted in the 2020 general election, was conducted in  December by Social Quest, a Los Angeles-based public opinion research firm. 

Los Angeles Unified will end its outdoor masking mandate Tuesday, following county health officials’ decision to lift the requirement for K-12 school systems earlier this week. Students participating in school sports Monday may refrain from using masks if they choose. 

The decision comes as California and its counties continue to loosen restrictions put in place amid the omicron surge. The state will most likely drop its indoor mask mandate for schools at the end of the month. However, Los Angeles County will not drop such requirements until the county reaches a moderate transmission rate of under 50 new cases a week per 100,000 people. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently considers the county to have a high transmission rate.

This is the first major decision made with Superintendent Alberto Carvalho at the district’s helm following his start Monday. The superintendent comes to LAUSD following 13 years at the country’s fourth-largest K-12 school system, Miami-Dade County Public Schools.

A new bill in the state Senate would give school boards and other local governing agencies clearer authority to remove people for willfully interrupting a public meeting, as reported by the Los Angeles Times.

Current law already allows people to be removed from meetings for “willfully interrupting” them. The bill would clarify that “willfully interrupting” means “intentionally engaging in behavior during a meeting of a legislative body that substantially impairs or renders infeasible the orderly conduct of the meeting.” It would also require officials to issue a warning to participants before removing them.

The bill was introduced in response to attacks against the mayor of Los Gatos, but school board meetings have also become very contentious during the Covid-19 pandemic, with parents protesting mask and vaccine mandates.

In September, California School Boards Association Chief Executive Vernon M. Billy sent a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom asking him to address attacks against school board trustees.

“I’ve watched in horror as school board members have been accosted, verbally abused, physically assaulted, and subjected to death threats against themselves and their family members,” Billy wrote in the letter.

After a week of backlash against Oakland Unified’s plan to close, merge and reduce grades at 11 schools over the next two years, the district’s school board is holding a special meeting Friday to consider pushing back the closures set for the end of the school year to the end of next year.

The board will also listen to presentations by Moses Omolade and Maurice Andre San-Chez, the two Oakland educators who have been on hunger strike in protest of the closures for 18 days.

At its Feb. 8 meeting, the board voted 4-2, with one abstention, to approve the closure plan, which called for closing Community Day School and Parker Elementary at the end of this school year, as well as to stop offering grades 6-8 at La Escuelita TK-8. Now, district leaders are proposing pushing those changes to the end of the 2022-23 school year.

As of Friday morning, it was unclear what prompted the proposed change. The plans for closures, mergers and grade reductions for the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years remain in place.

Faculty and staff from Fresno State and Cal State University Long Beach are speaking out against California State University Chancellor Joseph Castro for his handling of sexual harassment claims while he was president of Fresno State.

The statements come as the California State University board of trustees is holding a closed-door session Thursday to consider calls by legislators for an independent investigation into Castro’s handling of at least a dozen sexual harassment claims involving Fresno State Vice President of Student Affairs Frank Lamas, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Castro said on Feb. 4 that he welcomed an investigation.

The academic senate of Fresno State have drafted a vote of no confidence in Castro, according to The Fresno Bee. It asks for Castro to be put on leave without pay while an independent investigation is conducted into his actions. It calls for him to be fired if the investigation corroborates reporting from USA Today or additional evidence, such as whether Castro hid his actions from the search firm in his bid for chancellor.

Over 200 faculty and staff members at Cal State University Long Beach signed a petition calling on Castro to resign. The petition said there is no question of what happened, and there is no need for an investigation.

“We already know those facts. We already know what Castro did. We already know that he admitted that he reacted how he did, which was not to react and basically reward this individual,” Cal State Long Beach professor Emily Berquist Soule told the Los Angeles Times. “To us, that’s all the facts we need. We don’t have confidence that he would protect ourselves or our students from violence and sexual discrimination.

“There is a closed session meeting of the board today, so we won’t have any comment related to Chancellor Castro until that meeting concludes,” CSU spokesperson  Mike Uhlenkamp told EdSource. “If there is any action decided by the board we could potentially issue statements/press release, but the meeting is still ongoing. We will make sure to share if there’s anything to announce.”

Following the USA Today report, Board Chair Lillian Kimbell said she supported the call for an investigation and would bring it to the board on Thursday. The investigation calls came from Assemblyman Jose Medina (D-Riverside), who chairs the Assembly Higher Education Committee, state Sen. Connie Leyva (D-Chino), chair of the California Senate Education Committee, and the California Faculty Assn. — the union that represents more than 29,000 Cal State faculty members.

