“I stopped maybe a couple of weeks ago,” Juarez said last month. “I see the stuff that’s happening. I do see the news and I see what happens on the bus and then around here as well. So I don’t feel it’s safe for them to go by themselves, walking or on the bus.”

Before the increasing reports of violence and drug abuse on LAUSD campuses, she would allow her two older children in 9th and 10th grade to regularly ride the bus to and from the 32nd Street School near University Park in East Los Angeles.

Juarez’s concerns were not out of the ordinary. In February, shootings occurred overnight near a LA school campus, resulting in the deaths of two teenagers. Last month were arrested for bringing guns to school.

An LA Unified spokesperson declined to be interviewed, instead referring a reporter to  from the recent school board meeting where the issue was discussed during the Safe School Task Force annual update.

The presentation, delivered by Andres Chait, LAUSD Chief of School Operations, outlined 14 recommendations, including installing vape and weapons detection systems, developing and implementing peer counseling, and installing gates and security cameras in all schools. 

The increasing violence around the district has made some parents question whether LA Unified schools are safe — and if the school board made the right decision to after the murder of George Floyd. 

“They cut it without really thinking through who it was going to impact and without inclusion of the parent voice,” said Evelyn Aleman, Founder of a parents group.” They had activists, because activists are able to mobilize and come to the school board meetings and ways that Latino and indigenous immigrant parents cannot…that’s a significant voice, which is 74% of the student population was left out of that conversation.”&�Բ�����;

The funding was reallocated towards programs in schools with the highest number of Black students, including the hiring of more social workers, and counselors, targeting schools with high rates of suspension, chronic absenteeism and low academic student achievement.  The 74 previously did a story on the impact of the programs.

Pedro Noguera, Dean of the USC Rossier School of Educations said while police presence can deter some incidents, more cops are not a long term solution. 

“Campus Police are most effective at deterring individuals who don’t belong on campus from coming on campus. If that’s an issue…, they should consider deploying police to schools,” said Noguera. “But if the issue is preventing fights, they need trusted adults who kids will talk to…  you just have to be really careful because once you bring the police into the picture you significantly increase the likelihood of arrest.”&�Բ�����; 

LAUSD school police carry guns and handcuffs and have the authority to make arrests, a district spokesman said.

LAUSD district 7 board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin, an advocate for restorative measures, believes the best way to keep students safe starts by  teaching young children social-emotional skills to navigate conflict and  de-escalating potentially violent situations.

“I know that… (there is a) sort of myth or misconception that we swing from punitive to permissive.” Franklin said. “I’m not going to let kids run all over the place…we still have to keep our hands to ourselves, we still have to be safe and use our words. But I’m going to show you how to do that, teach you and give you a second chance.”

For Aleman and other parents the progress is too slow. According to an LAUSD published in September 2023, incidents of fighting and physical aggression increased by over 40% between the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years. More  than  600 fights and other physical aggression incidents were reported just 30 days into the 2023-24 school year. 

“I think it’s wishful thinking, and it doesn’t address the urgency of the situation, which is safety,” Aleman said in response to the district’s restorative plan to ensure safe schools. “This requires an immediate response, and it’s not just the school police…—But from LAUSD, everybody has to step up…. This is unacceptable. outside the school. That shouldn’t be happening.”

That’s because personalized, competency-based learning offers a promising alternative to traditional instruction and has been shown to help accelerate academic gains. Teachers can design personalized learning experiences that target instruction to address specific skills while ensuring that students meet the same academic standards and learning objectives that they would in a traditional classroom.

By better understanding each student’s level of understanding and need, educators can minimize the potential for compounding gaps in essential knowledge and skills. This is critically important, because if students haven’t firmly grasped foundational concepts from years before, their path to proficiency is obstructed, and they are bound to struggle.

In mathematics, for instance, students must first understand how to multiply decimals, which is taught in fifth grade, before they can confidently calculate percentages in seventh.

Miami-Dade Public Schools recognized this early in the COVID-19 pandemic and implemented a that utilized need-driven decision-making to ensure that resources reached individual students at the appropriate levels.

Rather than following rigid timelines and lesson plans, Miami-Dade dedicated extra time to foundational competence. The district developed and implemented strategies to evaluate students based on their level of academic achievement in meeting essential standards in both their current and previous grades.

As a result, while other school districts have struggled to recover from pandemic-related learning loss, has returned to pre-pandemic proficiency with minimal disruption. On the 2023 statewide accountability assessments, which are designed to measure progress toward critical learning benchmarks, Miami-Dade surpassed the state in the proportion of students scoring at grade level or higher in both English and math.

This highlights the importance of utilizing innovative educational strategies to meet students where they are. When young people succeed in school, they become more motivated to explore new topics — and that’s important. A new report from Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation surveyed over 1,000 students, ages 12 to 18, and found that less than half felt motivated to attend school.

Too often, traditional education falls short in helping students see relevance to their everyday lives. Project-based learning is an example of a competency-based learning experience that integrates knowledge with practical applications. This strategy cultivates critical thinking skills that are essential for success beyond the classroom, while helping students deepen their understanding of core concepts by using what they know to solve real-world problems.

For example, a study of a middle school project-based showed, on average, that students performed higher than a matched comparison group on state English Language Arts assessments by 8 percentage points in year two and 10 percentage points in year three. By aligning competencies with academic standards, educators can ensure that students receive a rigorous education that prepares them for academic achievement.

The effectiveness of competency-based methods is evident in performance-based schools like the . Lindsey Unified ranked No. 1 in English Language Arts growth on the 2019 Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium achievement test when compared with 63 similar districts, rising from the 33rd to the 87th percentile. By coupling core content with skills like communication, teamwork and adaptability, Lindsey Unified equips its students with both the knowledge and skills they need to thrive in a rapidly changing world.

Lindsay Unified is not alone. A RAND study of that participated in a personalized learning intervention found that after two years, students who started in the bottom quartile demonstrated greater gains than peers with similar demographics, prior academic performance and socioeconomic status that were not part of the intervention groups. The 32 schools were located predominantly in urban areas and served large numbers of minority students from low-income families.

Personalized learning cannot improve student outcomes without a major shift in mindset and significant changes in teaching methods. There is no quick fix or simple solution. Education must be reimagined in a way that celebrates each student’s individuality and considers how factors outside of school influence what happens within them. By implementing systems that provide tailored, differentiated support, learning can be made relevant and engaging for students.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded the RAND study and provides financial support to The 74. Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

A Los Angeles Unified School District spokesperson confirmed they’re investigating a listing on a notorious dark web marketplace, posted Thursday by a user named “The Satanic Cloud,” which seeks $1,000 in exchange for what they claim is a trove of more than 24 million records. The development comes nearly two years after the district fell victim to a ransomware attack that led to a widespread leak of sensitive student records, some dating back years. 

Simultaneously, federal officials were citing that earlier ransomware attack in L.A. and subsequent breaches, with FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel noting that they’ve become a growing scourge for districts of all sizes.

“School districts as large as Los Angeles Unified in California and as small as St. Landry Parish in Louisiana were the target of cyberattacks,” Rosenworcel said, adding that these events lead to real-world learning disruptions and sometimes millions in district recovery costs. “This situation is complex, but the vulnerabilities in the networks that we use in our nation’s schools and libraries are real and growing.”

“So today, we’re going to do something about it,” she said.

The five-person FCC voted 3-2 to approve the pilot, which will provide firewalls and other cybersecurity services to eligible school districts and libraries over a three-year period. While the pilot aims to study how federal funds can be deployed to bolster the defenses of these vulnerable targets, some have criticized the initiative for being too little, too late. When Rosenworcel first outlined the proposal in July, education stakeholders demanded a more urgent and substantive federal response.

Districts selected to participate in the newly approved pilot will receive a minimum of $15,000 for approved services and the commission aims to “provide funding to as many schools and school districts as possible,” it . While the funding “will not, by itself, be sufficient to fund all of the school’s cybersecurity needs,” the fact sheet notes, the commission seeks to ensure that “each participating school will receive funding to prioritize implementation of solutions within one major technological category.”

The Satanic Cloud, which posted the most recent batch of LAUSD data, told The 74 it’s entirely separate from what was stolen in the September 2022 ransomware attack on the nation’s second-largest school district. An executive at a leading threat intelligence company said his team suspects the data did originate from the earlier event.

The Los Angeles district is aware of the threat actor’s claims, a spokesperson told The 74 in an email Thursday, and “is investigating the claim and engaging with law enforcement to investigate and respond to the incident.”

‘����’s definitely sensitive data’

In an investigation last year, The 74 found that thousands of L.A. students’ psychological evaluations had been leaked online after cybercriminals levied a ransomware attack on the system. The district had categorically denied that the mental health records had been compromised, but within hours of the story, acknowledged that they had. 

Just last month, a joint investigation by The 74 and The Acadiana Advocate revealed that officials at the 12,000-student St. Landry Parish School Board, located some 63 miles west of Baton Rouge, waited five months after a ransomware attack to inform data breach victims that their sensitive information had been compromised. The notice came after an earlier investigation by the news outlets uncovered that personally identifiable student, employee and business records had been exposed, despite the �徱���ٰ�������’s assertion otherwise, and that St. Landry had likely violated the state’s breath notification law. Within hours of the first story publishing, the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office issued a notification warning to the district. 

The latest Los Angeles files were listed Thursday on the dark web marketplace BreachForums, briefly last month after it came under the control of federal law enforcement officials. The Federal Bureau of Investigation first targeted BreachForums in March 2023 when it, 20-year-old Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, at his home in Peekskill, New York. At the time, BreachForums was among the largest hacker forums and claimed more than 340,000 users. 

A sample file included in the L. A. listing is a spreadsheet with the names, student identification numbers and other demographic information of more than 1,000 students and their parents. Data disclose students who receive special education services, their addresses and their home telephone numbers. A list of file names suggest the records include similar information about teachers. 

Reached for comment through the encrypted messaging app Telegram, the BreachForums user who listed the Los Angeles data told The 74 “there is no connections” to the previous ransomware attack. The breach, the threat actor said, originated via the Amazon Relational Database Service, which allows businesses to create cloud-based databases. The service has been the that led to the public disclosure of troves of sensitive information. 

Kaustubh Medhe, the vice president of research and threat intelligence at the threat intelligence company Cyble, said the latest threat actor has a history of engaging in discussions about cryptocurrency scams on Telegram but this is the first time they’ve sought to sell stolen data. Cyble’s research team, he told The 74, sees “a high likelihood” that the data was sourced from files exposed in the earlier ransomware attack. 

“Historically, we have seen this kind of activity where old data leaks are recirculated on dark web forums by different actors,” Medhe said. Either way, Medhe said it’s incumbent on district officials to take urgent action. The files, he said, could be useful for “some kind of profiling or some kind of targeted phishing activity.

“����’s definitely sensitive data, for sure,” he said, adding that district officials should analyze the sample data set available online and confirm if the records align with their internal databases and, perhaps, those stolen in 2022. “They would need to do a thorough incident response and investigation to rule out the possibility of a new breach.”&�Բ�����;

‘An important step forward’

During Thursday’s FCC meeting, Commissioner Anna Gomez said the pilot program was an issue of educational equity. She cited a federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency , which noted that as ransomware attacks and data breaches at K-12 districts have surged in the last decade, districts with limited cybersecurity capabilities and vast resource constraints have been left most vulnerable. Connectivity, she said, is “essential for education in the 21st century.”

“Technology and high-speed internet access opens doors and unbounded opportunity for those who have it,” Gomez said. “Unfortunately, our increasingly digital world also creates opportunities for malicious actors.”&�Բ�����;

Faced with a growing number of cyberattacks, educators have for years s with money from the federal E-rate program, which offers funding to most public schools and libraries nationwide to make broadband services more affordable. ����’s a move that more than 1,100 school districts endorsed in a joint 2022 letter — but one the commission declined to adopt. In a press release, the commission said the pilot was kept separate “to ensure gains in enhanced cybersecurity do not undermine E-rate’s success in connecting schools and libraries and promoting digital equity.” The pilot will be allocated through the Universal Service Fund, which was created to subsidize telephone services for low-income households. 

In , the American Library Association, Common Sense Media, the Consortium for School Networking and other groups said the selection process for eligible schools and libraries was unclear and could confuse applicants. On Thursday, the library association nonetheless expressed its support. 

“The FCC’s decision today to create a cybersecurity pilot is an important step forward for our nation’s libraries and library workers, too many of whom face escalating costs to secure their institution’s systems and data,” President Emily Drabinski said in a statement. “We remain steadfast in our call for a long-term funding mechanism that will ensure libraries can continue to offer the access and information their communities rely on.”

Among the pilot program’s critics is school cybersecurity expert Doug Levin, who told The 74 that many school districts lack sufficient cybersecurity expertise and, as a result, the advanced tools that the pilot seeks to provide may not be “a good fit for school systems with scarce capacity.”

“There’s no argument that schools need support,” said Levin, the co-founder and national director of the K12 Security Information eXchange. But the FCC’s “techno-solutions point of view to the problem,” he said, is far too small to make a meaningful impact and could instead prompt a vendor marketing surge that “may end up convincing some [schools] to buy solutions that, frankly, they don’t need.”&�Բ�����;

In January, the University of California Board of Regents broke the hearts of undocumented students by halting a proposal to allow them to work on campus. A few days later, David Alvarez had a plan.

The  huddled with student organizers and decided to draft a bill to compel the UC, as well as the community colleges and California State University, to do what the UC regents would not.

Federal law prohibits employers from hiring anyone who is undocumented, but Alvarez’s  says California’s public colleges and universities should be exempt and allowed to hire undocumented students for on-campus jobs. The approach rests on an untested legal theory . ����’s based on the argument that a pivotal federal  doesn’t apply to state agencies, including public colleges and universities.

Assemblymember , a Corona Democrat and chair of the California Latino Legislative Caucus, has introduced a  that, if passed, would be taken to CA voters in the form of a ballot measure.

Both bills are . 

“We wouldn’t have to do this if the federal government actually did their job and passed immigration reform,” said Alvarez in an interview with CalMatters.   

Instead of working on-campus jobs like their peers, undocumented students must seek employment as independent contractors or find under-the-table jobs, . If Alvarez’s bill prevails, an estimated 60,000 undocumented students could benefit.

Last May, the UC Board of Regents  the plan to allow undocumented students to work. In January, the regents reversed course, voting 10 to 6 to delay any implementation by a year. , who sobbed in the public meeting space, castigated the regents and reverted to an agonizing square one in which they lacked the legal right to work.

Alvarez’s bill cleared its first hurdle in April, but it faces a  during an opaque legislative process known as , in which members of the appropriations committee decide in relative secrecy whether bills with a price tag advance or die.

A  the bill could cost California a few million dollars to implement these hiring changes and to handle the legal fees, should someone decide to sue a college or university for hiring undocumented students.  Those costs could become a large obstacle as the .

How much of an impact the bill would have on undocumented students is an open question: Most students — regardless of their immigration status — work off campus. Federal law is clear that private employers must follow the employment ban. The bills by Alvarez and Cervantes do not extend to the many other state agencies where undocumented students could work after graduation and earn competitive wages.

‘It is not fair’

For Alvarez, the bill is a continuation of California’s commitment to for undocumented students. Already the , grants and loans to these students, but they’re barred from receiving federal dollars. A campus job would allow them to cover the difference when financial aid falls short; it would help them with major expenses like housing, transportation and food.

“I’m out here fighting for the right to be given the opportunity to apply to a job on campus,” said Karely Amaya Rios . The 23-year-old is a graduate student at UCLA and has a pending job offer from a professor to help him write a book and teach his immigrant rights courses. Though she’s lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years, she’s undocumented and ineligible for the job. “It is not fair,” she said.

Rios  that she cobbles together enough money to cover rent and food costs by babysitting and selling clothes at a swap meet with her mother. She also receives some scholarships and stipends.

“I fear that all of you do not understand how disappointing and gut-wrenching it feels to be denied my humanity and my right to access the same opportunities as my peers,” added Fatima Zeferino, an undocumented Cal State Long Beach student, at the April hearing.

���������Գٱ��’&�Բ�����; would target just the UC, a potentially necessary move because the UC is . The Legislature’s bills can rarely force the system to do something.

Still, Alvarez’s office believes the UC “would be bound” by his bill, his district director, Lisa Schmidt, wrote in an email. She added that “even if it were not formally bound it would comply with the law once the Cal State and (community colleges) were doing so.”

Why public colleges are worried

The UC isn’t formally opposed to the bill, but its  the bill could expose UC hiring managers to civil and criminal prosecution and jeopardize the billions of dollars in federal research grants the university receives. Alvarez bristled at one objection the UC raised: that the bill as law could expose “undocumented students and their families to the possibility of criminal prosecution or deportation.” He called that “borderline offensive to students” who already have to navigate the legal complexities of their immigration status outside of school.  

Alvarez cited his own experience as a child born in the U.S. living in fear of what would happen to his undocumented parents. They were eventually granted legal status through the same 1986 federal law that now bars undocumented residents from working. 

Hovering in plain sight is the concern that a potential Trump White House would wage an aggressive legal attack on the university. It would potentially repeat a judicial system showdown that saw the university  to end job protections for undocumented workers who came to the country when they were young. That previous legal saga involved the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, but federal courts  halted the federal government’s ability to accept new applications.

The UC Office of the President never appeared persuaded by the legal argument put forward by the UCLA scholars. It sought outside legal opinion, and the conclusion was that the plan wouldn’t be “legally viable,” .

UC’s April letter to legislators underscored that worry: “However, after receiving advice from both inside and outside legal counsel, we concluded that there were considerable risks for the University and the students we aim to support.”

Ahilan Arulanantham, one of the two UCLA legal scholars behind the theory that state agencies are exempt from the federal rule barring undocumented residents from working,  that no hiring manager could be prosecuted if universities began hiring undocumented students.

“The risk that people would actually be criminally prosecuted for following state law is, in my view, vanishingly small,” he said then. “And we’re not aware of any example where people have been criminally prosecuted by the federal government for following a law that they were required to follow as a matter of the state.”

More likely is that the state would be sued and the matter would play out in courts, Arulanantham said. “If the universities lost that lawsuit and they still kept trying to hire people, of course that would present a different question.”

The state’s attorney general would defend the campuses in those suits, Alvarez said. The press office of the attorney general wouldn’t comment on Arulanantham’s legal argument or whether the attorney general would defend the campuses in a possible suit.

Cal State has issued no position, though it reiterated another point the UC made: The bill “could have consequences on the federal aid the CSU and our students receive,” wrote Amy Bentley-Smith, a spokesperson for Cal State. The fear isn’t unfounded. When the UC system weighed the issue, Republican Congressman Darell Issa asking that he “please inform Congress how the system intends to refund its current federal funding, as well as provide a detailed estimate of the fiscal impact to students by foregoing future federal assistance.”

Can community college students benefit?

While the legal risk of the bill looms large, the impact of the legislation on undocumented students may be limited in scope. That’s because the majority of undocumented students attend community college. The Cal State system has fewer undocumented students, and the UC campuses have the least, according to  from each system. 

Yet community college students are the least likely to work on-campus jobs. When they do work, only 7% of them have a campus job, according to an analysis provided by California Student Aid Commission. The rates are higher at Cal State and UC campuses, where 16% of working students at Cal State and about half of working students at the UC are employed on campus.

Many community college students work full time in the private sector, whereas campus jobs typically restrict students to no more than 20 hours a week. The hourly limit comes from research that says . 

Over the past six years, Jerry Reyes has studied at Reedley College, just south of Fresno, though he left at various points. He’s undocumented and ineligible for DACA, which offers temporary work permits for undocumented youth. 

He worked anyway, taking a job at an agricultural packaging house, where he made around $15 an hour. They “didn’t really ask” about his immigration status, he said. 

Better jobs are hard to find, he said. “I just ignore potential opportunities because I know they’re just going to turn me away because of my status.”

After a brief stint at San Francisco State, he returned to Reedley College, where he’s pursuing a new major in business administration and serving as a trustee on the community college �徱���ٰ�������’s board. The position is supposed to pay $375 per month, but he said the district won’t compensate him because of his immigration status.

“����’s frustrating,” Reyes said, to watch others get paid for student jobs when he does the same amount of work. He supports Alvarez’s bill but he wants a broader solution too. “A lot of these (undocumented) students don’t work campus jobs,” he said, “and even the jobs they take don’t pay as well.”

Alvarez said he’d consider future legislation to open job opportunities in other sectors too, but not before passing this legislation. “Look, this is already a heavy lift,” he said. “����’s not going to be easy.”

This was originally published on .

And some leave for kindergarten knowing how to read. 

“But it’s not because we’re hounding them,” said Heather Lyons, the program’s coordinator. “It’s because we’re constantly trying to help them pursue this love of learning.”

That careful mix of academics and social skills is one reason demand for the program is strong. Parents start calling in January to ask about registering their kids for the fall, Lyons said. Lamar’s program is part a statewide pre-K initiative now serving a quarter of the state’s 4-year-olds — up from about 3% six years ago.

The state helped drive pre-K enrollment nationwide to record levels in 2022-23, according to the recent from the National Institute for Early Education Research. Following sharp declines during the pandemic, participation in preschool is back on the upswing. Over 1.6 million children attended public pre-K last school year, with the percentage of 3-and 4-year-olds hitting new highs. 

Expanding access, however, doesn’t mean states have to cut back on quality by lowering training requirements for teachers or increasing class sizes, the report’s authors note.

They point to Mississippi as an example of a state that’s managed to boost enrollment while maintaining high standards.

In fact, the state is among the few that have written the institute’s “quality benchmarks” . Those include having teachers with a bachelor’s degree, assistants with early-childhood training, and screenings for vision, hearing and health problems.

“We’re keeping an eye on them,” said Allison Friedman-Krauss, an assistant research professor at the institute. “They started small with a focus on quality. They are also working hard to fund more coaches to support teachers, so they’re committed to quality in that way.”

There are now 36 early learning collaboratives — local partnerships that include school districts, Head Start providers and child care centers — that offer the pre-K program.

“We’re moving out of the baby stage and into the teen stage of the law,” said Rachel Canter, executive director Mississippi First, an advocacy group. She added that including Head Start, the federal preschool program serving children in poverty, is one reason the program receives bipartisan support. “People across the political spectrum see how it can benefit their own community. That has allowed us to expand it statewide while also making sure kids who need it most are getting access.”

Due partly to her advocacy, the legislature has increased annual spending on the program five times since 2016.

Now the challenge is to increase the number of child care providers that participate and continue to expand, she said. 

In communities without a program, parents are often left with lower-quality options or end up juggling their child between multiple caregivers during the day. Other parents, Canter said, might take fewer hours at work to stay home with their children. “That’s a terrible situation for a working family.”

Supporting the workforce

Advocates and policymakers are often the forces behind efforts to expand early-childhood education. But in — another state making major moves in pre-K — it was the voters who demanded more access when they passed a by an overwhelming 73%. 

The law creates permanent funding for early learning, resulting in the legislature appropriating last year. School districts, child care providers and tribal governments are now using some of those funds to by boosting teacher pay to match what K-12 teachers receive, using high-quality curriculum and giving preschoolers an extended school day.

The state also provides for teachers still earning their degree and pays for substitutes so teachers can take time off to attend courses.  

“The early childhood workforce has just been historically undervalued,” said Sara Mickelson, deputy secretary of the state’s Early Childhood Education and Care Department. “We’re really a state that is supporting access to degrees.”

Meanwhile, 70% of New Mexico 4-year-olds now attend public preschool, making the state one of just a handful that serves at least two-thirds of eligible students.

But states serving the most preschoolers — like California, Florida and Texas —  are not always examples of high quality.

California spent over $830 million in 2022-23 on preschool and is moving toward making all 4-year-olds eligible for its transitional kindergarten program by the fall of 2025. That figure accounted for over 70% of the total $1.17 billion increase in spending for the whole country, said Steve Barnett, the institute’s senior co-director.

But since it began a decade ago, the transitional program has met only a few of the institute’s 10 quality indicators. Teachers weren’t required to have special training in educating young children and class sizes were far larger than recommended — , compared with the institute’s benchmark of 20.

“There were no guidelines from the state,” said Rahele Arakabi, director of educational services for the Washington Unified School District in West Sacramento. Classrooms, she said, looked more like first grade than pre-K, with students sitting in rows facing the whiteboard. “Teachers really were in that mode of drill and kill.”&�Բ�����;

But the outlook for the program has improved. Statewide, class sizes are now capped at 24 students with two teachers; and charters that don’t comply face fines. By the 2025-26 school year, ratios will be set at the institute’s standard of 10-to-1. The state also offers a new credential for educators teaching preschool through third grade, and by next year, teachers will be required to have or experience in early-childhood education. 

In Washington Unified, which serves 130 transitional kindergarten students in six classes, ratios are even lower, 8-to-1. Some teachers who worked in the �徱���ٰ�������’s separate preschool program have already earned a credential to teach in transitional kindergarten.

Arakabi used a $400,000 to make classrooms more child-friendly, with age-appropriate furniture and play areas. She implemented a new curriculum specifically for pre-K and provided a year of coaching and support on child development. The investment, she said, is making a difference.

“My worry was always buying curriculum and then it just sits there in the shrink wrap,” she said. “This group of teachers is not easy to please,  but they’re actually using it.”

Nathan Reyes lives with his family five minutes from Cal State Los Angeles, where he’s paying close to nothing to earn a bachelor’s degree that typically lands graduates a salary of $62,000 .

He’s one of hundreds of thousands of California low-income students who attend colleges that, , cost the equivalent of a few months of a typical salary that students earn within a few years of graduation. 

A  compares California’s colleges by analyzing how long it would take low- and moderate-income students to recoup the money they spent to earn a college credential. It shows that many community colleges, Cal States and University of California campuses — all public campuses — have better returns on investment than most nonprofit private colleges and for-profit institutions.

Reyes’ only expenses are car upkeep, gas, a few books and helping his family with some housing costs. The third-year student didn’t need to take out loans.

“I feel very lucky,” Reyes, a communications major, said. “In high school, I was always stressing about, ‘Oh, man, I’m gonna have a whole bunch of debt racked up after college.’ And now that I’m in my third year, I don’t have to worry about any of that.”

Reyes, who’s 20 years old, receives state grants to cover all his tuition and federal aid . He also works for  that pays students a stipend.

Report calculates time it takes to recoup cost of degree

The report was commissioned by College Futures Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes college completion. The report merges several concepts into one number: 

• The net price of a college degree after all financial aid is calculated 
• The typical earnings 10 years after a student first enrolls in a school 
• How much higher those wages are compared to what young adults earn with just a high school diploma. 

It defines low- and moderate-income households as those earning below $75,000 annually.

The data, all from the federal government, show that the time it takes to recoup the net costs of earning a degree at Cal State San Bernardino is less than three months. That’s because low-income students there incur about $5,000 in out-of-pocket expenses if they finish in four years. Within a few years they earn about $53,000 a year — double what young adults with only a high school diploma make.

At Cal State Los Angeles, the time to recoup the net costs of earning a bachelor’s is also less than three months of a typical post-college annual salary. 

“​​This is really a first-of-its kind look,” said the report’s author, Michael Itzkowitz, who headed the federal government’s first consumer tool for comparing college costs under the Obama administration. The approach is a mathematical way of demonstrating which colleges confer economic value to students beyond what a high school diploma would.

A CalMatters analysis of Iztkowitz’s data found that the average time needed for a student to recoup their net costs is about two years at public institutions and a little over three years at nonprofit private colleges in California.

Some of those private campuses are as affordable as a Cal State, UC or community college after factoring in financial aid. Stanford University costs low-income students nothing. However, only 4% of students who apply are admitted, while all but three Cal States admit . Most undergraduates in California .

Pitzer, Pomona and the University of Southern California and several other highly selective nonprofit private colleges cost students less than a year’s worth of the typical salary they’ll earn within a few years of completing their degree.

Return on investment varies by college

While some for-profit colleges have strong returns on investment, most do not. 

It takes nearly 13 years for students attending this  segment of higher education to recoup their costs, Itzkowitz’s calculations show. California’s Department of Justice has sued for-profit , accusing them of deceitful practices, and won large financial judgments and settlements.

And that doesn’t even account for the 22 for-profit institutions that show no return on investment, meaning students from those schools earned no more than what a young adult with just a high school diploma makes. In the report, 24 campuses in total, or 8% of all California colleges, showed no return on investment, including two small nonprofit private colleges. 

“There are for-profit institutions that can offer an affordable education and good employment outcomes and they’re recognized within the data,” Itzkowitz said. “But what we also see is that there are a disproportionate amount that show more worrisome outcomes for students in comparison to other sectors.”

Most California for-profit colleges, however, predominantly issue certificates, which are shorter-term credentials that don’t regularly lead to the.

At 79% of California institutions in the report, low and moderate-income students typically recoup their costs in five years or less. For nearly a third of campuses, it was less than a year.

For many students, the ultimate costs of a degree will be higher than the data published today. That’s because they need more than two years to earn an associate degree or beyond four years to earn a bachelor’s, assuming they graduate at all. The longer they chase a degree, the less time they spend in the workforce earning the higher salaries that come with a college credential. Also, the federal net price data has limits: It only calculates what full-time freshmen pay. Students attending part time will experience different annual costs.

But the basic trend remains the same: State and federal financial aid at public campuses plus typical salaries that far exceed the wages for those with a high school diploma make college worth the investment.

Itzkowitz plans to produce a follow-up report that measures the return on investment by major. His organization, the HEA Group, produced an . Some majors lead to higher wages than others, which can skew school-wide results.

The data in today’s report show variation within public universities, too, even in the same city. UCLA’s net price-to-earnings ratio is about seven months and its students tend to earn more than those from Cal State LA after graduating. But the typical cost of a degree after four years for low-income students is roughly $31,000 — far higher than the $5,500 at Cal State LA, which is 20 miles away. 

“I wanted to go to UCLA, but it was too expensive for me,” Reyes said. “I did get accepted.”

Like he did at Cal State LA, he would have probably qualified for the Cal Grant, which waives tuition at public universities. But the distance from home would have forced him to either live in a UCLA dorm or commute about two hours daily between home and the crosstown campus. Housing, not tuition, is usually the largest expense for students at public universities. Borrowing money was out of the question for him. 

So was a long drive to UCLA. “If I ended up missing a class or something, I’d beat myself up over it,” he said. 

Schoolyards are hot and getting hotter, but only a tiny fraction of California’s grade school students can play in the shade.

Researchers and advocates are pushing the state to allocate money for , which can include trees, grass or gardens in place of the flat asphalt or rubber play surfaces at most schools. 

With the help of more than $121 million in state grants, 164 schools already are on their way to either designing or building green schoolyards. Many more applied for the school greening grants, with requests totaling more than $350 million for projects they hoped to build.

The high applicant numbers highlight growing demand for greenery at schools as the climate gets hotter. But with California’s Green Schoolyards program depleted and a state general of $56 billion over the next two fiscal years, where will the money for green school projects come from?

Some environmental groups are pushing for a proposed  that would include $350 million for the green schoolyards program. They also are pushing for a $1 billion carve-out in a proposed $14-$15 billion  that could go before voters this November.

“It is well known that our K-12 schoolyards, play structures and campuses are among the most dangerous climate liabilities currently facing the state — principally due to the deadly heat and flood potential our kids are being exposed to now,” environment groups wrote in a letter to authors of two school infrastructure bond proposals, Assemblymember , a Democrat from Torrance, and state Sen. , a Democrat from Orinda.

Muratsuchi told CalMatters he is reluctant to dictate how schools should use bond money.

“I’m aware of their request, but we have many other requests to consider,” he said, such as funds for heating and air conditioning systems and solar energy on campuses. “But those priorities will be defined by local school districts.”

Students need outdoor shade

On a typical 90-degree day under full sun, grass can reach 95 degrees, while asphalt can hit 150  and rubber surfaced play areas can reach 165 degrees, according to  for Innovation. 

Forget 90 degrees; other research predicts much of the country is on track for more than double the usual number of  by midcentury. Fresno already averages 33 days of 100+ degrees each year, Sacramento has 19 and Riverside has 14, federal . 

Unrelenting sun and high heat are bad for kids, the Luskin Center says: “Playing outside in the heat can lead to dehydration, headaches, heat stroke and other health impacts.”&�Բ�����;

Shade from trees is one of the best ways to cool things down, the researchers said, because it can reduce heat exposure to children by as much as . 

But most of California’s schools lack tree canopy, and the trees that do exist on campuses are often around the perimeter, where students can’t access their shade during recess.

Green Schoolyards America, a nonprofit dedicated to building more green space on campuses, recently conducted a  shading the state’s more than 10,000 public schools. 

It found that an average of 6.4% of the school areas students access are covered by tree shade. More than 2.5 million students attend schools with less than 5% tree canopy in student areas.

That’s a far cry from what urban forestry and  They say there needs to be enough trees to cover . Driven by that goal, Green Schoolyards America is pushing for ways to plant trees to cover at least 30% of each school area used by children during the day. 

So far only 29,452 California students have that level of tree canopy, out of nearly 6 million students.

“This is a long-term infrastructure problem,” said Sharon Gamson Danks, chief executive of Green Schoolyards America. 

 “����’s not building a little garden in the corner. ����’s actual infrastructure, on par with highway building. ����’s an investment, and we want children to not be overlooked in preparing for climate and protecting their health.”

Most greening projects on school campuses include more trees, but they can also include mulch, grassy fields to replace asphalt, and wooden play and learning structures, said Šárka Volejníková, the  program director for Bay Area parks.

The difference green space makes

At the César E. Chávez Education Center in Oakland, students — many from low income families — used to play on a yard that was 90% asphalt. The school is surrounded by freeways and industrial factories, and students suffer with high asthma rates, said Eleanor Marsh, the school’s former principal. 

“In lower income areas the schools have more concrete,” Marsh said. “That is just the reality. And in higher income areas, kids have more natural play structures that have been fundraised for by PTA’s. It becomes an equity issue around mental health and access to core academics.”&�Բ�����;

The school received a $1.2 million grant from the California Natural Resources Agency’s Urban Greening program and worked with the Trust for Public Land in 2020 to completely renovate the schoolyard, adding more greenery, trees and play structures that would be cooler and more academically enriching. 

Students were part of the process, taking the temperature of the asphalt and rubber playground and recommending alternatives.

Now students take outdoor gardening classes and play and run through their new “river” made with bricks, which doubles as a stormwater runoff system on rainy days. 

There’s no lack of enthusiasm for greening projects among educators, said Marsh, now principal at San Pedro Elementary School in San Rafael. 

“Every public school in California is up against huge  cuts,” she said. “There is no money at the school site level to improve the physical space for students. So we are really relying on support from the state.”

Where the money could come from 

The time to dedicate more funding to green schoolyards is now, said Manny Gonez, director of policy initiatives for the Beverly Hills environmental group 

The latest proposals for a climate bond, which would be paid off over many years, includes an ask for $150 million for an urban greening grant, which doesn’t exclusively fund school greening programs but has in the past. TreePeople also supports the request for $1 billion in the proposed school infrastructure bond.

Traditionally school bonds are for new school construction or renovation. School districts can apply for the state bond funds for projects and must provide local matching funds. There is money set aside for financially strapped districts that can’t provide as much of a local match. 

“This is a small down payment to really scale up the work that the state has been doing with these 164 schools,” Gonez said, referring to schools that already have green schoolyard grants.

The Trust for Public Land wants money set aside for green schoolyard projects and for the most needy schools to get priority, said Juan Altamirano, the group’s director of government affairs.

Earmarking the funds in the proposed school bond would boost support for the measure overall, Altamirano said. California voters — even those without children — support more green schoolyards, an April survey of 800 voters by the Trust for Public Land showed.  

Some legislators were noncommittal when discussing the request. 

Muratsuchi said he has been an environmental champion in the Legislature and understands the need for more green school funding. But in this case, it’s not up to him to define that as a priority in the school infrastructure bond. 

“Ultimately the priorities for school facilities funding should be driven by educators and not by the environmental lobby,” he said.

Glazer denied Calmatters’ request for an interview, saying he is not directly involved in the decision making of this issue. 

California already has committed to increasing the tree canopy on schoolyards on paper, but how that will happen is unclear.

In the state’s  published in April, officials said the state would prioritize greening schoolyards through its , “ensuring greening schoolyards is not just a consideration but an integral expectation when local educational agencies undertake new school construction projects and modernization projects.”&�Բ�����;

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office did not answer questions about plans to fund greening school projects. Alex Stack, a Newsom spokesperson, said “No other governor has done as much as Gov. Newsom to .”&�Բ�����;

Stacks said the green schoolyard grants already allocated are part of Newsom’s 2022 , funded by $52.3 billion in the California Climate Commitment budget. 

Newsom , and other parts of the budget, by more than 7% in his May revised proposal.

This story was originally published at .

The stress, burnout and strains on teachers have compounded so significantly that students, families and educators themselves face an undeniable crisis. Educators for Excellence’s seventh annual teacher survey shows that just 19% of teachers say the profession is sustainable and only 16% would recommend it to others. Simply put, America’s education system is failing teachers and students.

While the world has evolved rapidly, the same cannot be said for the teaching profession. When I began teaching in 2007, I can vividly remember pausing after dismissing my after-school club and realizing I had been with students for the past nine hours. My day was focused solely on my classroom. I had little time to take care of personal matters, let alone collaborate with or learn from my colleagues to better our collective teaching skills. I loved my work and knew it was important, but I also knew that my students weren’t getting my best under these working conditions.

The survey results paint a picture that is eerily similar to the conditions of my school in 2007. Teachers are still asked to do too much with too little. They are rarely afforded opportunities to demonstrate the full extent of their skills or collaborate with their colleagues to increase their professional learning: Just 26% say the profession is dynamic and less than half, 46%, say it’s collaborative. This is evidenced by historically low teacher morale, with less than half expressing a commitment to staying in education for the long haul.

Piecemeal solutions have been ineffective, as evidenced by teachers’ calls for change. Instead, what’s needed is an urgent and sweeping transformation of the profession. Teachers unequivocally want something different, but they also want to — and ought to be — meaningfully engaged in designing and implementing the change that comes.

When teachers are given the opportunity to voice their opinions to those who can make meaningful change in the profession, they are clear in what they want to see. First, teachers want more collaboration: 63% report wanting more time to work with colleagues, making it the most popular activity out of 13 provided options, including wanting more time for grading, lesson planning, professional development or even classroom instruction. They also report wanting to learn about innovative approaches to teaching and learning: alternatives to the one-teacher, one-classroom model; how to use research-backed instructional practices; and how to incorporate emerging technologies that drive student success, such as artificial intelligence. 

How can teachers drive transformation within their own profession? Though state and national policy has a critical role to play, an often overlooked but deeply essential tool for unlocking transformation exists elsewhere, in one built by educators themselves: teachers contracts. 

Contracts serve as the guiding document of the profession, creating the structure within which teachers and students navigate teaching and learning. They are intended to be democratic documents, allowing teachers to shape the profession from within their ranks and empowering them to lead from their classrooms.

Far too often, though, they instead create rigidity and immutability that prevent school leaders and teachers from shaping their school together and evolving alongside the rest of the world. They usually codify a one-size-fits-all job description that ignores teachers’ individual skills and passions, limiting the ability of a school community to shift and meet the students’ needs through the talents of their educators. With just a third of teachers reporting being very satisfied with their union’s negotiating priorities, the moment begs reflection on how contracts can address dissatisfaction with the state of the profession and instead welcome innovative new approaches.  

Thankfully, there are shining examples where districts have seriously rethought what teacher contracts look like, designing them in a way that directly addresses educators’ strengths and needs. Take Ravenswood City School District in California, for example. There, district and union leaders worked together to develop a contract that allows issues such as class size and compensation to be renegotiated at specified times during its term. This offers a unique built-in mechanism for reflection and adjustment, giving teachers a regular opportunity to build a profession that supports them and their students’ ever-changing strengths and needs. The contract also provided for salary increases and an innovative career ladder designed to incentivize and reward exceptional performance. Ravenswood’s new approach was tested through a soft launch and pilot year with built-in opportunities for renegotiation, allowing teachers to get a feel for the changes and the ability to make final revisions.

To fundamentally redesign the role of the teacher, creating modern classrooms ready to better serve students and truly appreciate educators, contracts must be modified to reflect the collaborative, dynamic and sustainable profession teachers are asking for.

Right now, starting with Teacher Appreciation Month and continuing far beyond, is the time to ignite a national conversation around the crisis in K-12 public education. It is time to elevate the voices and power of teachers and to deliver upon a fundamental shift in the education structure. Voices from the Classroom shares the shifts teachers would like to see. ����’s time to listen. 

Answer: When it $1.3 billion. 

This macabre joke is all-too real for San Francisco Unified, where this spring a state oversight panel took control of all budget decisions until the district balances its spending. After reviewing the district’s budget, the that the locally elected school board no longer has full authority over, “any action that is determined to be inconsistent with the ability of [the district] to meet its obligations for the current or subsequent fiscal year.”&�Բ�����;

According to an independent fiscal , the district has a number of budgetary problems: 

• It paid for employee positions using one-time federal relief funds and will need to lay them off or find other revenues or savings;
• It has not adjusted student enrollment projections to account for continued declines;
• It does not track monthly attendance data and, as a result, overstates average daily attendance in projecting future revenues; and
• Its budget office is understaffed, leading to inadequate control over its  and problems tracking employee overtime costs. 

Some parts of this story make San Francisco unique. For example, it spent in a failed effort to fix its payroll processing system. And, to avert a strike last fall, the district agreed to large salary increases — over two years for teachers and for service workers. 

California is also unusual in that it has a powerful oversight agency. The Department of Education’s Fiscal Crisis Team reviews district budgets to ensure they are financially solvent, and it can take over budgeting decisions if the need arises. 

Through these reviews, San Francisco was first put on “qualified” notice in December, which shifted to “negative” in May. The auditor in charge of San Francisco’s review that the district now spends more money than it brings in, and with that will come added scrutiny over all its budgetary decisions until the district can demonstrate that its books are in order.

That’s a different and more active oversight role than exists in many states. 

Still, in many ways, San Francisco is a canary in the coal mine for much of the country. There are a few common factors to look out for: 

Does the district have underenrolled schools? 

San Francisco has 4,000 fewer students than it did a decade ago and it will lose another 4,600 by 2032. In those same projections, the district leadership noted that nearly all schools in all grades had unfilled seats.  

And yet, despite the enrollment declines, the district has not closed schools, and the city’s teachers union has for that moratorium to continue. But by delaying those hard decisions, the district has spread itself thin, because it’s harder to provide a full range of services at severely underenrolled schools. 

California schools have suffered bigger enrollment declines than other parts of the country — and those are projected to get worse in the coming years. Still, more than two-thirds of public school districts nationwide have fewer students than they did pre-pandemic. 

Are the district’s staffing ratios financially sustainable?

San Francisco actually looks better on this metric than many other parts of the country. While three-quarters of districts nationwide have lowered their student-to-teacher ratios over the last few years, San Francisco has not. 

The district has also kept its total staffing levels in check. Unlike many others, it did not hire a host of new administrators, paraprofessionals, school counselors or other support staff. 

However, that’s not for lack of trying. In December, one of the first steps the San Francisco school board took to reduce its long-term budget deficit was to . This month, the district agreed to impose an immediate freeze on new hiring. 

Media last fall decried San Francisco’s teacher shortages and the number of vacant positions the district had. But with a stroke of a pen those “vacant” positions went away once the district realized it could not afford to hire more people.

In fact, San Francisco’s actions are what make it such an important warning for other district leaders across the country. Many districts haven’t faced the same external pressures that San Francisco has, and yet, too many places are overstaffed and underenrolled. That combination could make for painful budget discussions in the coming years. 

This is the context in which I’ve been thinking about the , a measure placed on the November ballot that would high schools to offer, and students to take, a semester-long personal finance course. 

Of course, I’m in favor of increased financial literacy. Many Americans lack such skills, and it leaves them at a serious disadvantage. ����’s important to understand things like how to save for retirement (many people ), how to pay taxes (many people ) and how to avoid predatory lenders (many people fall victim to and credit card companies). High school may even be a good place to teach such skills — there is some decent that financial literacy can improve personal finance , like saving.

But I’ll be voting against the ballot initiative. There are several reasons why I oppose it, related to the idea of mandating curriculum via ballot measure in general and to this specific initiative in particular. 

The primary general reason I oppose this initiative is that it sets a terrible precedent. While we might all like financial literacy, it’s not hard to imagine future ballot initiatives that try to change curriculum in ways we might not like. Referendums could try to strip race- and LGBT-related content from the curriculum, mandate abstinence-focused sex education or ban environmental content in science classes. Education policy is already too much like a pendulum, giving educators whiplash with constantly shifting demands. The last thing we need is to pile on new mandates via popular vote — and ballot measures in particular are notoriously difficult to undo.

Another general reason I oppose this initiative is that California already has paths for education policymaking that are subject to electoral accountability, and those elected folks should be allowed to do their jobs. There’s the governor and the state legislature, plus the state board of education and more than 1,000 local school boards on top of that. If voters want their government officials to do something about a curriculum issue, they can lobby for change or vote them out of office. The legislature has indeed already been in this area, with new curriculum requirements in ethnic studies and computer science and a financial literacy proposal very much like one on the ballot.

Beyond that, legislators, boards and executives in state government are much better positioned to pass rules that make sense in the context of existing education policies. In this case, for instance, California high schoolers , and that course covers many of the same topics as the new proposed mandate. Why not simply sharpen the list of subjects that need to be included in the economics course, rather than layering another partially duplicative requirement on top? The California Department of Education can also work to ensure that appropriate supports are provided to teachers — especially high-quality curricular materials that align with the new expectations — so financial literacy classes don’t become just another complicated-to-understand, unfunded burden on educators.

As for the specifics, I’m not opposed to teaching students about financial literacy, but it’s important to consider the tradeoffs in terms of what will be replaced. With in math and English Language Arts and widespread disengagement from school, I am worried about new course requirements that would distract from the educational core. 

And while financial literacy is great, it is no substitute for more direct actions the government can take to help people make better and easier decisions. We can teach children about doing their taxes, but we can also increase that saves taxpayers from needless fees from for-profit tax-preparation companies. We can coach children in how to manage checking and savings accounts, but we can also ban or sharply cap overdraft or ATM fees. We can teach young people the importance of early retirement, but we can also create safer and more generous retirement options that . 

If I’m feeling bored, the next time I get in my Lyft, I’ll bring up education policy, as usual. But I’ll tell the driver to oppose the financial literacy ballot initiative and leave the education policymaking to the policymakers. Or maybe I’ll do what my husband does when he doesn’t want to talk to his drivers and just tell them I do HVAC repair while I put in my headphones.

School curriculum is usually the purview of education experts, but this fall it could be decided by California voters, who will vote on adding a new requirement for high school students: a one-semester class in managing personal finances.

California’s Secretary of State is poised to certify that the  is eligible for the November ballot, which would add financial literacy to the list of high school graduation requirements beginning with the class of 2030.

Students would learn about paying for college, online banking, taxes, budgeting, credit, retirement accounts, loans, how the stock market works and other topics. The issue is critical, organizers said, as students face a shifting economy and difficult decisions about college, careers and their futures.

“No one comes out of the womb knowing how to manage their credit score. It has to be taught,” said Tim Ranzetta, co-founder of a  and a chief backer of the initiative. “And right now there’s a dramatic gap between what students know and what they need to know. We have to change that.”

Voters seem to agree with him. A 2022  of adults nationwide showed that nearly 90% support a financial literacy requirement in high school, and nearly as many wished they had taken such a course when they were students. 

That’s not surprising, considering the financial woes many people incur. The average  is $8,366, the sixth-highest rate in the country, and 1 in 6 borrowers nationwide are in default on their student loans. 

Financial literacy already in classrooms

But some education experts have pushed back, not because they’re opposed to financial literacy for students but because they question whether voters are best equipped to dictate what’s taught in classrooms.

Currently, the state’s History-Social Studies framework includes a , required for graduation, that covers much of the same material proposed by the financial literacy ballot initiative proponents. Financial literacy is also included in first, second and ninth grade curriculum. First graders, for example, learn that money can be exchanged for goods and services, and people make decisions about how to spend their money.

But Ranzetta said the curriculum, which was last updated in 2017, doesn’t focus enough on financial literacy. Personal finance is covered for only a few weeks in the economics course; the rest covers more abstract economic concepts like international trade, resource allocation and the benefits and drawbacks of capitalism. Individual teachers can choose how much they want to focus on certain topics.

State Superintendent Tony Thurmond wouldn’t answer questions about the ballot initiative, although he endorsed it. Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the State Board of Education, also wouldn’t answer questions. 

Leaving curriculum decisions to voters is ‘a bad idea’

The proposed ballot initiative so far has almost zero opposition, but some are questioning the idea of letting voters — and not education experts — decide what students learn in the classroom. Ordinarily, curriculum in California is developed by a group of teachers and subject-matter professionals who serve on the , which meets publicly six times a year. New curriculum is subject to multiple reviews, edits and public vetting, ultimately going before the  for adoption. Local school boards can adjust curriculum according to the needs of their students.

Polikoff worries that adopting curriculum through ballot initiatives could set a dangerous precedent. Religious or anti-LGBTQ curriculum, for example, could be approved by voters, setting up costly and lengthy legal showdowns with the state Department of Education. 

Curriculum can be complicated, as well. When writing new curricula, the Instructional Quality Commission looks at the broader context, making sure students get new material every year that builds on what they learned previously, subjects don’t overlap and topics are flexible enough for teachers to adapt lessons to the individual needs of their students. Textbooks and tests are also taken into consideration. 

Legislature weighs in

Most curriculum updates and changes originate with the commission, but sometimes the Legislature weighs in. The state’s new  and  requirements, for example, stemmed from Assembly bills. Another bill, , would add computer science as a graduation requirement.

, a financial literacy bill proposed by Democrat  of Sacramento, would actually do almost the same thing as the ballot initiative. The bill would require financial literacy as a graduation requirement, although it would go into effect until 2031, a year later than the ballot measure.

Bruce Fuller, education professor at UC Berkeley, said he worries about the increasing politicization of curriculum — either from the Legislature or those pushing for ballot initiatives.

“We have these political interests unabashedly trying to control what’s taught in the classroom, instead of leaving it up to teachers and locally elected school boards,” Fuller said. “We should trust those folks to devise thoughtful curriculum that’s appropriate for their students.”

He also questioned the ever-growing list of graduation requirements. High schools only offer six or seven class periods a day, and with more required classes there’s less room for art and other electives. Some districts have started adding an extra period so students can fit in all the classes they need to take to graduate,  and qualify for California’s public universities. 

“I’m not sure how adding more required classes is going to motivate restless teenagers,” Fuller said. “With more requirements, we’re giving them almost no chance to study things they’re actually interested in.”&�Բ�����;

McCarty’s bill  is not the Legislature’s first attempt to wade into financial literacy. A dozen bills requiring financial literacy have died or been vetoed in recent years, in most cases because financial literacy curriculum already exists and the state already has a system for adopting curriculum.

As Gov. Jerry Brown wrote in 2018 when he  that would have made financial literacy materials available to teachers: “This bill is unnecessary. The History-Social Science Framework already contains financial literacy content for pupils in kindergarten through grade 12, as well as a financial literacy elective.”

Ranzetta said the Legislature’s inability to pass a financial literacy curriculum is what spurred him to take the matter directly to voters.

“I recognize the value of the process, but it’s slow and so far it hasn’t worked in California,” he said. “The issue is too urgent and too popular to wait any longer.”&�Բ�����;    

Ranzetta grew up in New Jersey, where his father was a banker and his mother was a community volunteer who raised six children. He learned financial literacy from his parents, and assumed other young people did, too. It wasn’t until he started volunteering at an East Palo Alto high school that he realized many students are clueless about money, and that ignorance can hamper them throughout their lives. But they were eager to learn, he said, and share the information with their parents.

That experience inspired him to start NextGen Personal Finance, which offers free financial literacy curriculum and training for teachers. At least 7,000 teachers in California and more than 100,000 nationwide have participated, he said.

A class that demystifies money

At Berkeley High, Crystal Rigley Janis teaches two economics classes and three personal finance classes, covering topics she wishes she knew as a young person: how to negotiate a salary, not relying on gut instinct when investing, and avoiding individual stocks in favor of index funds.

“It took me 15 years to understand those things, and it probably cost me millions of dollars,” said Rigley, who worked for several years at a wealth management firm before going into teaching. “I don’t want other people to make the mistakes I did.”

Eliza Maier, a senior, was so inspired by Rigley’s class that she opened a Roth IRA when she turned 18 and transferred money from her low-interest savings account. The class, she said, helped demystify money and the role it can play in major life choices.

“We learned that money isn’t good or bad – it’s a tool,” Maier said. “It can help you realize your goals. It can help you be prepared for whatever happens in your life. I didn’t know anything about money when I started taking this class, but I think it’s so important, especially for high school students.”

This was originally posted on .

����’s unclear if the CCSA will prevail in court, but the suit is already making an impact on the nation’s second-largest district. 

LAUSD’s new colocation rules were . The CCSA’s suit seeks to prevent the district from enforcing .

The suit alleges the new rules violate a 2000 compelling LAUSD and other California school districts to provide charter schools with classroom space that is “reasonably equivalent” to classrooms used by traditional public schools.  

The new policy prevents charter schools from colocating with low-performing schools, community schools that provide social services, and schools in the �徱���ٰ�������’s . It also prevents charter schools from being sited in places where they could siphon students away from district-run schools. 

The restrictions would prevent charters from being sited at roughly 350 of about 770 public school buildings in the district, according to the CCSA. 

Under the new regulation, impacted charter schools will still be offered space to operate in other LAUSD district buildings. But charter school operators and their advocates say the restrictions will prevent them from serving communities that need them most.

Representatives for LAUSD declined to comment on the litigation. In in January, LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho said he believes the new regulation is legal. 

Attorneys for CCSA and LAUSD will meet with a judge on July 12 to determine whether the case is ready for trial and to set a trial date.

Here’s what’s to know about the looming legal fight: 

1. CCSA has a track record of legal victories, but a win in this case is no sure thing.

The CCSA has sued various California districts numerous times over the years, and has managed victories in the courtroom, including a 2015 win against LAUSD that . But David Bloomfield, an education law professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, said the suit faces a legal challenge in part because the impact of the policy is still unclear. 

“The court may say, well, let’s just see how this plays out,” said Bloomfield.  

2. Even without a legal victory for CCSA, LAUSD’s regulation still may be modified or even abandoned

Carvalho created the �徱���ٰ�������’s new colocation policy only after LAUSD school board members last year issued a resolution calling for the restrictions. But though he favors district-run magnet programs as a tool for reform, Carvalho is not a vocal opponent of charters. At the presentation of the new rules to the board, he said they might have to be changed. 

The regulations also passed the LAUSD board by a slim majority. Bcould bring a pro-charter majority back in control, setting the stage for a resolution calling on Carvalho to alter or revoke the regulation. 

3. The colocation policy may already be having a chilling effect on LA’s once-booming charter school sector 

Los Angeles Unified has more charter schools than any other district in the nation. But today . The district overall is shrinking, and LA’s charter sector is dealing with a hostile school board, falling charter enrollment and the resumption later this year of charter renewals, after they were suspended during the coronavirus pandemic. Charter operators said the new colocation rules have already affected school staff morale and, in some cases, worsened their relationships with traditional public schools. 

4. The impact of the regulation could vary, depending on how it is enforced

Officially, the new regulation will affect where schools can operate starting in the 2025-26 school year, but board members have instructed LAUSD’s charter school office to take “the spirit” of the regulation into consideration in colocation decisions made this year. 

There are currently 50 charters co-located in 52 LAUSD school campuses, with 21 charter schools located in buildings that fall into the categories identified by LAUSD as no-charter zones. CCSA officials said it’s not yet clear if the policy is already being enforced. 

The new regulations provide an exemption for charter colocations, but only if there are no changes to those charter programs. Depending on how this point is enforced, more or fewer schools could be impacted, charter operators and the CCSA officials said.

In March 2020, colleges were on the verge of a crisis. Students were dropping out en masse, and California’s public colleges and universities predicted they might lose billions of dollars within the year.

Enter the federal government. In three installments over the following year, Congress gave more than $8 billion to California’s public colleges and universities as part of a national rescue plan. For the California State University system, the stimulus money accounted for roughly a quarter of its annual revenue.

Suddenly, colleges and universities were scrambling to spend the money as quickly as possible, despite limited or inconsistent federal and state guidance. Experts worried , too fast. Campuses failed to take full advantage of the money, according to , and they made decisions that “prioritized students differently.”&�Բ�����;

Now, as the final deadline to spend the money approaches this June, the boom is turning to bust. Most schools have exhausted the money, often through major purchases, such as new laptops or tuition waivers for students. But maintaining those programs can be costly, and with the state facing a , colleges say it’s not clear where the money will come from next. 

For students, the boom was especially short-lived. Over three years, California’s colleges used the federal money to give cash to students, typically less than $1,000 each. For many struggling students, it wasn’t enough.

How pandemic relief funds ended up in students’ hands 

After graduating high school in 2020, Jose Castillo enrolled at Merced College, but he didn’t stay long. He needed money.  he dropped out in fall 2020 and started working 12-hour shifts, five days a week, at a food packaging warehouse. As long as he took a few overtime shifts, he could make nearly $2,000 a month.

He eventually quit and re-enrolled at the community college, where he’s studying animal science. Along with his regular financial aid award, about $10,000 a year, his college gave him an additional $2,000 over two semesters as part of the pandemic relief money. “I’m thankful for whatever I get,” he said. 

Castillo lives with his parents and younger brother on a dairy farm, about a half hour from the college. While he isn’t working anymore, his parents work 12-hour shifts at the farm. To help, he drives his brother to school and pays for gas. He also pitches in on groceries. 

Covering family expenses, school fees and textbook costs, the money “just goes away,” he said. “Right away.”&�Բ�����;

Of the $8 billion in federal aid, colleges were required to give about half directly to students. The money went to the poorest students, who often spent it on daily necessities, such as housing, food and transportation, according to 

But the criteria varied: the same student could qualify for COVID relief money at one school but not another. At Chico State and UC San Diego, for example, students applied for aid by submitting a simple form that only asked the amount of money they needed. Students at other schools, such as Cal State Long Beach State and Sonoma State, needed to write explanations justifying their need and some were denied, according to the 2021 state audit.

The other half of the $8 billion went to “institutional” needs, which colleges could define broadly, such as equipment or staff training. Compared to other federal relief, such as the Payment Protection Program for business loans, the higher education relief program had low levels of fraud, said Kevin Cook, who helps lead the higher education center at the Public Policy Institute of California. In 2022, the Institute released  on how California’s public colleges and universities used pandemic relief money. 

“It seems like these colleges, when given extra funds, were spending it on areas that were needed,” Cook said. “They didn’t build a new football field. They spent it on things that would make the campus safer or help students stay enrolled.”&�Բ�����;

Missing out on millions

Still, the federal relief program was far from perfect. The federal government bypassed the state and issued stimulus money directly to colleges and universities, allowing schools to spend the money quickly but with relatively little oversight.

In their reporting, schools often used vague terms to describe how, exactly, they spent the money they received for institutional use.  reported putting the vast majority of institutional funds towards recuperating “lost revenue” from tuition and dorms when students stopped attending. The university declined to specify what they used that revenue for.

Many community colleges were equally vague, though not all. At Yuba College, an hour north of Sacramento, administrators decided to give students additional cash by using the money designated for institutional needs. Because of low vaccination rates across the county, they also gave out nearly $700,000 worth of Amazon gift cards as incentives for students to get vaccinated. In East San Jose, Evergreen Valley College put most of its institutional needs dollars toward new technology, tuition discounts and waivers for students who had accumulated fines and fees. 

Often these expenses come with ongoing costs that the one-time federal funding can’t cover. At Evergreen Valley College, Vice President of Administrative Services Andrea Alexander has been scaling back how often departments get technology upgrades while searching for other funds to pay for future maintenance. She said the school will likely ask voters for a bond in the next five years to cover the ongoing cost of technology. The bond will also pay for cybersecurity upgrades, which are increasingly necessary as .

Amid the flurry of federal funding, the audit found that many public colleges and universities had neglected to apply for grants they were likely eligible for. Following the audit’s recommendation, the UC system found nearly $74 million in expenses that colleges could bill to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, according to Stett Holbrook, a spokesperson for the president’s office. The same agency approved from the Cal State system, with nearly $20 million in expenses still pending review. 

A spokesperson for the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, Paul Feist, said it has not issued any formal guidance to schools about requesting such reimbursements and that it “does not monitor what claims, if any, districts made to FEMA.”

‘I wouldn’t say it lasted long’

On a per-student basis, community colleges received less money than UC or CSU campuses, even though community colleges educate the majority of low-income students in the state. That’s because the federal government initially prioritized giving money to schools with a higher percentage of full-time students and to schools that had more Pell Grant recipients. 

Federal Pell Grants go directly to low-income students. Though many community college students qualify, . Community college students are also more likely to attend part-time, since many work. 

Initially, some community college students didn’t qualify for any aid. In January 2022, Mikala Hutchinson began taking classes at MiraCosta College in Oceanside, north of San Diego. She was taking high school-level classes since she didn’t have a high school degree or equivalent. 

For decades, adult students without a high school degree or equivalent have been left out of the financial aid system, . When the federal government first announced the COVID-19 relief grants, it neglected to specify whether students like Hutchinson were eligible.

Since enrolling, Hutchinson said navigating financial aid has been “a massive headache.” It wasn’t until May 2022, when she was taking college-level classes, that she got any financial aid from MiraCosta College. Over the course of a year, she received just over $2,000 in COVID-relief funds, all of which she put towards child care.

Hutchinson has two young children. That year, she paid more than $20,000 in child care. The money “helped in the beginning for sure,” she said, “ but I wouldn’t say it lasted long.”

This was originally published on CalMatters.

The young adult was set to speak at a webinar about one of CalHope’s new experimental apps. 

“I saw how many participants there (were)  and I was like, I’m about to use the app so it could calm me down,” said Paniagua. 

But Paniagua had some strategies from the app — including exercises to deal with anxiety. 

According to a study conducted by the California Department of Public Health, the state saw a 20% increase in suicides for young people ages 10 to 18 after the pandemic. To deal with the rising mental health crisis, the Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) has launched two new app-based programs, BrightLife Kids and Soluna, to be a first response resource for children and participants up to age 25.

“I never really knew how to express myself,” said Esther Verdugo, another Soluna participant who had experienced anxiety from her busy life before she started using the built-in journaling exercises. “The people around me always expressed themselves that I didn’t know how to share my own emotions so I shared them through journaling, and all of this I found through the . . . app.”

The release of both apps is part of California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Master Plan for Kids’ Mental Health, which launched in 2022 with a proposed budget of $4.7 billion. The two apps are free and are focused on providing a variety of resources. 

The BrightLife Kids app was introduced to California children under the age of 13 to be able to access mental health resources with their parents and guardians. Children can navigate the app under their guidance and request family or one-on-one coaching. 

The Soluna app is made for California teens and young adults from the ages of 13 to 25, covering a range of topics based on Soluna’s research of interviewing over 300 California youth on what matters to them, including body image, discovering identity, anxiety and depression.

These topics are laid out in the app as a series of constellations, with each star in the constellation featuring a different exercise such as: articles, podcasts, videos and quizzes all built into the app. One of the exercises, a meditative breathing exercise, was made in partnership with the Calm app, Apple’s 2017 App of the Year.

 “It turns out that the needs for the younger kids are quite different than the needs for older kids and young adults,” said Amrita Sehgal, vice president of business operations at Brightline, the company that made BrightLife Kids. “Especially for younger kids, there’s a big need to involve parents and caregivers and families into their care; versus for older kids, folks may want to interact more independently.”

For many Californians, getting help for mental health issues hasn’t always been easy. Dr. Beth Pausic, vice president of clinical excellence & safety at Kooth Digital Health, said, “When you look at US healthcare at the moment, there’s a provider shortage, there’s not enough therapists, there’s not even enough psychiatrists.” This can be especially difficult for teenagers that are  or .

Because the core belief is that mental health should be an ongoing conversation that is happening not just when problems arise, the apps focus primarily on prevention and early intervention. The individual coaching sessions are not meant to replace therapists or other traditional forms of behavioral health, but act as a first-response method.

“Mental health just needs to be a conversation that we’re having and not in a way that trends when something bad happens in the news,” Pausic said. “Covid put a spotlight on mental health, but there’s always been a mental health crisis. We just haven’t been talking about it.”

For kids and teens interested in using the services, they can be downloaded on the Apple App Store; and BrightLife Kids on the Google PlayStore with Soluna soon to follow.

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Mayor, a 12th grade student at Santa Susana High School in Simi Valley, said she is often just going through the motions in her classes where she feels disconnected from her schoolwork.

����’s the work after school that excites her.

“If you’re not engaged with school and involved in clubs and have a group of friends that help you stay around, I understand why you wouldn’t feel that sense of comfort and purpose going to school,” Mayor, 18, told The 74.

Mayor is one of many Gen Z students who feel disenchanted and disconnected from school.

A from and the surveyed more than 1,000 Gen Z students between the ages of 12 to 18, finding that less than half enrolled in middle or high school felt motivated to go to school. About half said they do something interesting in school every day.

The report found the most influential driver of Gen Z students’ happiness is their “sense of purpose” at work and school, with more than 60 percent considering themselves happy.

The sentiment among Gen Zers has forced educators nationwide to shift their strategies and way of thinking to find new ways to engage students — from offering a range of elective classes, such as graphic design and culinary arts, to internships that sync up with careers they’re interested in. 

This shift also comes as a growing number of high school students value on-the-job training over other postsecondary options, including a four-year degree.

Mayor said the survey results were “honestly not that surprising.”

She said many of her classmates have grown disconnected from school because teachers often position students’ future success with how well they perform in traditional academic courses.

“I’ve seen a lot of students struggle…but they’re good at other things like art or sports, and I feel like that’s something teachers should recognize and hone in because not every student is going to be good at academics,” Mayor said.

Tackling Student Disengagement

Courtney Walker, an assistant principal at Carrolltown High School in Georgia, addresses student disengagement by offering elective classes including graphic design and culinary arts. She also has students take career aptitude tests to gauge their skills.

“Anytime we add new elective courses, we use the [career aptitude test] data to help us plan courses that align with students’ interest that they could be very talented and successful in,” Walker told The 74.

Walker said high school students who have already completed graduation requirements are “plugged into internships.”

“We had a student a couple of years ago that really knew he wanted to become a pilot so we were able to set up an internship at the West Georgia Regional Airport,” Walker said.

“We really want to make sure we’re providing students with opportunities to dig into fields that they really are passionate about,” she added, “so that they don’t just graduate from high school but also have a plan and support in place to be successful in that plan.”&�Բ�����;

Kimberly Winterbottom, a principal at Marley Middle School in Maryland, said students need to feel “connected” with both their peers and adults, such as teachers or mentors they trust. 

“We spend a lot of time trying to connect kids to what they’re interested in, whether it’s joining a club, or if they’re struggling connecting them with an adult they really respond to,” Winterbottom told The 74.

Winterbottom added how having direct conversations with students on the importance of engaging in school has proven helpful.

“Adults don’t spend a lot of time explaining to students the reasons why but I feel like when we do some light bulbs go off and students start to understand and become more invested,” Winterbottom said.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

But new federal data has given researchers some cause for optimism, suggesting efforts to make teaching more financially viable with strategies such as paying student teachers have helped to move the needle. 

From 2018 through 2022, enrollment in teacher preparation programs grew 12% nationally, or by about 46,231 more candidates, according to a from Pennsylvania State’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy Analysis.

Nine states lead the pack with notably higher bumps in teacher prep programs in recent years: Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Ohio, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina and, with the highest average growth, Maryland. 

The modest upswing, seen both in enrollment and completion rates, during some of the most strained years in American education, has surprised experts.

“It was encouraging to see … at the height of the pandemic, it certainly was not what we were expecting,” said Jacqueline King, research and policy consultant with the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. 

Only 11 states saw continued enrollment declines in the prep programs during the last three years, among them Montana and Minnesota. 

“I think that all the work that we’ve been doing around grow your own, apprenticeships and residencies… to open up more affordable pathways into teaching are starting to bear some fruit, which is amazing and fantastic,” King added.

Contributing factors also include federal pandemic relief funds and new laws in states such as and that pay student teachers. In Maryland, for instance, some during their year long teaching residency. 

“It’s real,” said King. “It’s enough money that you’re not thinking, how am I gonna do student teaching and have a part time job?” 

Still, researchers caution, the growth is not nearly at the pace required to match hiring demand. Teacher shortages are , and in key areas like special education and math. 

Enrollment in teacher preparation programs in just one decade — about fewer teachers are prepared annually. Compounding social, political and economic strains fueled the decline, including a major recession and education reform efforts that negatively impacted public perception of teaching and America’s schools. 

By 2021, only five areas had bucked the overall trend, with more enrollees than a decade prior: Arizona, Mississippi, Texas, Washington and Washington, D.C. Texas’s growth can be attributed to rapid expansion of a particular alternative program, Teachers of Tomorrow, . 

“Over the last seven years, we’re kind of treading water in terms of the number of teachers,” said Ed Fuller, education professor at Pennsylvania State University and author of the most recent analysis. “We don’t need to be where we were in 2010 because we don’t have as many students, but we need to be a lot closer to that than we are now.”

