The Chronicle, CATHERINE HO: "The Bay Area is expected to receive a brief bout of rain and wind starting Monday afternoon, but it will be much less powerful than the historic storm that hit the region in late October.

Light rainfall is likely to begin developing over the North Bay on Monday afternoon, and increase in intensity over other parts of the Bay Area throughout the evening and overnight, said National Weather Service meteorologist Roger Gass. The bulk of the rainfall is expected to occur after sunset Monday and before sunrise Tuesday.

“It’s nowhere in comparison to the event we had in October. That one did produce historic rainfall across the North Bay and Bay Area,” Gass said. “This will be a little more run-of-the-mill type atmospheric river, a relatively weak one.”

LA Times, LA Times, LILA SEIDMAN: "When a fierce early-season storm drenched parts of Northern California last month, some experts said it was in the nick of time.

Reservoir levels were critically low. Soils were parched. Fires rampaged through dry forests.

There was general consensus among climate experts that not even the record-breaking downpour would end the two-year drought plaguing the state. There was too much of a deficit, and a single storm — even of biblical proportions — would not be able to solve it in one fell swoop."

SETH SANDRONSKY, Capitol Weekly: "About 17,000 graduate student researchers calling themselves Student Researchers United (SRU) at 10 University of California campuses are seeking to form a union with the United Auto Workers, a campaign that began in early 2020. UC management is not wholly on board with this move of unrepresented employees.

Ryan King, a representative for the UC’s Office of the President, declined a reporter’s request for an interview, but issued the following statement.

“The University of California believes our graduate student researchers contribute to the University’s key research mission, creating new knowledge. We support our employees’ right to union representation. UC is in ongoing discussions with the United Auto Workers and the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) regarding the final composition of this new bargaining unit.”

L.A. restaurants in low-vaccination areas brace for hits as new mandate arrives

JENN HARRIS, LA Times: "Is this the beginning of the end?” Kim Prince asked during a recent phone call. “We have been in a period of pivot, pivot, pivot. I just want to fry chicken.”

On Monday, Prince, who owns Hotville restaurant at the Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw mall, and all other restaurateurs in the city of Los Angeles will have to pivot again to comply with a new ordinance that requires customers to show proof of a vaccine or a negative COVID-19 test to dine indoors.

Enforcement of the ordinance, which covers shopping malls, movie theaters, beauty salons and other indoor activities, will start Nov. 29 and remain in effect until the city lifts its COVID-19 pandemic emergency declaration."

The Chronicle, ERIN ALLDAY and JILL TUCKER: "Federal approval of vaccines for 5- to 11-year-olds last week marked a turning point in the pandemic, with all school-aged children now able to get the shots.

But it also sparked what has become an urgent, and potentially divisive, question among many parents: How much longer are kids going to have to wear masks at school?

The short answer: for a while yet. The school mask mandate is a state order, and California public health officials will only say that it’s in place indefinitely."

Sacramento Bee, GILLIAN BRASSIL: "In an ornamental glass case on the left side of California Sen. Alex Padilla’s office sits a framed picture of his parents meeting President Joe Biden in Los Angeles in 2014.

Yes, Padilla says, he had the chance to introduce his parents to the then-vice president of the United States.

“But the other thing is, I introduced the vice president to my parents,” he said in an interview with The Sacramento Bee."

The Chronicle, JOE GAROFOLI: "The San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ controversial decision to reject a 495-unit apartment complex has become a key issue in what will become one of the hottest races in the Bay Area — and likely California — over the next few months: the special election to replace David Chiu in the Assembly.

For San Francisco voters, the question provides a crucial way to differentiate between the two big-name candidates in the race — Supervisor Matt Haney and former Supervisor David Campos — both of whom are progressive Democrats, likely to agree on many of the decisions they’d be faced with in the Assembly. They are on opposite sides of this project.

Sacramento Bee, DAVID LIGHTSABER/JEONG PARK: "The California business community has an idea for easing the supply chain crisis: Suspend recent labor-friendly laws affecting warehouse workers and independent contractors.

