WeToo: pushing for gender parity in the California Legislature
Capitol Weekly, RICH EHISEN: "On the morning of Election Day 2016, Buffy Wicks figured two momentous events in her life were going to come to fruition that day: the birth of her first child and Hillary Clinton being elected president of the United States.
Spoiler alert – neither of those things happened.
“I had been the state director for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and I thought that my daughter was going to be born the day we elected the first woman president,” Wicks recalls. “Then my daughter was late, which I call her first act of civil disobedience. And obviously Hillary Clinton did not become president.”"
Newsom supports cash reparations? Governor’s comments ‘inaccurately framed,’ spokesperson says
Sac Bee, MARCUS D. SMITH: "Gov. Gavin Newsom’s spokesperson has corrected the “inaccurate” framing of his comments earlier this week in response to approved recommendations by the state’s task force that studied the wrongdoings of slavery and other historical forms of discrimination against Black people.
It was reported Wednesday by Fox News that Newsom “declined to endorse cash payments,” which is a false narrative according to the Governor’s office.
Newsom had said in a media statement that “dealing with the legacy of slavery is about much more than cash payments.”"
California Democrats further torn after seeing Sen. Feinstein’s return to Washington
LA Times, SEEMA MEHTA, BENJAMIN ORESKES: "As she approaches retirement age, Democrat Donna Perkins understands reluctance about telling Sen. Dianne Feinstein what to do as she winds down her career.
After all, California’s senior senator has already announced that she would not seek another term — and some argue that the calls for her to step down earlier are rooted in misogyny and ageism.
But after seeing news coverage of Feinstein’s return to the nation’s capital last week, in a wheelchair and still weak after a nearly three-month absence from Washington as she recovered from shingles, Perkins is more concerned than ever about the 89-year-old senator’s ability to represent 39 million Californians."
Gloria Molina, Chicana who blazed paths across L.A. politics, dies
LA Times, GUSTAVO ARELLANO: "Gloria Molina, the daughter of working-class parents and an unapologetic Chicana who transformed the political landscape of Los Angeles, died Sunday night after a three-year battle with cancer.
Her death at her home in Mount Washington, surrounded by her family, was confirmed in a Facebook post on Molina’s official account. She was 74.
Molina’s political life had been a series of firsts that inspired generations of women and Latinos to seek public office — the first Latina Assembly member in California, the first Latina on the Los Angeles City Council, the first Latina on the L.A. County Board of Supervisors."
Map of California tornadoes shows where the spikes in wild weather happened
The Chronicle, JACK LEE: "The start of 2023 has brought wild weather to California, including an above-average number of tornadoes.
Just last week, two tornadoes touched down in the Los Angeles area within a span of about 10 minutes. That brings the total as of mid-May to nine, compared with the annual average of seven, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Tornadoes aren’t that unusual for California — just relatively infrequent compared with other parts of the country, like the central United States. They tend to land more frequently in two “miniature Tornado Alleys” — the Central Valley and the Los Angeles coastal plain — Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the Nature Conservancy, said during an online presentation."
The Chronicle, MATTHIAS GAFNI, CYNTHIA DIZIKES: "California health regulators have barred John Muir Medical Center from treating some of the state’s most seriously ill children after flagging dozens of wide-ranging and serious issues in the Walnut Creek hospital’s pediatric intensive care unit, The Chronicle has learned.
The violations documented last week by the Department of Health Care Services, or DHCS, call into question the qualifications and competency of the unit’s doctors and nurses, as well as the care they were providing to children in the pediatric intensive care unit, or PICU. The unprecedented move by DHCS means that the unit is now unable to admit patients through California Children’s Services, or CCS, a public health program that has boosted the PICU’s profits and profile since it first obtained certification to treat these children in 2017.
The state review of the PICU — which opened in 2015 under the branding and partnership of national health care powerhouse Stanford Medicine Children’s Health — was prompted by a series of Chronicle investigations into four potentially preventable deaths, as well as DHCS’s failure to provide oversight of more than two dozen units throughout California with CCS certification."
Author of bill to tie school employees' raises to funding formula increases makes big concession
EdSource, JOSH FENSTERWALD: "The author of legislation that would raise funding under the Local Control Funding Formula to pay for a 50% wage increase for school staff over seven years has agreed to drop a key provision to mollify critics. It’s too early in the legislative process to determine whether they will be satisfied.
As amended, Assembly Bill 938 would set the goal of increasing the base level of funding for LCFF by 50% by 2030-31. But it would no longer explicitly call for raising school employees’ pay by the same percentage. Instead, it would say the Legislature’s intent is more general: to use the funding increase “to close the pay gap” between educators and the market for other comparably skilled employees.