About in K-12 public schools nationwide in 2022 than before the pandemic. The steepest drops are in the younger grades, partially a result of declining birth rates.

On the whole, districts did not pump the brakes on hiring teachers because of the alarming 2% drop in student enrollment. Flush with expiring pandemic relief funds, schools added 15,000 teaching positions last school year. 

Even as full-time school staffing reached an all time high, a quarter of districts had fewer teachers per student than they did in 2016. 

The demand for teachers is far from met, with about 55,000 teaching jobs open nationwide. Since 2008, the decline of teachers in training has impacted schools in every corner of the country. 

Even places like Pennsylvania, whose supply of teachers historically was so abundant that many newly-credentialed teachers were sent out of state, are of a shrinking teacher workforce. Its surplus has gradually disappeared over six years. 

“People weren’t paying attention,” said Fuller, who recommended that public figures talk up the professions’ value and that the legislature take on teacher scholarships to tailor recruitment for local needs. Scholarships could be earmarked for teachers of color, math educators, or those serving high-poverty schools, for example. 

But if districts and states, tasked with building diverse, robust teaching pools, are focused solely on producing new candidates, King cautioned efforts would be in vain, akin to using a hose to fill a leaky bucket with water. 

By the end of the 2021-22 school year, 10% of teachers left the profession nationally, 4% more than before the pandemic, according to . Experts point to job dissatisfaction, political polarization and exhaustion. 

In Florida, one of the nine states that saw a higher enrollment bump than most, more than 5,000 teaching positions are vacant, the . The job has gotten harder, too — remaining educators teach more students per classroom than they did before the pandemic. While the enrollment data suggest a move in the right direction, it will take years for today’s teachers in training to enter its workforce.

“We’ve really got to think more about the job of a teacher and how we make it more sustainable — financially, from the perspective of work-life balance, and giving people opportunities for growth,” King said. “We need to look at teaching and why it’s such a difficult job to sell.”

Some bills before California’s Legislature don’t come from passionate policy advocates, or from powerful interest groups.

Sometimes, the inspiration comes from a family car ride.

While campaigning two years ago, Assemblymember Pilar Schiavo’s daughter, then nine, asked from the backseat what her mother could do if she won.

Schiavo answered that she’d be able to make laws. Then, her daughter Sofia asked her if she could make a law banning homework.

“It was a kind of a joke,” the Santa Clarita Valley Democrat said in an interview, “though I’m sure she’d be happy if homework were banned.”

Still, the conversation got Schiavo thinking, she said. And while  — which faces its first big test on Wednesday — is far from a ban on homework, it would require school districts, county offices of education and charter schools to develop guidelines for K-12 students and would urge schools to be more intentional about “good,” or meaningful homework. 

Among other things, the guidelines should consider students’ physical health, how long assignments take and how effective they are. But the bill’s main concern is mental health and when homework adds stress to students’ daily lives.

Homework’s impact on happiness is partly why Schiavo brought up the proposal last month during , led by former Assembly Speaker .   

“This feeling of loneliness and disconnection — I know when my kid is not feeling connected,” Schiavo, a member of the happiness committee, told CalMatters. “����’s when she’s alone in her room (doing homework), not playing with her cousin, not having dinner with her family.”&�Բ�����;

The bill analysis cites a survey of 15,000 California high schoolers from Challenge Success, a nonprofit affiliated with the Stanford Graduate School of Education. It found that 45% said homework was a major source of stress and that 52% considered most assignments to be busywork.  

The  that students with higher workloads reported “symptoms of exhaustion and lower rates of sleep,” but that spending more time on homework did not necessarily lead to higher test scores.

Homework’s potential to also widen inequities is why Casey Cuny supports the measure. An English and mythology teacher at Valencia High School and , Cuny says language barriers, unreliable home internet, family responsibilities or other outside factors may contribute to a student falling behind on homework.

“I never want a kid’s grade to be low because they have divorced parents and their book was at their dad’s house when they were spending the weekend at mom’s house,” said Cuny, who plans to attend a press conference Wednesday to promote the bill.

In addition, as technology makes it easier for students to cheat — using artificial technology or chat threads to lift answers, for example — Schiavo says that the educators she has spoken to indicate they’re moving towards more in-class assignments. 

Cuny agrees that an emphasis on classwork does help to rein in cheating and allows him to give students immediate feedback. “I feel that I should teach them what I need to teach them when I’m with them in the room,” he said.

The bill says the local homework policies should have input from teachers, parents, school counselors, social workers and students; be distributed at the beginning of every school year; and be reevaluated every five years.

The Assembly Committee on Education is expected to hear the bill Wednesday. Schiavo says she has received bipartisan support and so far, no official opposition or support is listed in the bill analysis. 

The measure’s provision for parental input may lead to disagreements given the recent  between Democratic officials and parental rights groups backed by some Republican lawmakers. 

Because homework is such a big issue, “I’m sure there will be lively (school) board meetings,” Schiavo said.

Nevertheless, she says she hopes the proposal will overhaul the discussion around homework and mental health. The bill is especially pertinent now that the state is also poised to  with the passage of .

Schiavo said the mother of a student with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder told her that the child’s struggle to finish homework has raised issues inside the house, as well as with the school’s principal and teachers.

“And I’m just like, it’s sixth grade!” Schaivo said. “What’s going on?”

Update: The Assembly education committee on April 24 approved an amended version of the bill that softens some requirements and gives districts until the 2027-28 school year.

This was originally posted on CalMatters.

SAN FRANCISCO — It was two days before the start of the school year, and Lauren Koehler shrugged off her backpack and slid out of a maroon hoodie as she approached the blocky, concrete building that houses the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Enrollment Center. Koehler, the center’s 38-year-old executive director, usually focuses on strategy, but on this August day, she wanted to help her team — and the students it serves — get through the crush of office visits and calls that comes every year as families scramble at the last-minute for spots in the city’s schools. So when the center’s main phone line rang in her corner office, she answered.

“Good morning! Thank you for waiting,” Koehler chirped, her Texas accent audible around the edges. “How can I help you?”

On the line, Kelly Rodriguez explained that she wanted to move her 6-year-old from a private school to a public one for first grade, but only if a seat opened up at Sunset Elementary School, near their house on San Francisco’s predominantly white and Asian west side. Koehler told her the boy was fourth on the waitlist and that last year, three children got in.

“We will keep our fingers crossed,” Rodriguez said, sounding both resigned and hopeful.

Stanford professor Thomas Dee predicted this. Not this specific conversation, of course, but ones like it. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, public school enrollment in the United States had been , thanks to birth-rate declines and more restrictive immigration policies, but the decreases rarely exceeded half a percentage point. But Dee said, between fall 2019 and fall 2021, enrollment declined by 2.5 percent.

At the leading edge of this national trend is San Francisco. Public school enrollment there fell by 7.6 percent between 2019 and 2022, to 48,785 students. That drop left SFUSD at just over half the size it was in the 1960s, when it was one of the largest districts in the nation.

Declining enrollment can set off a downward spiral. For every student who leaves SFUSD, the district eventually receives approximately $14,650 less, using a conservative estimate of state funds for the 2022–23 school year. When considering all state and federal funds that year, the district stood to lose as much as $21,170 a child. Over time, less money translates to fewer adults to teach classes, clean bathrooms, help manage emotions and otherwise make a �徱���ٰ�������’s schools calm and effective. It also means fewer language programs, robotics labs and other enrichment opportunities that parents increasingly perceive as necessary. That, in turn, can lead to fewer families signing up — and even less money.

����’s why Koehler is trying everything she can to retain and recruit students in the face of myriad complications, from racism to game theory, and why educators and policymakers elsewhere ought to care whether she and her staff of 24 succeed.

Answering calls in August, Koehler had a plan — lots of little plans, really. And she hoped they’d move the needle on the �徱���ٰ�������’s enrollment numbers, to be released later in the year.

Koehler arrived at SFUSD in May 2020, which also happens to be when most believe the story of the �徱���ٰ�������’s hemorrhaging of students began. During Covid, the �徱���ٰ�������’s doors remained closed for more than a year. Sent home in March 2020, the youngest children went back part-time in April 2021; for of middle and high school students, schools didn’t reopen for 17 months, until August 2021. In contrast, most private schools in the city ramped up to full-time, in-person instruction for all grades over the fall of 2020.

It was the latest skirmish in a long-standing market competition in San Francisco — and the public schools lost. The �徱���ٰ�������’s pandemic-era enrollment decline was three times larger than the national one.

“My husband and I are both a product of a public school education, and it’s something we really wanted for our children,” said Rodriguez, the first caller. But her son ended up in private school, she explained, because “we didn’t want him sitting in front of a screen.” It was a conversation that has played out repeatedly for Koehler these past few years. But public schools staying remote for longer is not the whole story, not even close.

Remote schooling accounted for about a quarter of the enrollment decline nationally, Stanford’s Dee estimates. The bigger culprit, especially in San Francisco, is population loss. Even, the city  the fewest 5-to-19-year-olds per capita of any US city, about 10 percent of the population, which is roughly half the.

Then, starting around the time Koehler arrived, fewer new kids came than usual and more residents moved to places like Florida and Texas. A recent Census found 89,000 K-12 students in San Francisco, about 93,000 in 2019. That decline represents more than half of SFUSD’s pandemic-era drop.

����’s difficult to pinpoint how many children migrated to private school in response to SFUSD’s doors’ staying closed, since many did, but at the same time, some private school students also moved away. But Dee’s research shows that private schooling increased by about 8 percent nationally. (Homeschooling numbers also grew, although the number of kids involved remains small.)

And these aren’t the only reasons Koehler’s task can seem Sisyphean.

“You guys should be able to find out how many spots are open!” a father sitting outside Koehler’s office said, frustrated after visiting the enrollment center once a week all summer.

Koehler nodded sympathetically and told him his son was sixth on the waitlist for Hoover Middle School and that three times that many got in last year.

Since 2011, families have been able to apply to any of the city’s 72 public elementary schools, submitting a ranked list of choices. The same goes for middle and high school options. When demand exceeds seats, the enrollment center uses “tiebreakers,” mandated by the city’s elected school board, that try to keep siblings together, give students from marginalized communities a leg up, and let preschoolers stay at their school for kindergarten. After that, living near a school often confers priority. A randomized lottery for each school sorts out the rest, which leads to the entire system being referred to locally as “the lottery.”

Sixty percent of applicants got their first choice in the lottery’s “main round” in March 2023. Almost 90 percent were assigned to one of their listed schools. That makes for a lot of happy campers. It also makes for parents like the father with a wait-listed son, holding out for a better option.

Though she responded to him with unwavering calm, Koehler was frustrated too. She knew a seat would be available for his son, but state law prohibited her from letting the boy sit in it until an assigned student told the enrollment center they wouldn’t attend or failed to show up in the first week of school.

“I appreciate your patience,” she said, scrawling her cell number on a business card.

To avoid this bind, Koehler and her team have been experimenting with over-assigning kids, the way airlines overbook flights. New, too, is Koehler’s transparency about wait-list standing. In fact, at the beginning of August, every wait-listed family received an e-mail sharing its child’s standing, plus how many kids on the list got in last year. Koehler and her staff hope promising data will encourage parents to hang in there, while a disappointing forecast will open their minds to another school in SFUSD.

Overbooking and transparency represent incremental change. “I annoy some people on my team to no end by being like, ‘Well, I don’t know if we’re ready for this really large step, but let’s take a small step,’” Koehler said. “Let’s put as many irons in the fire as we can.”

Koehler’s next caller said, “The students are not getting their schedules until 24 hours before school starts, which is completely absurd!” Her voice fraying, the mother shared her suspicion that this was true only for kids coming from private middle schools, like her son. Koehler explained that the policy applied to all ninth graders, but still, she said, “I’m sure that’s stressful and annoying.”

Another caller had her heart set on Lincoln High School, down the block from the family’s home. But her son had been assigned to a school lower on the family’s list and an hour-long bus ride away. Koehler suggested several high schools that would have been a short detour on the woman’s way to work south of the city, but the mother began to cry. She had no interest in “Mission High or whatever,” even when Koehler pointed to Mission’s the highest University of California acceptance rate in SFUSD.

Family and friends are most influential in shaping people’s attitudes about schools, research specific to SFUSD shows. So if they’ve heard bad things, Koehler’s singing a school’s praises often does little to change their minds. Parents also turn to, which  push families toward schools with relatively few Black and Hispanic students, like Lincoln, which currently scores a 7 on GreatSchools.org’s 1-10 scoring system, while Mission rates a 3.

As the mother on the phone grew increasingly distressed, Koehler responded simply, “I hear you.” And then, “I know this is really hard.”

She learned these lines from her therapist husband. Before they met, Koehler was an AmeriCorps teacher at a preschool serving kids in a high-poverty community. By her own admission, Koehler was “a totally hopeless teacher,” and she couldn’t stop thinking about “all these systems-level issues.” When her pre-K class toured potential kindergartens, she said, “The schools were just so different from each other.” She realized, “Where you are assigning kids — and what their resourcing level is — matters.”

After getting a master’s in public policy at Harvard, Koehler took a planning job with Jefferson Parish Public School System in New Orleans and then became a director of strategic projects with the KIPP charter school network in Houston. She moved to the Bay Area in 2018 to work for a different charter network, and that’s when she met the handsome, “uncommonly honest” school counselor. When she joined SFUSD in 2020, her husband struck out into private practice. “I feel like I get training every day,” quipped Koehler of his reassurances at home.

Now, she has her staff role-play parent counseling sessions, practicing skills picked up during trainings on de-escalation, listening so that people feel heard, and other forms of “nonviolent communication.” They try to make families feel understood and give them a sense of autonomy and control.

Often, they succeed. Often, they fail.

When phone lines quieted, Koehler began to call parents from the waiting area back to a sunny conference room featuring two massive city maps dotted by district schools.

The first family told her they live in Mission Bay, a rapidly redeveloping area where a new elementary school isn’t  until 2025. They were excited about a school one neighborhood over, until they tested the two-bus commute with a preschooler. Then they realized that the city’s recently opened underground transit line goes straight from their home to Gordon J. Lau Elementary. Koehler wasn’t optimistic about there being openings; it’s a popular school.

When the computer revealed one last spot, she squealed à la Margot Robbie’s Barbie, “You are having the luckiest day!”

But the next parent, Kristina Kunz, was not as lucky. “My daughter was at Francisco during the stabbing last year,” she told Koehler. The sixth grader didn’t witness the March 2023 event, but when the school was evacuated, she thought she was about to die in a mass shooting. Once home, she refused to go back. Kunz told Koehler the family would have left the district, but they’d already been paying Catholic school tuition for her brother after he’d felt threatened at another middle school a few years earlier. “That was literally the only option,” Kunz said, “and we absolutely can’t afford it this year.”

Koehler read Kunz the list of middle schools with openings, all in the city’s southeast, which has a higher percentage of Black and Hispanic residents than other parts of the city. “Huh uh,” Kunz said, “none of those.” She’d take her chances waiting for a spot to open at Hoover on the west side.

The next parent, a woman who’d recently sent a vitriolic e-mail to the superintendent, said, “There’s no seats open in middle schools.” When Koehler rattled off the schools in the southeast that still had openings, the mother shrugged, as if those didn’t count.

Koehler closed her eyes and quickly inhaled. What she didn’t get into, but was perpetually on her mind, is what she’d read in“,” by Rand Quinn, a political sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

San Francisco segregated its schools from its earliest days. In 1870, students with Asian ancestry were officially allowed in any school, but often weren’t welcome in them, leaving most Asian American kids to learn in community-run and missionary schools. In 1875, the district declared schools open to Black students too, but nearly a century later, in 1965, 17 schools were more than 90 percent white and nine were more than 90 percent Black. A large system of parochial schools thrived alongside a handful of nonreligious, exclusively white private schools.

Public school desegregation efforts began in earnest in 1969 with the Equality/Quality plan, which, though modest, involved busing some students from predominantly white neighborhoods. An uproar followed, and the district, which had more than 90,000 students at its 1960s zenith, saw its numbers drop by more than 8,000 students between the spring and fall of 1970 as families fled integration. Over the next dozen years, SFUSD’s rolls decreased by more than 35,000, owing to white flight and also to the last of the baby boomers aging out and drastic public school funding cuts in the wake of a 1978 state proposition that largely froze the property tax base.

After 1980, enrollment bounced back a little, but then for years it plateaued at roughly 52,000 students. During the 1965–66 school year, more than 45 percent of the �徱���ٰ�������’s students were white. By 1977, just over 14 percent were. Today, that number is just under 14 percent. All of which is to say, when white families left in droves, they never really came back.

There have been about half a dozen similar initiatives since Equality/Quality — with names like Horseshoe and Educational Redesign — and each time, some west-side parents mounted opposition. Quinn quoted a former superintendent, Arlene Ackerman, who said at the outset of one of those “neighborhood schools” campaigns in the early 2000s: “They’ve said racist things I hadn’t heard since the late ’60s…talking about ‘in that neighborhood, my child might be raped!’”

����’s not just white families who object to their kids being educated alongside a significant number of Black children, said longtime Board of Education Commissioner Mark Sanchez. “You see that in the Latinx population and Asian population as well.”

In nearby Marin County, home to some of the nation’s most affluent suburbs, private schools opened one after the other in the 1970s. At least another 10 independent schools popped up in San Francisco proper, stealing market share from both SFUSD and the city’s parochial sector and pushing overall private school enrollment for the first time. Today, approximately 25 percent of San Francisco’s school-aged children attend private school, compared to 8 percent  of California and similar shares in many large cities. A November San Francisco Chronicle found that at least three independent schools have applied for permits to expand or renovate their campuses in order to make room for more students. At one private school, enrollment is projected to more than double.

When Americans think of , they think of the South, said Sanchez, but San Francisco has long had its own. In part because the city didn’t offer quality schooling to children of color. “You’ll see a lot of second-, third-, fourth-generation Latinos that will just only put their kids in Catholic school.”

These personal decisions have a ripple effect beyond decreasing SFUSD’s budget. Research  that advantaged, white families’ turning away from public schools sends a signal to others about their quality. Other studies reveal that when private schools are an option, recent movers to gentrifying neighborhoods  more likely to opt out of public schools. And it is well-established that segregated environments breed people who seek comfort in segregated environments.

“����’s kind of a chicken-and-the-egg thing,” Sanchez said: Private schools are there in part because of racial fear, and racial fear is perpetuated in part because private schools are there.

In 2015, in the southeast part of the city, SFUSD opened Willie Brown Middle School, that includes a wellness center, a library, a kitchen, a performing arts space, a computer lab, a maker space, a biotech lab, a health center, and a rainwater garden, in addition to light-filled classrooms. With small class sizes, bamboo cabinets, few staff vacancies, and furniture outfitted with wheels, it could easily be a private school.

But Willie Brown remained under-enrolled, year after year, even after the school board passed a policy giving its graduates preference for Lowell High School, known as the “crown jewel” of SFUSD. Last year, enrollment jumped when Koehler’s Enrollment Center overbooked the school in the first round, parents decided to give it a shot, and kids ended up happy. About 20 percent of the student body is now white, yet still, spots remained open two days before the start of school this past fall.

To some observers, Willie Brown is just the latest iteration of a failed “if you build it, they will come” narrative in San Francisco. In the second half of the 1970s, the district created new programs and “alternative schools,” akin to other cities’ magnet schools, to attract back families that had fled. Later, Superintendent Ackerman promised a flood of investment in schools in the southeast, including new language programs. There was a small effect on enrollment, Quinn said, but only on the margins.

So when the parent said, “There’s no seats open in middle schools,” Koehler understood that lots of factors influence which schools work for a family and which don’t. But there was also an echo of 1960s anti-integration parent groups. 

“I’m sorry,” she replied, “I know this is really stressful.”

A 17-year-old newcomer to the US entered the Enrollment Center and sat across the conference room table from Koehler. She asked when he’d arrived in San Francisco.

���dz����Բ���.”

“Ayer?” Koehler asked. (Yesterday?)

“No, domingo pasado.” (Last Sunday.)

In New York City and other large cities, an increase in asylum-seeking families with stopping public school enrollment declines. Migrant children to San Francisco too, and Koehler’s team has tried to reduce the they and other families face when trying to enroll.

But Koehler would need to meet many more kids like this one to stave off school closures.

She’d also need charter school enrollment to stop increasing.

The next parent, also a recent immigrant, stepped into the conference room with a stack of papers issued by the Peruvian government and the conviction that her son needed to be placed in a different grade than the one specified by his age. She made it clear to Koehler that the family would jump at the first appropriate placement offer: SFUSD’s or at Thomas Edison Charter Academy. Koehler scrambled to get the boy assessed and recategorized.

Charter schools were first authorized in San Francisco in the 1990s. Though their share of the education market is smaller here than in places like New Orleans, charter enrollment has, with new schools often inhabiting the buildings of schools SFUSD had to close. Now, approximately 7,000 students attend charter schools rather than district ones.

On August 30, 2023, SFUSD families received an e-mail from the superintendent saying, “We are going to make some tough decisions in the coming months and all the options are on the table.”

Each time a student leaves the district, SFUSD has less money to operate that student’s old school. But the heating bill does not go down. The teacher must be paid the same amount. A class of 21 first graders — or even a class of eight — is no cheaper than a class of 22.

It stands to reason that closing under-enrolled schools and reassigning their students and the funds that go with them to different schools, as many districts across the country are to do, should produce better educational outcomes for all. But it often doesn’t, as experiences in ,  and  illustrate. Sally A. Nuamah, a professor at Northwestern University,  school closures as “reactive” and urged policymakers to focus instead on the root causes of declining enrollment, like the lack of affordable housing that drives families out of cities.

Koehler can control those things about as readily as she can dig a new train tunnel or decrease school-shooting fear. But she might be able to improve the �徱���ٰ�������’s reputation.

Her team started by modernizing marketing efforts, like going digital with preschool outreach, producing a video about each school, and rebooting the annual Enrollment Fair, a day when principals and PTA presidents sit behind more than 100 folding tables. Parents used to push strollers through the throngs to grab a handout and snippet of conversation; now, schools play videos and offer up QR codes too.

For two years, SFUSD has also worked with digital marketing companies. One “positive impression campaign” included social media posts pushed out by the San Francisco Public Library and the Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families. Images feature photos of smiling students alongside the names of the SFUSD schools and colleges they attended: For example, “Jazmine – Flynn Elementary School – Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 – O’Connell High School – Stanford University.” In addition to online ads, the district has purchased radio spots and light-pole ads. ����’s mailed postcards.

Koehler would like to increase the current outlay of about $10,000 a year, but it’s hard to spend on recruitment when instruction remains underfunded, even if increased enrollment would more than offset the cost. Especially since, at some point, marketing becomes futile. With a finite number of kids in the city, initiatives to increase market share become “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Dee likes to say. (Private school-board members and admissions directors in San Francisco are also expressing alarm at population declines.)

And in San Francisco, any PR campaign contends with two major sources of bad PR: the press and parents. Koehler understands why journalists report on what’s  in SFUSD: ����’s their job. But she sees loads of negative headlines and very few accounts of the many things that are going right. Readers are left with the impression that private schools in the city are objectively better at serving students, which just isn’t true.

Some parents have left SFUSD or refused to enroll their kids because of substantive complaints, like with the �徱���ٰ�������’s decision not to offer Algebra I in eighth grade (starting in 2014). There is also some real scarcity in the process, as in Rodriguez’s case: There simply isn’t enough room on Sunset’s small campus for everyone who wants to be there. And individual families have unresolvable logistical constraints, and in very rare cases, truly legitimate safety concerns. But a lot of it has to do with timing — and fear.

When David, a father of two, rang the Enrollment Center, it was with the air of a man who just wanted to do the right thing.

After touring SFUSD’s George Peabody Elementary, David and his wife decided the school would be a great fit for their incoming kindergartener. There was something special about it, and they wanted her to learn in a diverse setting.

But they also wanted a backup plan, having heard of the lottery’s vagaries. “We had two number-one choices,” he said: Peabody and a Jewish private school. They applied to both. In March, their daughter was offered a spot at the private school — and one at a different SFUSD school they liked less. “If we got into Peabody in the first round, we would have gone to Peabody,” said David, who asked that his full name be withheld to protect his privacy. Instead, they signed a contract with the private school. “We put our daughter on the waitlist” for Peabody, he said, “and then kind of forgot about it.”

When the family got an e-mail offering a spot, on the Saturday before school started, they were excited enough to click “accept,” even though they would have lost their private school deposit. Then they learned that Peabody’s after-school program was full. “There was just no way that we could have made it happen without aftercare,” David said. So he called the Enrollment Center to offer the spot to another family.

Hearing David’s story, Koehler sighed. If she had been able to place his child at Peabody in the first round, aftercare would have been available there, but in August the only programs with openings were located offsite. Because that didn’t work for David’s family, Koehler was left with a seat sitting open at a high-demand school.

Private schools can require open houses, interviews, and a tuition deposit to help screen out all but the most interested families and reveal information about their likelihood of accepting an offer. But SFUSD has tried to do away with hurdles like that, since they disadvantage the already disadvantaged. With no way of gauging intention to attend, Koehler has to hold seats from March until August for thousands of students who ultimately won’t use them. And she can’t just overbook aggressively, because there are always outliers. This year, one of the city’s biggest middle schools saw every single child who was assigned in March, save one, show up in August. Private schools can more easily absorb extra kids if they overdo it with admissions a little, but Koehler risks a massive fiscal error under the �徱���ٰ�������’s union contract. And overbooking risks leaving other SFUSD schools under-enrolled, something single-campus private schools don’t have to worry about.

It leaves SFUSD an unpredictable mess able to enroll fewer families than it otherwise would. And because the process is a mess, more families apply to multiple systems to hedge their bets and end up holding on to multiple seats, making it all more of a mess.

But change is coming. In 2018, the school board  a resolution to eventually overhaul SFUSD’s school assignment system. Starting in 2026, citywide elementary school choice will be replaced by choice within zones tied to students’ addresses. The task of sorting out the details has fallen to Koehler’s team, along with a group at Stanford co-led by Irene Lo, a professor in the school of engineering who has been trained to design and optimize “matching” markets like this one.

If Lo could start anywhere, she’d centralize the application process so that families would rank their true preferences: public, private, and charter. One algorithm could then assign the vast majority of seats in a single pass, largely eliminating delays like the one David’s family experienced. But private schools stand to lose ground by agreeing to that, and many public school supporters would argue that this condones and uplifts private and charter schools. So instead of centralization, Lo will start with prediction.

She’ll use AI and other modern modeling tools to anticipate what parents will like. Then there’s “strategy-proofing,” a term from game theory. Essentially, it means trying to set up a system that incentivizes parents to be truthful. Over the decades, families have taken advantage of loopholes allowing students to attend a different school than the one designated by their address. And not just a few families. In the late 1990s, it was more than half. To gain an advantage, they’ve also lied about their student’s ethnicity, “race-neutral diversity factors” such as mother’s education level, and their zip code. Any way each system could be gamed, it was gamed.

Lo said the new six or seven zones will be drawn so each comes close to reflecting the �徱���ٰ�������’s average socioeconomic status. Layered on top of that will be “” at each school, basically set-asides giving lower-income students first dibs on some seats to make sure diverse zones don’t segregate into schools with wealthier students and others with concentrated poverty. City blocks will be used as a proxy for students’ level of disadvantage.

It all sounds great. It also all sounds familiar. In the early 1970s, Horseshoe featured seven zones and assignment to schools so as to create racial balance. Educational Redesign relied on quotas to make sure no ethnic group exceeded 45 percent. The current lottery uses “microneighborhoods” to capture disadvantage.

What makes Koehler and Lo think the outcome could be different this time?

Lo admitted that they’re trying “another way of putting together the same ingredients.” ����’s still guesswork, but with her cutting-edge tools it should be more accurate than the guesswork of the past. And while parents still won’t have complete predictability, they’ll have more than before.

“I understand this is really difficult,” Koehler said to the last parent of the day.

With the waiting room empty and back offices quiet, Koehler approached each member of her staff: “Go home, because I know this is going to be a really long week.”

����’s likely to be a very long year—and decade—for the enrollment center.

San Francisco was 40 percent white as of the last Census, but only 13.8 percent of its public school enrollment was. Even if Lo works the unprecedented miracle of getting schools to reflect the �徱���ٰ�������’s diversity, there is no hope that they will reflect the �����ٲ�’s&�Բ�����;without a major change in the way parents have behaved for decades. The data is clear: Without a critical mass of white students in a school, a significant number of parents won’t consider it.

Still, many families are choosing SFUSD, including some of those Koehler talked to in August. Kunz’s daughter got into Hoover off the waiting list. A few months into the school year, her mother said, she is thriving. Her older brother, the one who was pulled out of public middle school, chose SFUSD’s Ruth Asawa School of the Arts over a well-regarded Catholic high school.

Rodriguez, the mother who wanted to send her first grader to Sunset, learned a few days after her call with Koehler that everyone assigned had shown up, and her son wouldn’t be offered a spot. But Koehler’s team had another suggestion near the family’s home: Jefferson Elementary School. Rodriguez almost rejected it in favor of private school, but she’s relieved she didn’t.

“The community’s been very, very welcoming,” she said in October. “His teacher’s wonderful; she has almost 20 years of experience. It has a beautiful garden. The principal is really involved.” A few months later things were still going well: “Jefferson is just fantastic,” she said in December: “We’ve been really, really pleased.”

But Rodriguez said she’s still “recovering” from the enrollment process. “I also worry about the future of it, as we hear potential school closures, budget deficits,” she said. The family is considering selling their house, in favor of a place somewhere else in the Bay Area “where there aren’t so many of the issues that SFUSD is running into.”

In October, David said he and his wife wouldn’t necessarily send their second child to the Jewish private school: “I think we probably will look at Peabody again.” And if that happened, he said, they may even move their oldest over to SFUSD. But by December, his outlook was different. David said his family has been very happy with the private school experience.

Koehler knew about each of these outcomes and thousands more like them, and she hoped they would amount to a turned tide, with enrollment starting to creep up rather than down.

This fall, she and her team learned of SFUSD’s preliminary numbers: Enrollment increased from 48,785 to 49,143. That said, hundreds of those kids are 4-year-olds, sitting in “transitional kindergarten” spots newly added to a statewide specialized pre-K program. In essence, enrollment had flatlined.

Koehler felt nonetheless undaunted. The stable numbers mean “that our outreach is working,” she said. “We are not losing people at the rate that we otherwise might.”

And not all of her plans, her incremental tinkering, have come to fruition yet. “One of my random dreams is that we could do aftercare at the same time as we do enrollment,” she said. She also pointed to SFUSD’s efforts to realign program offerings with what parents want most, spread more success stories, better compensate teachers, and get a bond measure on an upcoming ballot. For the 2025–26 application cycle, her team would like to automatically assign families to multiple waiting lists, “which we hope will make at least the process seem less cumbersome and frightening,” she said. Add in Lo’s changes, Koehler said, and “we’ll draw people back who right now are frustrated by our process.”

“I have a sense that the future will be positive.”

This story about  was produced by , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the .

Her project, Rubix, inspired by the Rubik’s Cube and Lego, is a tiny prefabricated home complete with a kitchen, a bathroom and other necessities.

 “����’s intended for independent living with dignity for the homeless population,” Wang said.

Rubix is entirely off-grid, powered by solar energy, and uses bamboo and recycled plastics as its main construction materials.

Unlike any of the other tiny home products that are available on the market, Wang said, “it’s an innovative design that makes manufacturing, transportation and installation cheaper, faster and far more efficient.”

Rubix has an independent plumbing system, so it can also be used in natural disaster relief. 

Wang has been communicating with city council members and nonprofits that are interested in seeing Rubix being implemented in San Diego.

She is also fundraising to create a full-scale prototype. Wang says she’s aiming for a one-time purchase cost of $30,000, compared to the $50,000 per year San Diego shelter beds cost to maintain.

For her work on Rubix, Wang , a nonprofit that provides opportunities for accomplished young people to make a positive difference.

Ryan Manriquez opened the door of his second-floor apartment to a blaring fire alarm. It was September 2023, a few weeks into the school year at UC Berkeley, where he’s a graduate student studying public policy.

Residents descended the staircase, following lighted exit signs. The alarm was getting louder, urging Manriquez to leave. But he couldn’t. Sitting in his power wheelchair, he looked at the only way out of the building for him — an elevator down the hallway, its doors now shut and inoperable. There was no way out for him. 

“When I stepped into the hallway, I just broke down in tears because I knew finally that I wasn’t going to have a place to safely evacuate,” he said.

As a safety measure, elevators shut down to contain a potential fire. Even though the alarm turned out to be false, Manriquez waited four hours before the elevator worked again, causing him to miss his favorite class that afternoon — public policy. 

While California’s public university systems have robust emergency policies and procedures, not all students who are physically disabled have reliable access to equipment to help them evacuate in an emergency. 

Last summer, when Manriquez toured a unit of The Intersection, an off-campus apartment complex the university operates for graduate students, he noticed there were no disability evacuation chairs in the building.  

Evacuation chairs allow people who have a mobility disability to  in emergencies. Some chairs require assistance from two people and are typically folded and stored with other emergency supplies or mounted on the wall. Other evacuation chairs can be battery-powered, allowing physically disabled residents to independently transport themselves up or down stairs.

According to UC Berkeley’s housing policy, evacuation chairs must be  in all campus buildings. Before he moved in, Manriquez requested a chair from the Berkeley Housing office in July. The evacuation chair was not installed when the school year started the following month. And it still wasn’t installed when the fire alarm went off in September. 

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 requires at least one  on every floor, whether it is achieved with an elevator, ramp or lift. The law doesn’t require buildings to have evacuation chairs in multi-storied buildings.  

People with disabilities are disproportionately impacted by disasters and emergencies. Data cited by the Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies shows that disabled people are two to four times as likely  in emergencies compared to their non-disabled counterparts.

“It is hard to think that they just weren’t ready for someone like me to enter into one of the top graduate programs in the country,” Manriquez said. 

The ripple effect 

A few weeks after he was trapped in his apartment building, still without an evacuation chair on his floor, Manriquez shared his experience during public comment at the University of California Board of Regents meeting. After his speech, UC President Michael Drake offered a “personal apology.” Drake also asked campus chancellors to prepare an update on the status of emergency exit accessibility on their campuses at a future meeting.  

“The chancellors are here and I know by the time we come back to the November meeting all the chancellors will be able to ensure nothing like this can happen on any of the campuses in the future,” Drake said. 

Shortly after Manriquez spoke to the regents, in October 2023, two folding manual disability evacuation chairs were installed in his building, one of them on his floor. 

But some students have had to wait longer.

Some students still unequipped

Less than 24 hours after Manriquez’s experience, UC Berkeley student Trisha Nguyen couldn’t leave her second-floor, on-campus apartment during a fire drill.

Like Manriquez, Nguyen was met with shut elevator doors, blocking people from using it. After the drill was over, Nguyen’s apartment mates returned to open the elevator doors, so she could leave in her power wheelchair. 

“All undergraduate students and staff evacuated safely except for my personal care attendant (my mom) and me,” Nguyen wrote to CalMatters. 

Before the incident, Nguyen said UC Berkeley’s University Housing Department failed to give her an evacuation plan that would meet her needs. It wasn’t until after Manriquez shared his experience that the university housing department sent out information on , Nguyen said. 

“UC Berkeley does not do an excellent job of informing disabled students about emergency protocols for persons with disabilities,” Nguyen said. 

The UC Berkeley Office of Disability and Compliance sent out a self-identification questionnaire after her experience asking whether students with disabilities want a consultation to prepare for emergencies. The responses were then shared with building managers and first responders, said UC Berkeley Chief Accessibility Officer Eva Callow. 

Nguyen explained that with folding evacuation chairs, individuals with disabilities are “expected to simply wait” for first responders to assist, “hoping they arrive in time before the fire reaches us.”&�Բ�����;

Nguyen wants to see the campus install electric evacuation chairs that allow disabled students like her to evacuate safely without relying on first responders or others. She added that as someone who doesn’t live on the first floor, she understands there might not be a safe route with an electric wheelchair. 

“The current protocol involves us relying on other people to get us out of the building safely,” Nguyen said. “But, I also want to have the resources necessary to take the initiative to evacuate myself.”

In March 2024, nearly six months after the September fire drill, Nguyen said university housing installed a manual evacuation chair on her floor.

Attempts to build accessible emergency plans

Across UC Berkeley’s campus, there are at least  to find an evacuation chair, according to the campus. As of publication, a webpage with in each building was still under construction.

The UC system does not record how many buildings have evacuation chairs across its 10 campuses, though developing system wide policies on disability accommodations such as emergency exits will be the responsibility of the UC’s new Office of Civil Rights.  

“My office is monitoring the progress of this work on our campuses and we’ll keep the board informed,” Drake said at the November UC Regents meeting. 

Within the office, which officially launched in February, there will be a disability rights office dedicated to improving accessibility at UC campuses. 

In January 2024 the UC’s Systemwide Advisory Workgroup on Students with Disabilities provided updated recommendations to better serve disabled students and staff. Developing a systemwide disability-inclusive emergency evacuation plan was the group’s main recommendation. 

“Students with disabilities experience an  for emergency evacuation — and often, downright danger,” the report read.

Currently, all campuses have emergency protocols for students with disabilities, some more extensive than others. While most campuses have evacuation chairs available, the onus falls on students to think proactively and request them, according to UC Communication Strategist Stett Holbrook. 

At UC Irvine, for example, students can use the  to request a customized evacuation plan by selecting “ADA” under the “Report” section. The university is updating its individualized emergency evacuation plan process, so this method will likely change soon, said ADA coordinator Andrew Berk.

“There are a lot of people with hidden disabilities who choose not to disclose,” he said. “We do not in any way want to put pressure on someone to disclose their disability.”

No student has requested an emergency evacuation plan this year, according to Berk. UC Irvine’s Emergency Management Director Randall Styner said his office is working to better communicate emergency evacuation options and resources available to students with campus posters and programming at orientation. 

Berk and Styner collaborate to create customized plans for students when requested. Both stressed the importance of including people with disabilities in the planning process. 

“You cannot have accessibility if you do not involve people with disabilities,” Berk said, adding he is as a person with a disability. 

UC Irvine has installed evacuation chairs in  according to a 2021-2022 emergency management report. Additionally, newer student housing offers two options: a button with two-way communication alerting first responders of the person’s location or a one-way system for guidance during emergencies. 

“This goes beyond people with disabilities because what we do for that population also helps people who are injured and people who might be a little older,” Berk said. 

At UC Davis, representatives from housing, emergency management and the campus fire department are currently revising some emergency protocols, according to UC Davis Crisis Communications Manager Bill Kisliuk.

“The draft calls for relevant campus units, for example, Student Housing and Dining Services, to train staff in identifying those in their communities who have access needs or functional needs and supporting them in an evacuation or other emergency,” Kisliuk wrote to CalMatters.  

Other higher education emergency plans

The 23-campus California State University system requires campuses to have emergency management programs, but not a protocol for accessibility. The Cal State Chancellor’s Office does not track which buildings at each campus have an evacuation chair. Each campus decides how to maintain evacuation chairs in the buildings, depending on how frequently the building is used or who is using the building, said Cal State spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith.  

Like UC students, Cal State students with disabilities have had to navigate campuses not built for them. Cal Poly Humboldt alum Christine diBella  her campus and the CSU over a  in October 2021. Her complaint outlined a general lack of accessibility on campus, including the lack of an emergency evacuation plan. Despite living on the third floor of her dorm building at the time, like other disabled students she could not get out in her power wheelchair. The case was settled in October 2023.

The California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office instructs campuses to follow the state-recommended , “emphasizing that districts comply” with the recommendations. Those include communicating plans on social media or having a local disaster registry — a list of individuals who might need additional support during emergencies, said system spokesperson Melissa Villarin.  

“We feel it’s important that college officials, who have deep and specific knowledge of their campuses, partner with local emergency response officials,” said Villarin, who explained each community college district has individualized emergency plans. “Their knowledge, combined, can be used to develop plans and policies that protect students, staff and the public.” If there is a need for further emergency training, campuses are directed to consult the California Office of Emergency Services.

What is happening now at UC?

The UC Office for Civil Rights  Feb. 20 and includes a Title IX office, an office for anti-discrimination and one for disability rights. Catherine Spear will start as  of the civil rights office on May 6, reporting directly to Drake. The office will streamline all discrimination and harassment allegations and aims to provide consistency in the reporting process, according to the office’s website.  

In an email sent March 19, Drake required each campus to designate a representative to update on campus evacuation plan changes and to complete a checklist by June 30. Campuses must designate a campus representative, develop individualized emergency evacuation plans and provide evacuation chairs.  

These new requirements are aimed at ensuring students don’t experience the anguish Manriquez felt in his hallway in September. He says he’s optimistic about the new protocols and office, something that may not have happened had the UC Regents not heard him from that meeting. 

“I think it is extremely important to have leaders among higher education that are representatives of the students they serve,” Manriquez said. “I rarely, if ever have, seen a physically disabled person in a position of university leadership at the highest level.”&�Բ�����;

For the record: This story has been updated to clarify the process for students to request an individualized evacuation plan at UC Irvine.

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They’re called “Pell runners” — after enrolling at a community college they apply for a federal Pell grant, collect as much as $7,400, then vanish.

Since fall 2021, California’s community colleges have given more than $5 million to Pell runners, according to monthly reports they sent to the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. Colleges also report they’ve given nearly $1.5 million in state and local aid to these scammers.

The chancellor’s office began requiring the state’s 116 community colleges to submit these reports three years ago, after fraud cases surged.

At the time, the office said it suspected . Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government loosened some restrictions around financial aid, making it easier for students to prove they were eligible, and provided special one-time grants to help keep them enrolled. Once these pandemic-era exceptions ended in 2023 and some classes returned to in-person instruction, college officials said they expected fraud to subside. 

It hasn’t. In January, the chancellor’s office suspected 25% of college applicants were fraudulent, said Paul Feist, a spokesperson for the office. 

“This is getting significantly worse,” said Todd Coston, an associate vice chancellor with the Kern Community College District. He said that last year, “something changed and all of a sudden everything spiked like crazy.”

Online classes that historically don’t fill up were suddenly overwhelmed with students — a sign that many of them might be fake — Coston said. Administrators at other large districts, including the Los Rios Community College District in Sacramento, the Mt. San Antonio Community College District in Walnut, California and the Los Angeles Community College District, told CalMatters that fraudsters are evading each new cybersecurity strategy. 

The reason for the reported increase in fraud is because the chancellor’s office and college administrators are getting better at detecting it, he said. Since 2022, the state has allocated more than , cybersecurity and other changes in the online application process at community colleges.

The reports the colleges submitted don’t include how much fraud they prevented. 

The rise in suspected fraud coincides with years of efforts, both at the state and local level, to increase access to community college. Schools are reducing fees — or making college free — while legislators have worked to simplify and expand financial aid. Those efforts accelerated during the pandemic, when 

����’s not surprising, then, that “bad actors” would take advantage of the system’s good intentions, Feist said. 

Financial aid fraud is not new

College officials suspect most of the fake students are bots and often, they display tell-tale signs. In Sacramento, community colleges started seeing an influx of applications from Russia, China, and India during the start of the pandemic. Around the same time, administrators at Mt. San Antonio College saw students using Social Security numbers of retirees. Others had home addresses that were abandoned lots. Uncommon email domains, such as AOL.com, were another red flag. 

These scams aren’t new. The federal government has long required colleges to report instances of financial aid fraud. Every year, the federal government closes around , including a recent  who stole nearly a million dollars by collecting fraudulent student loans. California community colleges also say they’ve spotted fraudulent applications from people trying to get an .edu email address in order to receive student discounts.

When the chancellor’s office began requiring community colleges to file monthly reports, it asked for the number of fake applications and the amount of money they gave to fraudsters.

CalMatters submitted a public records request for the data, broken down by campus. After the request was initially rejected, CalMatters appealed and received an anonymized copy of all of the monthly reports, lacking individual campus details. 

The reports show that between September 2021 and January 2024, the colleges received roughly 900,000 fraudulent college applications and gave fraudsters more than $5 million in federal aid, as well as nearly $1.5 million in state and local aid. 

The numbers show that fraud represents less than 1% of the total amount of financial aid awarded to community college students in the same time period. ����’s hard to tell how accurate the data is because compliance is spotty, with some months missing reports from as many as half the colleges. 

More fraud, in more places

To understand how fraud is evolving, the chancellor’s office uses several sources of information and data, Feist said. One indicator is an atypical bump in applications. 

“If I saw, for example, that a college that only gets 1,000 applications in some time frame gets 5,000, you kind of know something is probably up,” said Valerie Lundy-Wagner, a vice chancellor for the community college system. 

The chancellor’s office provided CalMatters with anonymous application data for each month from September 2021 to January 2024. CalMatters analyzed the data using two different techniques to identify statistical outliers in the application data and asked the office to verify the methodology. The office repeatedly declined.

According to the analysis, more than 50 of the state’s 116 community colleges saw at least one unusual spike in the number of applications they received during that time frame. In the last year, colleges have seen more unusual spikes than at any point since 2021. Along with fraud, however, outliers could also reflect normal fluctuations in applications or the . 

“What we’re hearing is that (fraud) is happening more widespread than people are letting on, but people just have their heads in the sand because it looks good to have your enrollment going up,” said Coston with the Kern Community College District. Many college administrators say improvements in artificial intelligence have made it easier for people to attempt fraud on a larger scale. 

Yet clamping down too hard on fraud can have unintended consequences. More than 20% of community college students in California don’t receive Pell grants they’re eligible for. Administrative hurdles — including the verification process — are one reason why, according to  by researchers at UC Davis. To help, the federal government is trying to simplify its financial aid application, but in some cases, it’s . 

“We’ve overcorrected at times, even in policy, and in how stringently we’re verifying students relative to the amount of fraud in the system,” said Jake Brymer, a deputy director with the California Student Aid Commission. As a result, he said, real low-income students get pushed out.

Kicking real students out of class

Sometimes, the fraud detection backfires on actual students, ousting people like Martin Romero.  

In order to graduate from East Los Angeles College, Romero, 20, must take American history, so last fall he enrolled in an online class where students can watch pre-recorded lectures on their own time. 

He said it’s all he had time for. Romero takes four classes at East Los Angeles College each semester and serves as its student body president. He also helps out at his family’s auto body shop, sometimes as much as 15 hours a week. 

On the first day of class last fall, he said the online portal, Canvas, wasn’t working on his computer.

That day, the American history professor did a test through Canvas, asking students to respond to a prompt in order to prove they were not a bot. Romero didn’t answer, so the professor dropped him from the class. 

“I was freaking out,” he said, and wrote to the professor as soon as he found out, begging to be reinstated. The professor told him the class was already full again, so letting him in would mean kicking someone else out. 

For the college’s Academic Senate, the faculty group that governs academic matters, fake students is one of the top three issues, said its president, Leticia Barajas. 

“We’re frustrated with the fact that some of these courses are getting filled really quickly,” she said. “We see it as an access issue for our students.”

She said there’s been an uptick in recent months, especially in certain kinds of online classes, that has forced professors to focus on hunting bots instead of teaching. Professors now are expected to test their students in the first weeks, asking them to submit answers to prompts, sign copies of the syllabus, or send other evidence to prove they are real. 

Increasingly, she said, the bots are evading detection, especially with the help of AI. “They’re submitting assignments. ����’s gibberish,” she said.

The endless, multi-million dollar game of combating fraud

Campus and state officials described fraud detection as a game of whack-a-mole. “When we get better at addressing one thing, something else pops up,” said Lundy-Wagner. “That’s sort of the nature of fraud.”

To fight fraud, she said, the chancellor’s office, the 73 independently governed districts and their colleges all must work together, including those who oversee information technology, enrollment and financial aid. Part of the challenge is that the system is so “decentralized,” she said.

The largest reform underway is , the state’s community college application portal, which will offer more cybersecurity, Feist said. He also said there are other “promising” short-term projects. 

One of them, a software tool known as ID.Me, launched in February. The contract with the software company, , gives it permission to check college applicants for identification, including video interviews in certain cases. Privacy experts have warned that the company’s video technology could be  

To mitigate these privacy concerns and avoid creating enrollment barriers, applicants need to opt in to the new verification software. 

In the first few days after its implementation, 29% of applicants opted in to ID.Me’s new vetting process. Some applicants started the verification process but never finished, said Feist, while others are ineligible because they’re under the age of 18. The rest chose not to verify their identity for other reasons, including many who are suspected bots. 

‘We’re just trying to survive’

In Los Angeles, community colleges have already seen a drop in suspicious applications, said Nicole Albo-Lopez, a vice chancellor with the district. But she’s skeptical the problem is solved. “The lull we see, I don’t believe we’ll be able to sustain,” she said. “They’ll find another way to come in.”&�Բ�����;

Her district is now concerned that bots are trying to steal data or intellectual property, not just financial aid. “Say I have 400 sections of English 101 online. There are 400 variations of readings, assignments, peer-to-peer questions that somebody can go in and scrape,” Albo-Lopez said. 

Barajas said faculty at East Los Angeles College are so overwhelmed by bots they haven’t discussed the potential risk to their intellectual property: “We’re at such a level where we’re just trying to survive.”

Meanwhile, students like Romero who are wrongly mistaken for bots must develop their own survival skills. When the professor denied the request to re-enroll, he signed up for the same course in the one format that was still available — in-person. The class met every Monday and Wednesday at 7:10 a.m., and the professor deducted points for anyone who was late.

“It was torture,” he said, noting that he missed two classes and was late to around four. He finished the class with a B but said he would have had an A if he had gotten into the class he wanted.

As student body president, he said he’s been outspoken about the issue. While he was able to fulfill his history requirement, he worries that other students may not be so lucky. 

Data reporter Erica Yee contributed to this reporting. 

Adam Echelman covers California’s community colleges in partnership with Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education.

The survey polled more than 1,000 registered voters, parents of public high school students in L.A. County and students. It intentionally focused on parents and students from “backgrounds disproportionately impacted by inequities in our education system,” particularly those who are Black, Latino and immigrants. There were also four focus groups, two with students and two with parents.The poll was commissioned by Harbor Freight Tools for Schools, a program created by the founder of Harbor Freight Tools to expand skilled trades classes in high schools across the country.

L.A. County is the most populous in the nation, yet fewer than 1 in 5 public high schools in its 80 school districts offer trade programs and classes. Over the last 25 to 30 years, skilled trades classes in high schools have vanished, and the few that remain are seen as important only for students not planning to attend college. Yet, among respondents who overwhelmingly support the expansion and funding of these classes, over 70% believe they can help students prepare for higher education.

“Incorporating skilled trades into high school curriculums is our ‘north star’ goal,” says Belen Vargas, senior director of Los Angeles County Programs at Harbor Freight Tools for Schools. The L.A. County program provides funding to schools that offer trades classes, like La Mirada High School and Port of Los Angeles High School, and supports mobile programs that do not require a dedicated classroom or on-campus equipment, including afterschool, on weekends and during the summer. The organization advocates for industry, labor and education leaders to support and fund the expansion of these classes in L.A.

Vargas says that what stood out to her in the focus groups was students’ recognition of the importance of construction jobs for their local economy and neighborhoods.

“Young people in the focus group really spoke about wanting to work in a career where it’s improving their community, and they spoke very eloquently about driving around and seeing these big projects going up and how they know that’s that’s to better their community, and they want to be part of that,” Vargas says.

She says the organization team met with over 20 big industry leaders last year. They unanimously agreed that these classes are important but said there is no existing pipeline of skilled professionals ready to take on the dozens of infrastructure projects that will be coming to L.A.

Brent Tuttle, a welding teacher at La Mirada High School, says there’s already a shortage of construction workers, but even more will be needed soon as L.A. prepares to host the Olympics in 2028. 

“There’s welding, plumbing and all these trades out there that are in high demand … but nobody’s filling them because nobody’s trained to do it,” Tuttle says.

He has been teaching welding for 24 years, 14 of them at La Mirada. In 2020, Tuttle was one of 18 trade teachers who received $50,000 from Harbor Freight Tools for Schools.

He says there’s often a stigma attached to taking trade classes because people believe those students are less competent than those attending college and couldn’t get in. Yet he believes that perception is changing slowly as parents and students learn about the high wages many trade professions offer and as more people realize the skill and intellect needed for jobs such as auto mechanic. He says students who learn these skills in high school could be making six figures in five years, whereas those who attend college could graduate with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and earn far less.

He says that some of his students who went to college found that working in a trade was a better option.

“I didn’t think they were going to be welders, that wasn’t in their plan, but many went to school and they’re like, ‘You know what? This is tougher than I thought. I have this skill and now I’m falling back,’” he says.

Tuttle, who has about 150 students, models his class like a real welding job. His students in advanced classes are expected to arrive an hour and a half before school starts because that is typically when welding jobs begin. They are expected to come in, get dressed and begin working on projects for the first two hours of class. His freshmen and sophomores learn how to use the machinery and learn the basics of five types of welding.

Jacob Pittman, a senior, has already completed all his graduation requirements, so he spends four class periods in the welding workshop and has become a shop lead, helping his classmates. Like many students, Pittman had a difficult time adjusting when the pandemic began, and his grades suffered. Early into high school, he decided college wasn’t for him. His dad was supportive of his decision and introduced him to the option of trade school. Tuttle says Pittman has been a standout student because of his strong work ethic and how quickly he picks up on skills. Tuttle has received approval from the school to hire a shop aide and says he plans to hold off on filling the position while Pittman attends trade school for a year. After that, he intends to hire him.

Pittman says his favorite part of the welding program is the positive environment where everyone seems to genuinely enjoy their time working on their craft and creating projects.

Like Pittman, 17-year-old Nova Thomas enjoys helping younger students. She recalls the summer program where they helped middle school students build barbecue grills as one of her favorite projects. Tuttle says the summer program La Mirada does through Harbor Freight Tools for Schools has allowed more girls to participate. Thomas says she tries to promote the welding program to the middle school girls because of her great experience.

“I’ve definitely always felt comfortable and never felt inferior in the shop,” she says. “It’s always been a safe space, and I’ve never felt like I had to compete for anybody’s respect, so I always appreciate that. During the summer school program, I tried to stress to the girls how important and awesome it would be if they would actually continue with these skilled trades later on.”

Tuttle says his female students typically end up being better welders than his male students because they are more meticulous. He says that though they are usually slower than the male students, it’s because they are focusing on perfecting every level.

“I’m super lucky to have the shop I have,” Tuttle says. “I know I’m in a blessed situation where my boss has yet to tell me ‘no’ on things that I’ve asked, as long as it’s within reason.”

He believes the county isn’t doing a good job of giving students options while they’re in high school to pursue these careers.

The survey, conducted by research firm Evitarus, polled 400 registered voters, 495 parents of students attending public high schools in L.A. County and 258 students. Evaritus conducted three online surveys between Nov. 20, 2023, and Jan. 21, 2024. The margin of error for registered L.A. voters was plus or minus 4.9%. The four focus groups were for South L.A. Black/African American parents; L.A. Harbor Latino high school students; L.A.Harbor Latino parents (in Spanish); and South L.A. Black/African American high school students.

Students seeking state financial aid have just two weeks remaining to beat a California deadline, even as thousands  of completing the federal application necessary to get that state aid — a problem that particularly affects students who are citizens but whose parents are not. 

Now a prominent state lawmaker, Assemblymember Sabrina Cervantes, a Democrat from Corona and chair of the California Latino Legislative Caucus, is fast-tracking a bill to give affected California students additional time to complete the federal application and access more than $3 billion in state aid. If passed,  would move the current deadline from  and would go into effect immediately.

Its  is scheduled for Monday at 3 p.m. Lawmakers realistically must approve the measure before next Thursday, when the Legislature goes on break and reconvenes April 1 — one day before the current state financial aid deadline.  

Cervantes’ bill follows a technology crisis at the federal level that has prevented U.S. citizens from completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, because their parents don’t have a Social Security number. ����’s a new problem that only emerged this year and has generated a high degree of worry among the higher education community in California and nationally.

The tech glitch is basically this: The federal online application wouldn’t allow those parents to enter their financial information. Without those details, a student can’t finalize their federal aid application — and therefore cannot apply for state financial aid.

“The Legislature can highlight, double down on how unacceptable it is that certain U.S. citizens cannot submit a FAFSA,” said Gina Browne, a senior official with the California Community Colleges system, , “and I’m personally offended by it.”

The scale of the problem is hard to gauge. More than 100,000 California students last year submitted a federal aid application without their parents’ Social Security numbers. ����’s not clear how many of those had parents who lacked a number or whether they chose to not share one with the government. Nationally, about 2% of applicants faced this issue in 2024, U.S. Department of Education officials said.

Remaining federal issues

The department said  this week  blocking some students from finishing their applications. Those include instances in which a parent’s — or spouse’s — name doesn’t totally match the forms both the parent and student must complete. 

The state Senate is also planning to push for that debuted Thursday. California’s public colleges and universities urged a  to support an extension of the state financial aid deadline. Key advisors for the Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom backed the idea then.

“We think that extending the state financial aid deadline is worth considering because it allows the U.S. Department of Education more time to resolve these technical difficulties,” said Lisa Qing, an official with the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Chris Ferguson, of the California Department of Finance, said, “the administration is likely in a position to support such an extension.”

But a delay this year may not address other issues with the federal application that could emerge in 2025, said Jake Brymner, a senior official with the California Student Aid Commission.

Parents without Social Security numbers now have to confirm their identity to complete FAFSA, such as by . “Depending on the national political environment,” students “may have some additional concern about sharing family members’ information with a federal agency as they try to seek financial aid,” Brymner said.

Brymner’s implication is that families may worry if Donald Trump wins the presidential election this year. The Republican nominee reportedly plans a  of undocumented immigrants, , if he returns to the White House.

The commission  using another application for state financial aid — currently reserved for undocumented students — to bypass the federal technical glitches this year affecting U.S. citizens. The state doesn’t share information on that application with the federal government.

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Don Shalvey died March 16, 2024, of glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. He was 79.

A compelling case could be made that without Don Shalvey, the charter school sector would not have grown as rapidly into the vibrant movement it is today, serving across the United States.

Much of what Shalvey accomplished was based on his emphasis on building relationships and networks — and his exuberant personality, now tempered by brain cancer first diagnosed in December 2022. He has been vigorously fighting glioblastoma with the same fortitude that made him a pioneer in entrenching charters as a significant part of the nation’s education system over the last three decades. 

As superintendent of a small district south of San Francisco, Shalvey opened the San Carlos Learning Center in 1994. Now called , it was the first charter school in California and just the second in the nation, after in St. Paul.

Partnering with a pre-Netflix thirtysomething named Reed Hastings, Shalvey was instrumental in getting a legislative cap of a mere 100 charter schools for the entire state lifted — and replacing it with a limit of 100 per year. 

Today, despite intense opposition from the California Teachers Association, the state now has over 1,300 charter schools. One-fifth of all charter school students in the United States live in California, a disproportionately large number relative to the state’s population.

Shalvey and Hastings also came up with the idea of creating a nonprofit organization to run several charter schools simultaneously, and getting it written into law. Using that authority, they co-founded Aspire Public Schools, the nation’s first charter management organization. 

Today Aspire, with 36 schools, is one of the most esteemed CMOs in the nation. And one-third of all charter schools are run by a CMO. 

Shalvey expanded his work on behalf of charter schools nationally as deputy director of K-12 programs at the Gates Foundation. During his time there, charter enrollments grew by a half-million as a result of support from the Charter School Growth Fund underwritten by Gates and other foundations. But his efforts extended far beyond just charters, especially in implementing the Common Core standards and improving teacher preparation in several states.

Most recently, as CEO of , he has focused on improving outcomes for mostly Latino students in his beloved San Joaquin Valley. He has lived there for the last two decades, on a ranch in a small town near Stockton, with his wife, Sue Shalvey — herself a teacher, principal and leader in special education.

But his roots were in Philadelphia, where, by his own account, he learned lessons that shaped everything he did — including finding the right people to work with which to accomplish the seemingly impossible.  

“I grew up always wanting to be around people who were better than me in things I was trying to be good at,” Shalvey said in a recent interview. For example, to improve his skills on the basketball court, “you rounded up a team of your friends, and go to the toughest place you find in Philly to get better.”&�Բ�����;

Shalvey “is the living embodiment of Philadelphia street smarts and California dreaming, all in the service of students and their families,” said Bob Hughes, Gates’s director K-12 education in the U.S. “His intelligence, joy and exuberance light up every room he enters. ‘Protean talent’ is an understatement. Don would visit a classroom in the morning, meet with a group of principals in the afternoon and catch a jazz concert in the evening. And you would rush to keep up.”

Founding the San Carlos Charter, “took a lot of courage that you don’t see in too many school superintendents these days,” said Eric Premack, executive director of the , a support and advocacy organization. 

Starting Aspire, said Premack, who has worked alongside Shalvey since those early years, was “another groundbreaking thing to do, a gutsy move for a traditional school superintendent to make.”

I first met Shalvey over two decades ago, when, as an editorial board member at the San Francisco Chronicle — and charter school skeptic — I wrote a long and supportive piece about the just-opened Lionel Wilson Prep High School, in one of Oakland’s roughest neighborhoods. 

The park across the street had been chained shut for years because it was a haven for drug dealers and violence. The school, named for Oakland’s first black mayor and sporting gleaming corrugated aluminum panels, purple stucco walls and yellow doors, beamed hope into its struggling neighborhood.

It had been the first public school to open in Oakland in over 20 years, made possible by an $18 million private bond measure floated by Aspire.

An indication of Shalvey’s ability to bridge hostile divides, or even chasms, is that he persuaded then-Oakland superintendent Dennis Chaconas to join the school’s board of directors.

I did not see Shalvey for nearly a decade after that — until I became director of EdSource, and he was on its board. He enthusiastically supported its transformation into a journalism organization covering education in California.

Shalvey’s partnership with Hastings was crucial to some of his most public successes. To force California to raise the charter cap again, as the 100-school maximum had already been reached by 2005, they gathered the more than 1 million signatures needed to put an initiative on the ballot. 

“The [teachers union] said, ‘We don’t necessarily like what you are doing, but we don’t want to spend the money to defeat you at the ballot box,’ ” Shalvey said. And then, in classic Shalvey style, he reached a compromise on the legislation so the union didn’t oppose it.

“The combination of Don as Mr. Charming Establishment and me as a wealthy provocateur presented a unique challenge to the teachers union,” Hastings recalls. 

Carl Cohn, a leading educator who served on the California State Board of Education, recalled that when he was superintendent in Long Beach and Shalvey was in San Carlos, they backed the state’s original charter law. “Both of us thought that reducing bureaucracy and bringing teachers and parents closer together in the design of classroom programs that would benefit all kids was a really good idea. We were both heading traditional districts at the time. Unlike me, Don has stuck with that really good idea throughout his career of more than half a century.”&�Բ�����;

 “As we look at the emerging polarization and culture wars taking place in K-12 education today,” added Cohn, pointing to perhaps Shalvey’s greatest contribution, “Don’s calming voice resonates with both sides and is needed now more than ever.”

In addition to his humor and resolve, Shalvey brought an entrepreneurial spirit to his work. “A good way to spot an entrepreneur is that they don’t think they are taking risks,” said Hastings. “They just plunge in, they know how to win, they know how to make a difference.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

After years of cash windfalls, California schools are bracing for a stretch of austerity that could jeopardize students’ already precarious recovery from the pandemic.

An end to billions of dollars in federal COVID relief funds, declining enrollment, staff raises, hiring binges and stagnant state funding should combine over the next few months to create steep budget shortfalls, with low-income districts affected the most. 

“The fiscal cliff is going to vary,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. “The districts that got the most COVID relief dollars, those that have the most low-income students, are going to face the biggest losses.”&�Բ�����;

In his , Gov. Gavin Newsom largely spared schools, keeping intact popular initiatives like transitional kindergarten, universal school meals, community schools and after-school programs. He proposed dipping into reserves and delaying some expenses to make up a projected  shortfall.

But the exact numbers are shifting. The Legislative Analyst’s Office predicted that the  than Newsom calculated and cuts will be unavoidable. Newsom will release a revised budget in May, and the Legislature has until June 15 to pass a final budget.

Meanwhile, federal COVID relief funding for schools will end in September. In a series of grants known as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, the federal government gave California schools $23.4 billion to pay for everything from air purifiers to after-school tutoring. 

That funding was distributed based on the number of low-income students districts have. Districts with lots of low-income students got more money, which means they’ll lose the most when the funding ends. 

In the beginning of the pandemic, schools tended to spend the money on one-time expenses, like tablets and Wi-Fi hotspots for students attending school remotely. But as schools reopened, they started spending money on ongoing programs intended to help students catch up academically and recover from the mental health hardships of remote learning. That could include tutors, longer school days or summer and after-school programs.

San Bernardino City Unified used $8 million of its $230 million in COVID relief funds to beef up its after-school program. Thanks to the extra funding, the district has been able to offer free after-school activities, tutoring, transportation and mental health support at every school. 

Keeping the ‘sparkle in kids’ eyes’

Mia Cooper, a parent with three children in San Bernardino City Unified, said her childrens’ after-school program has been a life-saver. In fact, it’s the main reason they want to go to school, she said.

They not only benefit from tutoring, but they get to enjoy ballet and acting lessons, field trips to science museums and Disneyland, robotics classes, performances by folklórico dance troupes and other fun activities. 

During the pandemic, one of Cooper’s daughters was withdrawn and depressed, but the after-school program helped her reconnect with friends and fall in love with school again. Keeping the program intact should be a priority, Cooper said.

“The kids were exposed to so many different activities and cultural things,”  she said. “If a program is working for kids and we’re seeing good outcomes, I think it’s something we need to keep. … We shouldn’t lose that sparkle in kids’ eyes.”

A budget reckoning for some districts

But some �徱���ٰ�������’s use of COVID relief funds could worsen their budget prospects, Roza said. Districts that invested one-time funds in ongoing expenses, such as new staff, raises and bonuses, might be headed for a reckoning. Nationwide, school staff increased 2% since the pandemic while enrollment decreased 2%, according to Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab.

Salaries for existing teachers have risen, too. Districts in , ,  and  – all of which have declining enrollment – agreed to hefty teacher raises and bonuses in the past year.  

Still, the fiscal outlook is not as dire as it was during the 2008 recession, said Julien Lafortune, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California.  has risen dramatically since then, lifting California from the bottom half of states in school funding to . In addition, the state’s shift to  a decade ago has provided more money for students with higher needs, although inequities persist. 

But that doesn’t mean these cuts won’t hurt, Lafortune said, especially for students who were most affected by the pandemic. Low-income, Black and Latino students disproportionately bore the brunt of school closures, , because they were more likely to suffer economically from the pandemic, less likely to have adequate technology at home, and less likely to have a parent available to help them with distance learning.

“����’s not like the Great Recession, but I think the challenges are greater now,” Lafortune said. “A lot of the academic progress we made was erased by the pandemic.”&�Բ�����;

Roza worries that arguments over potential cuts in the next year will eclipse concern over learning loss. Potential school closures and teacher layoffs will inevitably elicit loud protests, but school boards should stay focused on services that directly help students, such as math tutoring and literacy, she said.

“Some districts will be focusing on staff retention instead of kids’ needs,” Roza said. 

These decisions may be so divisive that Roza predicts a high rate of turnover among school administrators and board members unwilling to make unpopular decisions. She also expects to see some districts refuse to make sufficient cuts and risk insolvency or state takeover.

Planning pays off in Fresno

Fresno Unified is among the districts facing a double whammy of declining enrollment and a large loss of relief funds. The 70,000-student district received more than $787 million in state and federal relief money, one of the largest allotments in California.

But the district was careful to build reserves, rely on state grants when possible and not overly invest in ongoing staff salaries. Instead, it used most of its money to train teachers in math and literacy, extend the school day and provide a high-quality summer program. It also brought in social workers, restorative justice counselors, attendance specialists and other staff to boost students’ mental health.

The investments have apparently paid off. The number of students meeting California’s math benchmark rose almost 3 percentage points last year, even as the state average remained unchanged. And chronic absenteeism fell significantly, from 51% in 2022 to 35% last year.

Still, the district expects to make some cuts, probably affecting the district office but not schools directly — at least at first, said the �徱���ٰ�������’s chief financial officer, Patrick Jensen.

“����’s like we’re in a boat and we can see a storm coming,” Jensen said. “We’re not going to be dashed against the rocks but we still need to find a safe harbor.”.

San Bernardino City Unified, among California’s lowest-income districts, also received a high  relief funding payout: $230 million for 46,000 students. But the district isn’t anticipating a financial disaster once the funding expires. It plans to shift some of its state block grant money to pay for programs funded with relief money, where necessary, and has been conservative with planning. ����’s also closely monitoring the state budget and economic outlook, said Associate Superintendent Terry Comnick.

But there’s still likely to be some cuts, and the district will have to look closely at what programs have been effective and which didn’t live up to expectations. In addition to the after-school program, a “resident guest teacher” program had positive results, Comnick said. The district hired substitute teachers to work one-on-one or in small groups with students who were the furthest behind. The $4.5 million program, which was at every school, resulted in higher test scores among the highest-needs students.

So far, it looks like the district will be able to keep both programs, at least for the next few years, Comnick said.

“People call it a (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief) cliff because the money just ends,” Comnick said. “But for us it will hopefully be a gentle slope.”