Businesses say they will be able to move goods more quickly if the state suspends the 2019 law that requires companies to provide more workers with employment benefits. Ditto for the law that prevents warehouses from enforcing quotas that limit people’s ability to take bathroom breaks.

LA Times, CHRIS MEGERIAN, MELANIE MASON and ERIN B. LOGAN: "During five decades in public life, Joe Biden has confronted, with varying degrees of success, nearly every flashpoint in American racial politics, from school desegregation to crime crackdowns that disproportionately affected communities of color. When he ran for president last year, he promised to “heal the soul of our nation” that had been inflamed by Donald Trump.

Now, less than one year into his term, Biden is facing a rising furor over education and critical race theory, a decades-old academic framework that’s become a catch-all term for everything Republicans dislike about diversity initiatives, how schools teach U.S. history and other ripple effects from last year’s reckoning on racial injustice ignited by the murder of George Floyd.

The issue presents an array of challenges for the president and his party. Stoked by a right-wing media ecosystem that can amplify and distort the debate, it echoes appeals to white grievances that have a tradition of electoral success. Democrats can be hesitant to engage, but ignoring the controversy opens them up to criticism that they’re out of touch or dismissive of parental concerns — a sentiment that Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, harnessed in his successful campaign for Virginia governor."

The Chronicle, DUSTIN GARDNER: "Farmer Erik Herman said he couldn’t help but feel a tinge of remorse as he looked out over the dirt field where an orchard of 8,000 fig trees stood until earlier this month, when they were uprooted by bulldozers in the name of conservation.

The orchard, seven miles outside Madera in the sprawling San Joaquin Valley, is another casualty of the water shortage that is forcing farmers in the nation’s top-producing agricultural region to abandon otherwise fertile ground en masse.

Sacramento Bee, MILA JASPER: "With some early application deadlines passing and others looming just around the corner, high school seniors across California are in the thick of it: tallying up their Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate classes, asking teachers for recommendations and putting together personal essays.

Students have more than enough work on their hands without spending time figuring out which schools require what information, and how their grade point average compares to other admitted students’ data.

The Sacramento Bee organized key first-year admission information including important dates, acceptance rates and application fees for the University of California and California State University systems as well as Stanford and the University of Southern California so you can keep track of it all in one place."

LA Times, MOLLY HENNESSY-FISKE: "During the last year, Mary Ellen Cuzela — concerned about students being indoctrinated about sex and “critical race theory” — successfully petitioned her suburban Houston school district of about 83,000 to remove two books from their libraries: The novel “Lawn Boy” by Jonathan Evison and the graphic novel “Losing the Girl” by MariNaomi.

Cuzela, a mother of three who works for the district as a substitute teacher, said she was encouraged by Republican Texas lawmakers’ focus on critical race theory, an academic framework for examining systemic racism — which is not taught in any U.S. public school — that she considers “Marxist ideology” and “anti-American.” She has a list of more than a dozen more books she wants removed from schools along Houston’s rapidly growing and diversifying Energy Corridor, home to some of the world’s major oil and gas companies.

“I don’t want to ban books. I don’t want to be a book burner. My goodness, no,” said Cuzela, 49, whose children have attended public school for years in Katy. “I’m not into censoring. That is not what this is about. We filter students’ internet access. We have keywords, trigger words, that we know people shouldn’t have access to as a minor. So why isn’t that same process in the school libraries?”"

LA Times, PALOMA ESQUIVEL: "A few years ago, high school teacher Joshua Moreno got fed up with his grading system, which had become a points game.

Some students accumulated so many points early on that by the end of the term they knew they didn’t need to do more work and could still get an A. Others — often those who had to work or care for family members after school — would fail to turn in their homework and fall so far behind that they would just stop trying.

“It was literally inequitable,” he said. “As a teacher you get frustrated because what you signed up for was for students to learn. And it just ended up being a conversation about points all the time.”"

Rain, wind and snow

The Roundup: