News updates

The University of California, San Diego, will break ground this week on two construction projects: a residential village that will house 2,400 students as well as a new student union, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported.

The student union will serve as a central social hub and gathering spot on campus. It will be called the Triton Center and will house an alumni and welcome center, a 500-person event space and student health services, the Union-Tribune reported.

The housing village — to be called the Ridge Walk North Living and Learning Neighborhood — will help meet the university’s increasing student demand for housing. The Union-Tribune noted that the project is part of a larger effort by the campus to add about 5,700 beds by 2026.

California State University released a plan Monday that included 13 recommendations to address declining Black student enrollment, retention and graduation rates across the 23 campus system.

The report was assembled by a work group consisting of university presidents and experts across the system and includes feedback from Black students, faculty and staff.

“The collective and unified commitment on the part of CSU leadership to implement the report’s recommendations underscores the importance and urgency of this work,” said Jolene Koester, interim chancellor of the system. “While correcting longstanding inequities will take time, we must take immediate and decisive action. The CSU’s Black community deserves it. Our mission and core values demand it.”

The recommendations include creating plans for early outreach to Black students, creating more welcoming and affirming spaces, developing inclusive and culturally relevant curriculum, and prioritizing Black faculty and staff recruitment.

Capistrano Unified has selected Christopher Brown, currently an assistant superintendent at Long Beach Unified, to be its next superintendent.

Brown will take over the top job at Capistrano Unified, the largest school district in Orange County, on July 1, according to The Orange County Register. At Long Beach Unified, Brown was the assistant superintendent for research, assessment and school improvement.

The superintendent position at Capistrano Unified was left vacant when the school board voted in December to oust Kristen Vital, the district’s longtime superintendent.

“I am truly humbled to be selected as the new superintendent for the Capistrano Unified School District,” Brown said in a statement. “I look forward to partnering with the board to build on the long history of success enjoyed by CUSD. I am eager to interact with our students and families in the fall and with the teachers and staff members who support them.”

Clovis Unified School District approved its first-ever union contract with psychologists and mental health support providers earlier this week. 

The contract gives the mental health workers higher pay and better benefits, guarantees a pay raise in the future and provides more mental health support for elementary students, according to The Fresno Bee. 

Under the contract, the mental health team will receive:

• A 13.75% pay increase, retroactive to July 2022, as well as a 3.5% pay hike next year.
• Stipends for additional roles, for time worked beyond their contracted hours, and for being bilingual.
• Funding for professional development and other resources.
• And contract protections for part-time positions and leave time. 

Also as a result of the contract, the district will hire more staff, meaning the school psychologists and mental health professionals can spend more time with the district’s elementary students, The Bee reported. 

Still, the 42,000-plus-student district remains the state’s largest school system without a teachers union. For years, teachers have tried unionizing, with the most recent efforts stalling. 

But teachers are hopeful that unionization will happen. They watched as the mental health workers unionized, which “was really important and paved the way for the teachers to also take that path,” third grade teacher Teresa D’addato told The Bee.

“We’re hoping — and we’re hopeful — that (unionizing) will come soon,” D’addato said. “We’ll see how things go as our minds become more open to the possibility (of unionizing) here.”

San Francisco Unified’s teacher shortage  in the 2020-21 school year was worse than that of California and the Bay Area, according to a recent report from the San Francisco civil grand jury.

The grand jury also found that nearly a quarter of San Francisco Unified teachers are not fully credentialed, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The report cited several possible reasons behind the teacher shortage, including low starting salaries, the district’s ongoing payroll fiasco, a lack of promotion of the district’s competitive benefits and programs that help teachers, and a lack of data showing why teachers decline job offers or leave the district, according to the Chronicle.

The grand jury concluded that the district does not have enough credentialed teachers to give every student a quality education, according to the Chronicle.

The majority-conservative school board of Chino Valley Unified voted 4-1 at a packed meeting Thursday to ban pride flags in classrooms, the Southern California News Group reported.

The policy allows teachers to display the California state flag, the U.S. Flag as well as other country, state and military flags, but bars them from displaying pride flags, according to SCNG.

More than 300 people attended the meeting, according to SCNG. The board was also scheduled to consider a policy that would force educators to identify transgender students to their parents, but did not take action on the policy.

Students decried the decision, saying that pride flags provide “a symbol of hope and safety” to LGBTQ+ students, and called for board president Sonja Shaw to be removed from office.

The Legislature passed a $311.7 billion 2023-24 budget Thursday and forwarded it to Gov. Gavin Newsom, where it will sit until they reach an agreement on final details.

Lawmakers were required to pass a budget by June 15 to continue to get paid. That leaves two weeks until the July 1 constitutional deadline for the governor to sign a balanced budget. Assembly Budget Committee Chair Phil Ting predicted there would be a deal in a matter of days.

Passage of Senate Bill 101 – 61 to 14 in the Assembly, with five members not voting, and 32-8 in the Senate – was along party lines, with Republicans criticizing more than $40 billion in risky revenue assumptions. Because of spring flooding, residents in parts of the state have until October to file their taxes; a better handle on revenues will be known then.

The Legislature’s budget is $5 billion larger than Newsom’s May revision. The Legislature restored $2 billion Newsom cut in transit capital spending, and added $1 billion in subsidies for mass transit. It also built in $2 billion in expected property taxes, raising the amount for Proposition 98, the formula that determines funding for schools and community colleges, by that amount.

Legislators want to restore about $3.5 billion Newsom proposed to cut from two multi-year block grants approved last year, for learning recovery and for arts and music instructions, although the latter can be used for general purposes. Instead, lawmakers would delay an unallocated $400 million of $500 million for a new priority of the governor approved last year: the Golden State Pathways, which would promote career opportunities, including apprenticeships, for low-income high school students in high-skill, high-wage areas, including technology, education and health.

Newsom also is proposing less of an increase in funding for child-care providers, who are being paid at levels tied to 2016 costs, than the Legislature approved. Otherwise, they agree on major elements of education funding in Newsom’s May revision.

Carol Christ, the chancellor of University of California, Berkeley, will retire next summer, she announced Thursday.

“My time in office has been meaningful and rewarding beyond compare, and I will sorely miss the challenges, the opportunities, and the daily interactions with the members of Cal’s amazing extended family,” Christ said in a statement.

Christ has been Berkeley’s chancellor since 2017. She said she initially planned to stay in the role for between three and five years. But the onset of Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 changed those plans.“What I, or anyone else, never expected was a global pandemic that descended quickly upon the world and had the effect of slowing everything down, including our university’s most important efforts and endeavors. I simply could not imagine parting ways with so much left to do,” Christ said.

“When I’m closer to the end of my tenure, I look forward to sharing with all of you thoughts about my time in office, our university, and the state of higher education. For now, however, there is much work left to be done.”

Christ started her career in higher education at Berkeley, where she was a professor and an administrator for three decades before she became president of Smith College, a private liberal arts college for women in Massachusetts, in 2002. She stayed there until 2013 and returned to Berkeley in 2015, serving in multiple roles before becoming chancellor in 2017.

In her final year as chancellor, Christ said she will spend her time “focusing on key initiatives and projects,” including student housing and “strengthening our financial foundations.” UC plans to soon convene a search committee to find a successor, said Michael Drake, UC’s systemwide president, in a tweet.“Carol Christ has been a visionary leader @UCBerkeley, leading the campus into dynamic new heights. She’s also been a valued friend and colleague to me.”

West Contra Costa Unified’s school board approved the district’s budget for the 23-24 school year Wednesday.

Under the budget plan, the district’s general fund is projected to receive about $482 million in revenue during the next fiscal year and spend about $541 million . The district expects that about $109 million will be carried over from the current fiscal year, leaving an ending balance of about $70 million.

At the school board meeting last week, West Contra Costa Associate Superintendent of Business Services Robert McEntire explained to the board that the district anticipates to spend beyond its projected revenue for the following two fiscal years. Without making cuts, West Contra Costa Unified would exhaust its reserves below the state-mandated minimum, triggering receivership.

Mister Phillips, the only school board member to vote no on the 23-24 budget, said that the budget wasn’t “truly balanced,” given the district’s financial position in the following years.

“I think we have to bite the bullet and actually make structural changes, so our budget is balanced, not just on paper,” Phillips said.

Board president Demetrio Gonzalez-Hoy said the district has been pushing cuts “year by year” and has reached a point where they can’t be pushed any more.

“We have to make a very difficult decision next year and we all have to come together to figure out what to do,” Gonzalez-Hoy said.

Fresno County’s three largest school districts are providing summer meals again this year to children under 18, regardless of school enrollment. 

While the free meals for all children isn’t a new practice among Fresno Unified, Clovis Unified and Central Unified, students are now required to eat the meals at the school site, a change from previous summers. In the past, families could obtain the meals in drive-through or on-campus pickups. 

“The only requirements are that the student must be present to receive their meal and must eat it in the designated area,” Central Unified district spokesperson Gilbert Magallon told The Fresno Bee, which reported the dates and locations for the summer meals in each district.

California runs on child care. That’s the rallying cry of the Child Care Providers United, a union that represents 40,000 home child care providers across the state.  The union negotiated its first contract, which is set to expire at the end of June, with the state in 2021, in an attempt to win better pay and benefits for the historically underpaid workforce. 

Amid budget negotiations, CCPU members and supporters held a protest in Sacramento on Thursday to lobby legislators to raise the amount the state pays for the roughly 300,000 child care vouchers given to low-income families and to overhaul the way those rates are set to reflect the actual cost of care.

“We fight for a transformational contract that ensures livable compensation. We need a raise,” said Rasiene Reece, who has been a child care provider in Victorville for 20 years. “We are not babysitters. Child care is essential for California, and child care is past due.”

Child care advocates have long decried the state of the child care system, in which many families can’t afford the care they need and many providers can’t survive on their poverty-level wages. The median wage for a California child care worker in 2019 was $13.43 per hour, according to a report from Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment. 

“Advocates are appreciative of the Legislature’s unwavering support for child care and efforts to include a 25% rate increase in the proposed budget,” said Josefina Ramirez Notsinneh, director of early childhood at Children Now, an advocacy group. “We are hearing that the administration is still focused on the collective bargaining efforts and has not shared much. We are hopeful that with the legislative deal and the unified ECE pressure, the governor will support this proposal. We are moving in the right direction to ensure that we fix and transform child care and early learning in California.”

In response to the child care crisis, the Legislature has proposed a roughly 25% raise in the reimbursement rate while Newsom has proposed an 8.2% cost-of-living adjustment to centers. Along with waiving child care fees through September, which Newsom also proposed, the Legislature’s proposal capped family fees at 1% of income and waived fees for families with income under 75% of the state median. 

Rate increases for home childncare providers are subject to bargaining as part of ongoing negotiations between the CCPU and the administration. 

A growing number of college professors in California are choosing to encourage the limited use of artificial intelligence in classroom assignments, CalMatters reported.

One was Diablo Valley Community College adjunct professor Frako Loden, who created an assignment to see how students in her American Cinema class interacted with ChatGPT, according to CalMatters.

For their final opinion piece of the semester, they were to pick a discussion question about the 1950s movie “A Place in the Sun,” insert it into ChatGPT as a prompt, and then grade the response themselves. But the AI got key details of the plot wrong in some cases, Loden said.

Loden’s assignment illustrates not only the limitations of ChatGPT — Loden said she found in her own research that many details of movie plots it gives are not only false, but “ideologically loaded” and “maybe even racist” — but how professors are increasingly experimenting with its use in the classroom.

California’s public higher education systems have not yet created a formal policy regarding the use of generative AI, which can create images and text that are nearly indistinguishable from those made by humans. That leaves professors in the role of watchdog, preventing breaches of academic integrity.

“Faculty have to come to a decision, whether it’s in California or nationwide. And the decision is, do you want to adopt?” Tony Kashani, a professor of education at Antioch University who is writing a book about the use of AI in the classroom, told CalMatters. “On campus, there’s a lot of contention about this.”

Trustees of the Chino Valley Unified School District in San Bernardino County are considering a policy that would require school officials to identify transgender students to their families, The Sacramento Bee reported.

The proposed policy would put the school district at direct odds with the California Department of Education, which has issued guidance to school districts to protect the privacy of transgender students who may not be out at home, according to the Bee. The proposal is scheduled to be debated at a board meeting Thursday.

It would require schools to notify parents and guardians in writing within three days of learning that a student has requested to be identified by a different gender. They must also be informed if a student has used a name other than their legal name, or accessed a bathroom other than the one for their sex assigned at birth, the Bee reported.

“This policy is meant to foster trust between district employees, and our students’ parents and guardians,” district board President Sonja Shaw said in a statement. “I stand for the authority of parents to guide the upbringing of their children and their involvement in decisions related to their education, health, safety, and wellbeing.”

Jorge Reyes Salinas, of the LGBTQ advocacy group Equality California, told the Bee that Chino Valley Unified’s proposal is “truly sick” and that it “directly, blatantly goes against state law.”

One in eight students across California are not completing high school, and the rate rises to 1 in 3 for students with higher needs, such as foster children, students with disabilities, students experiencing homelessness, and English Language learners.

This is just one of the findings in a new series of 8 research reports from the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools released today analyzing the California Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) pilot program, a 5-year state program aimed at meeting the academic, behavioral, and social-emotional needs of students. 

The reports outline findings from the implementation of MTSS as it pertains to English language learners, students experiencing homelessness, foster youth, and more.

For youth experiencing homelessness, for example, the research identified practices they found promising in prioritizing the needs of this group of students. These practices included providing individualized tutoring and increased collaboration between resource agencies that schools work with. 

“Due to the complex nature of homelessness and the various ways youth are impacted, collaboration across state and local entities is needed to ensure that young people are supported in the most optimal of ways,” wrote the report authors.

Some of the recommendations include increased and coordinated mental health services, increased staffing, and access to emergency housing resources. The 8 research reports can be found at this link.

Last month, Calbright College, the state’s online-only community college, announced that it had launched its first apprenticeship partnership for nine of its students with Fresno-based Bitwise Industries.

But, on Memorial Day, Bitwise furloughed all 900 of its employees, according to the Fresno Bee,  including the Calbright apprentices.

In a statement, the College said: “Our hearts go out to everyone affected by the developments at Bitwise Industries. Calbright is in contact with and working to assist the nine graduates who had recently begun apprenticeships and are now among the 900 furloughed employees — from helping them re-enroll in another Calbright program, connecting them to alternative work-based learning opportunities, or engaging our career services team to share public wraparound services available to them—we are all hands on deck to support our students through this evolving situation.”

Bitwise Industries was supposed to provide workforce training by bridging the gap between people from underserved communities to tech companies.

Since news broke about Bitwise, Calbright officials say they haven’t heard from the company. However, they have contacted the state’s Employment Development Department and the California Department of Apprenticeship Standards to help the graduates find alternatives and additional services.