EdSource staffer Michael Burke contributed to this report.

Two newly introduced bills could impact the early education landscape in California if they eventually become law. Both bills seek to redefine aspects of the kindergarten experience.

Assemblymember Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, has introduced a bill, Assembly Bill 1973, that would require school districts to offer full-day kindergarten. Currently, some districts offer only part-day programs.

“Full-day kindergarten gives students the time they need to engage in meaningful learning and play,” McCarty said. “This can result in greater school readiness, self-confidence and student achievement compared to part-day programs.”

Under this bill, school districts would be required to offer full-day kindergarten programs to all students, starting in the 2025-26 school year. Schools would also be able to offer part-day kindergarten in addition to the full-day program.

Researchers note that part-time kindergarten is preferred by some families. Districts serving middle-class and affluent communities tend to offer part-day kindergarten, research shows, while poorer districts often offer full-day programs. 

Sen. Connie M. Leyva, D-Chino, has introduced legislation that mandates a mixed delivery approach to transitional kindergarten, or TK. Senate Bill 976 would give parents the option to send their children to a public elementary school or a community-based child care provider for TK, a stepping stone between preschool and kindergarten.

“It is critical that California offers flexibility and options for working families with children who would benefit from transitional kindergarten,” said Leyva, “but are unable to access those services because of their own work or other day-to-day responsibilities.”

Charitable gifts to colleges and universities across the U.S rose by almost 7% in fiscal year 2021, Inside Higher Ed reported Thursday.

“Total giving to U.S. institutions grew to $52.9 billion, up from $49.5 billion,” the report stated. It was based on the latest Voluntary Support of Education survey by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

“This period covered the depths of the pandemic, so you hope that people are thinking that key institutions are very important. They’re remembering formative parts of their lives and want to support institutions,” Amir Pasic, dean of the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University, told Inside Higher Ed. “That’s something to watch—the alumni pattern—because that is, in many ways, the future indicator of giving.”

Bryan Reece, the chancellor of the Contra Costa Community College District who had been placed on paid suspension two weeks ago, has resigned, according to a statement sent to district employees Wednesday night.

Reece’s resignation was effective Feb. 11, Judy Walters, president of the district’s board of trustees, wrote in an email to employees. He had served as chancellor since Nov. 1, 2020. The trustees appointed “Mojdeh Mehdizadeh, to become the district’s interim chancellor for the period of February 16, 2022 through June 30, 2024, at a starting annual base salary of $357,714,” Walters wrote.

Reece had been first placed on administrative leave Sept. 14, but reinstated Oct. 1 while an investigation of an unspecified personnel matter continued.

Reece was fired as president of Norco College in the Riverside Community College District in June 2019, where he had worked since 2016. No reason was made public.

Along with Los Angeles County’s 80 school districts and the L.A. County Library, the Los Angeles County Office of Education is asking the Federal Communications Commission to take more strides toward closing the digital divide for students.

School and library officials are requesting that the FCC extend funding for school and library tools and services, change requirements surrounding its discount program for those services and adjust the household eligibility for discounted broadband services.

The request comes as many students continue to navigate online learning as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. About 365,000 households lack broadband internet services, with most of those in lower-income communities and Black and Latino households.

The FCC currently runs the Emergency Connectivity Fund, which provides funding for schools and libraries to help cover equipment and service costs for use by students, teachers and others who may lack access at home. The fund is set to expire June 30, but L.A. County schools and libraries are pushing to extend the deadline as students, teachers and staff continue to rely on access amid the pandemic. Schools and libraries must access this funding through the FCC’s E-Rate program, which limits how funding can be requested.

County school and library officials are also asking that the FCC consider altering the eligibility threshold for households applying to its Affordable Connectivity Program, which provides discounts on internet services. Households can receive up to $30 a month toward internet services or up to $75 a month for those on qualifying Tribal lands and can receive a one-time discount on devices. Eligibility is currently based on federal poverty guidelines, but school and library officials are asking that the FCC adjust the threshold to account more adequately for California’s cost of living as was done in Alaska and Hawaii.

“All 80 of our districts and partners in the county Library system have made a powerful statement about the critical importance of affordable and accessible broadband for students and their families,” Los Angeles County Superintendent of Schools Debra Duardo said in a press release. “With just a few key changes by the FCC, funding already in place can be effectively aligned to make the needed infrastructure improvements to end the digital divide for communities that need it most.”

The daughter of Mexican immigrants who grew up in the Imperial Valley and has represented pro bono clients applying for asylum and seeking compliance with fair housing laws has been nominated for the California Supreme Court.

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the nomination of Patricia Guerrero, 50, on Tuesday. She currently serves as a judge for the California 4th District Court of Appeal, which hears cases in San Diego and Imperial counties. She would be the first Latina to serve on the state’s highest court.

“If confirmed, I look forward to helping instill confidence in the equality and integrity of our judicial system while honoring the sacrifices of my immigrant parents and demonstrating to young people that anything is possible in our wonderful and diverse country,” she said in a statement.

After working her way through UC Berkeley and Stanford Law School, Guerrero worked in private practice and served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of California and as a Superior Court judge in San Diego County. In her volunteer work, she discussed legal issues in schools though the Judicial Council’s Judges in the Classroom program.

Guerrero would succeed former Justice Mariano-Florentino “Tino” Cuéllar, who also grew up in the Imperial Valley after emigrating from Mexico. Cuéllar resigned to become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was a dissenter in two important education cases before the seven-member court in 2016. In 4-3 decisions, the court declined to hear a lawsuit that had challenged teacher tenure and dismissal laws, Vergara v. California, and two combined lawsuits in which lower courts found no constitutional basis for challenging the Legislature’s authority to determine what it considers adequate school funding.

The deciding vote in that case was cast by the court’s then-newest member, Leondra Kruger. Kruger is one of three individuals President Joe Biden is considering to replace retiring U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. If she does succeed him, Newsom would get a third nominee to the high court. His first nominee, Martin Jenkins, the first openly gay justice, was Newsom’s chief legal adviser.

Guerrero’s nomination must be confirmed by the Commission on Judicial Appointments.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday announced the awarding of an additional $116 million toward the state’s Homekey program, which provides housing for people experiencing homelessness or on the brink of it.

The millions in new funding will be allocated to seven projects located across the state in the cities of Los Angeles, Salinas and Napa, plus the counties of Orange and Ventura. Each city and county will use the funding to acquire permanent housing that includes a variety of amenities, such as education and employment services, housing stability support and community-building activities like gardening and art. The funding announced Wednesday is in addition to $322.8 million awarded to cities and counties statewide since late last year.

While the Homekey program, which is administered by the California Department of Housing and Community Development, was created to help individuals of all ages, there are a handful of projects in the state that specifically support young people who are homeless. Two of those projects receiving funding Wednesday are located in Ventura County and the city of Napa.

Many governors across the country are using their annual State of the State addresses to highlight the essential role of early learning and child care for families and society at large, according to an analysis by the First Five Years Fund, a research and advocacy group.

Amid a deepening child care crisis, the focus seems to cut across party lines, researchers say, with 66% of the governors stressing that investing in child care is one of the best ways to get parents back into the workforce and help the economy and 50% pointing to funding pre-K programs as a critical way to invest in the future of their state. It’s also noteworthy that 1 in 5 governors suggested that emergency federal funds were critical to helping working families and the child care sector weather the pandemic.

“Child care and pre-K have proved to be a rare, unifying priority for both Democratic and Republican leaders for years,” said Sarah Rittling, executive director of the fund. “This year’s State of the State speeches continue that long tradition, with bipartisan governors from across the country affirming their commitment to improving access to high-quality early learning and care options. It’s clear that in any state, from South Carolina to Hawaii, leaders know these are smart investments for parents, children and their states’ economies.”

With inflation at a 40-year high, most families are feeling the pinch of higher prices at the grocery store, on their heating bill and when they pay rent. But, as Market Watch reported, there’s one expense that’s grown even faster in recent years: child care. 

The growth in child care prices exceeded the annual rate of inflation in 2020 and 2019, according to a new report from Child Care Aware, an advocacy and research organization. The average annual cost of day care for infants hit just over $12,300 in 2020, an increase of  $1,000 over the prior year. 

Inflation, which measures how fast prices increase over time, hit an annual rate of 7.5% in January, which means that households are spending about $250 more per month on goods and services than they were in 2019, as Market Watch cited, when inflation was about 2.1%.

Meanwhile, over the past three decades, child care costs have accelerated faster than other basic family expenses such as housing and groceries, and incomes haven’t kept pace, according to research from First Five Years Fund, a group that advocates for affordable child care.