“The ultimate goal is to address the crisis of a shortage of school employees by closing the wage gap — rather than focus on an arbitrary number of 50%, not only for teachers but for food service workers, who can make more at McDonald’s,” Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, the author of the bill as well as the chair of the Assembly Education Committee, said this week."
The Chronicle, JILL TUCKER, NORA MISHANEC: "The Oakland Unified School District reached a tentative agreement Sunday with striking teachers, but the teachers’ union said it was awaiting “an accurate document” reflecting the deal before agreeing to avert another strike day on Monday.
The school district sent the union the tentative agreement “signed and ready for their signature” on Sunday night, and was waiting for a reply, school Board President Mike Hutchinson told The Chronicle shortly after 11:30 p.m. “We’re waiting on them.”
Shortly after 10 p.m., the Oakland Education Association, the teachers' union, had announced on Facebook: “We will be on strike tomorrow unless OUSD can complete and produce an accurate document that reflects the agreement that we reached with the district earlier today. We have given the district a deadline of 11 PM to do so.” Hutchinson said the district did send the union the agreement before 11 p.m."
Teaching from 3,000 miles away: San Jose school’s response to the California teacher shortage
BANG*Mercury News, ELISSA MIOLENE: "On a Wednesday morning in May, a dozen students streamed into their geometry class at the Cindy Avitia High School. But instead of looking toward the blackboard, the 10th-graders opened up their laptops — and got ready to connect with a teacher nearly 3,000 miles away.
Their class is one of 11 taught by a virtual teacher at the charter school, which is pulling in educators from Alaska, Maryland and Texas to address California’s teacher shortage.
“I know it’s not ideal for our students — we all know that,” said Shara Hegde, the CEO of Alpha Public Schools, a charter network with four schools in San Jose. “But until we really, radically change the education profession here in the United States, we’re going to be looking at solutions like this.”"
LA Times, JOSH ROTTENBERG, JESSICA GELT: "Less than two weeks ago, 11,500 members of the Writers Guild of America went on strike. When they put down their pens and closed their laptops, some also put their careers and ability to support their families on hold. It was a risk they were willing to take in a struggle that has threatened to boil over for years.
On daily picket lines outside studios and production facilities in Los Angeles and New York, television and film writers have been hoisting placards and chanting in unison, hoping to force the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers to heed their demands for what they regard as fair compensation and better working conditions in an industry that has been radically reshaped by streaming.
With the two sides still far apart over a range of thorny issues including streaming residuals, staffing levels and the use of AI, many fear the standoff could drag on for months, sending aftershocks across the industry and doing untold damage to the local economy."
Breed says her own car was broken into, as CNN questions whether S.F. is ‘failed city’
The Chronicle, NORA MISHANEC: "Facing heightened pressure to improve public safety, San Francisco Mayor London Breed voiced sympathy with frustrated residents while defending her handling of the city’s homelessness and drug crises during a Sunday CNN report on the city's problems.
The mayor said she understands how residents feel, telling an interviewer that her own car was broken into last year.
The hour-long report — aired on CNN’s “The Whole Story With Anderson Cooper” — retread well-known problems in the city’s troubled Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods. In addition to Breed, CNN’s Sara Sidner, a former KTVU anchor, queried former Mayor Willie Brown and former Chronicle columnist Phil Matier on whether drug use and soaring housing costs had turned San Francisco into a “failed city.”
BANG*Mercury News, ETHAN VARIAN: "Angelica Lopez has been here before. A notice from the city. Visits from outreach workers. Thirty days to pack up her belongings and move along.
But this time, Lopez and hundreds of other homeless people staying by Coyote Creek in central San Jose are being warned that they no longer can set up camp on much of the waterway — a grassy floodplain where many have lived for years.
Starting Monday, the city will begin clearing a roughly four-mile section of the creek to make way for a long-planned flood-protection project. Anyone still there after that date will be considered trespassing."
BANG*Mercury News, ALDO TOLEDO: "When Kathryn Wade moved to Antioch in 2007, she thought she’d finally get her little slice of the American dream.
Better schools. Safer neighborhoods. Room to breathe. A town where Friday nights are for high school football, an appropriate suburban ending to weekdays spent on hours-long commutes under tunnels and across bridges.
Just 45 miles from her native San Francisco, Wade saw it as the perfect place to build a life away from the poverty, crime and violence of the city, and keep her teenage sons out of trouble."