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  • When California schools summon police 

    When California schools summon police 


    Middle schooler allegedly attacks classmate twice, choking him severely. Police recommend attempted murder charges to district attorney.

    School staff calls police to report squirrel with injured leg in school courtyard.

    Unknown man in swimsuit briefs adorned with Australian flag trespassing at high school pool. Lifeguard sees a man follow boys 9 and 12, into the locker room. Man strips, pulls back the shower curtain to see the boy and asks: “Does this make you uncomfortable?” Man flees. Police list indecent exposure and lewd acts as possible offenses.

    Officer dispatched to investigate ringing school alarm. Burnt English muffin found in teachers’ lounge. 

    From Crescent City, Weed and Alturas in the far north to Calexico and El Cajon nearly 800 miles south, all along the Pacific Coast, across the sprawling Central Valley and up into the High Sierra and down into the Mojave Desert, police are dispatched to California schools thousands of times on any given day classes are in session.

    Reasons are myriad: Students bringing guns and knives — and even a spear and a bow and arrow — to school, sexual assaults and “perversion reports” and fights. Then there are lost keys, malfunctioning alarms, and dogs — even cattle — loose on school grounds. Once, police were called for help with a swarm of bees.

    Calling the Cops Investigation

    Editor’s Note: This is the first in a continuing investigation into school policing in California.

    Monday: San Bernardino County: growing hotspot for school-run police

    Explore the data at callingthecops.edsource.org

    Credits: 

    • Reporting: Thomas Peele and Daniel J. Willis
    • Local reporting: Emma Gallegos (Kern County), Lasherica Thornton (Fresno), Mallika Seshadri (Los Angeles and San Bernardino County) and Monica Velez (Oakland)
    • Project manager and editor: Rose Ciotta, Investigations and Projects Editor
    • Database design, data gathering, scraping, cleaning: Daniel J. Willis, Thomas Peele and Justin Allen 
    • Website design: Justin Allen
    • Graphics and website design: Yuxuan (Sunny) Xie
    • Social media, photo editor: Andrew Reed
    • Copy Editor: Chuck Carroll

    Cops rush to reports of students attempting suicide and overdosing on drugs, bullying, sexual assault and unwanted touching. They surveil high schoolers leaving campuses for lunch. They break up fights between parents over spots in elementary school pickup queues. They haul drunken adults from the stands at school sporting events. They once investigated a teacher’s claim that someone stole $10,000 from her classroom desk. 

    Mostly the call logs capture the anguish of youngsters with mental health challenges, victims whose nude photos are showing up on social media for all to see and parents turning to school administrators to deal with it all.

    Such details emerged from nearly 46,000 police call logs and dispatch records EdSource obtained from 164 law enforcement agencies in 57 of California’s 58 counties as part of a sweeping statewide investigation into school policing.  

    The data offered a raw, first-blush look at why school staff summon cops, reasons that sometimes lead to juvenile and adult arrests.

    All incidents included in the police logs largely remain out of public view due to state laws that shield juveniles and allow police to withhold information on investigations. As a result, the data collected as a representative sample of the state is also clearly an undercount of what routinely occurs in California schools.

    An EdSource analysis found that nearly a third of all calls for police were for incidents deemed serious. After consulting police experts, EdSource tagged the data with a definition for serious incidents as those that reasonably required a police presence. Included among serious incidents are those tagged as violent, which include anything involving a violent act, including self-harm.

    The share of serious incidents increases to 4 out of 10 when police patrols are set aside. They make up about a third of all records, but most have little detail on what police were doing at or near the school.

    The analysis also showed that high school students in districts with their own police departments are policed at a higher rate than in districts that rely on municipal police and sheriffs. 

    School police calls across California

    Four years after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, igniting a national revolt and the defund-the-police movement, only about 20 of California’s 977 public-school districts made significant changes to school policing.

    Most that acted ended contracts with municipal police departments to post cops — commonly called school resource officers — in schools. And three districts that made changes reversed course and brought police back after short hiatuses. 

    EdSource’s investigation sampled records showing calls from and about schools to city and school district police departments and county sheriffs. In some cases, officers stationed in schools dispatch themselves to a problem by radioing their dispatcher. Schools without campus police often call 911. Typically, police record their activity as “patrol” or “school check,” vague descriptions that raise questions about the use of public resources.

    Whenever a school resource officer ran along a corridor, one hand on a radio microphone, or a sheriff’s deputy raced along a country road with lights and sirens on to reach a distant rural school, they contributed to what data showed is a vast, continuing police presence in California’s pre-K to 12 public education, EdSource found.

    The records resurfaced a debate lingering years after Floyd’s killing about how much policing schools need and if deploying armed officers does more harm than good.

    Similarly to police debates at the municipal level, school policing can be polarizing. Across California, the issue emerges as a political divide, with some seeing the police as necessary to ensure safety and others seeing them as agents of racial injustice.

    In 2021, the ACLU of Southern California issued a scathing report that recommended an end to school policing in the Golden State, calling it “discriminatory, costly, and counterproductive.” In schools with regularly assigned cops, students across “all groups” were more likely to be arrested or referred to law enforcement, researchers found.

    A 2020 University of Maryland study published in the journal Criminology and Public Policy, found school districts that increased policing through federal grants “did not increase school safety.” Researchers recommended improving safety through “the many alternatives” to police in schools.

    In California, school policing is “a structure. It’s part of the budgets, it’s part of the vocabulary of the schools. It’s part of what the expectation is from the parents and the students,” said Southwestern Law School professor Jyoti Nanda, who has researched school policing for 25 years and calls it “completely unnecessary,” adding, America is the lone civilized country where it is practiced.

    In rural California, school policing is seen as routine, allowing students to become “comfortable interacting with someone in a uniform, wearing a badge, and carrying a gun, so that as they grew older, they see those people as a friendly face, a resource that they could go to as opposed to someone that they should be afraid of,” Tulare County School Superintendent Tim Hire told EdSource. The practice is spreading in Tulare, where three small districts recently agreed to share a resource officer to travel among them. 

    Such decisions are often couched as safety matters, a vigilant effort to prevent the next school shooting and avoid the failure of Uvalde, Texas police to stop the gunman who slaughtered 19 students and two teachers in 2022.

    When state Assemblymember Bill Essayli,  R-Riverside, introduced legislation in February to require an armed police officer in each public school with more than 50 students, he described the need in base terms: “We need good guys and girls with guns, ready to act.” 

    Essayli’s idea is “a step backward,” Assembly Education Committee member Mia Bonta D-Alameda, said at a hearing where the bill died in April. “We know it to be true that there’s a disproportionate impact on Black and brown students when police officers are in schools.” 

    A matter of local control

    The state Department of Education offers no guidance or best practices, calling policing a local matter, a spokesperson said. There’s little consistency statewide in whether police are deployed in schools. Nineteen school districts have their own police departments, including Los Angeles Unified, which refused to release its police call data, some with only a handful of officers.

    Los Angeles Unified cut its police department’s budget by 35% in 2020 and banned officers from being posted in schools. Following reports of escalating violence, the district recently reinstated police to two schools through mid-June. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho had informed the school board that he was planning to return police to 20 schools, but he got community and trustee backlash.

    Oakland Unified disbanded its police department in favor of non-police staffers to keep peace in schools and respond to emergencies. Principals were trained on when to call city police only as a last resort. Still, data shows eight of the district’s 18 traditional middle and high schools combined to call city police 225 times, with nearly half of them serious, between Jan. 15 and June 30, 2023. Reasons include assault with a deadly weapon, suicide attempts, battery and terrorist/criminal threats.

    Retired Long Beach and San Diego school Superintendent Carl Cohn, who served on the California State Board of Education from 2011 to 2018, said Oakland’s model of deploying people to talk students through peaceful resolutions of disputes can work. In the early 1990s, he ran the Long Beach schools anti-gang task force, hiring people with “street cred,” including former gang members. 

    They “could stop instantly what was going on on a campus by their mere presence,” Cohn said.  “Their credibility with youngsters that might be on the verge of gang affiliation was really powerful.”

    Yet Cohn’s “not on board with this notion of ‘let’s abandon the school police altogether.’ It’s the type of thing where ultimately there’s enough bad things from time to time happening that the safety of children has to be front and center.” Police must be well-trained, and school officials must cooperate with them, he added.

    Shutting down the Oakland Unified police department of 11 officers and changing its policing culture is tough and ongoing, said a leader of a racial-justice group that pushed for the change.

     “There’s still the ideology of policing that exists on campus and is embedded in the infrastructure of schools that we’re also up against,” said Jessica Black, a Black Organizing Project activist. “The criminalization of young people, implicit bias, and anti-Black racist practices” still need to be confronted. 

    It was only after Floyd’s murder that Dr. Tony Moos, a physician, learned that her four children who had each attended high school in the affluent Santa Clara County city of Los Altos had “negative interactions” with school resources officers “that they’d kept to themselves,” she said. 

    Moos was motivated to act and got the city to examine school police practices and make changes.

    After hearings that included a Black high school teacher saying a resource officer had once pushed her to the ground, the city pulled police from the high school. The city also replaced its police chief in 2022. The new hire, a Black woman, came with much-needed experience. 

    Out of public view

    California law grants police wide powers to withhold documents, including investigatory records, requested under the Public Records Act without revealing how many such records are being withheld. Many departments withheld from EdSource some — or even all — of the school calls they received. 

    The same is true about what information police can reveal in news releases or public statements about individual school incidents, especially involving juveniles. The public is often then not informed about police activity in schools.  

    That means that the serious incidents — weapons, death threats, rapes, assaults, fights, drugs — that police are responding to in 3 out of 10 calls often remain confidential.

    Police in Crescent City, Del Norte County, for example, didn’t release information about the attempted murder of a student at Crescent Elk Middle School by a classmate who allegedly repeatedly choked him on Jan. 23, 2023, until EdSource asked about the incident more than a year later.

    When EdSource asked police in Avenal, Kings County to elaborate on a call record of a late-night report of “shots fired” at the city’s high school, a lawyer responded claiming the information was exempt from disclosure.  

    “The problem is that (the exemptions) apply to virtually everything law enforcement does. They never expire. So, every police report is potentially covered by the investigatory records exemption,” said David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, an open government group. The lack of disclosure of police activity in schools makes it all the harder to determine what the correct level of policing should be, he added. 

    Given the importance of the issue, the lack of information is troubling, Loy said. The debate over school policing “should be held on the basis of full and complete data and not driven by anecdote.”

    A day of policing

    The one-day record of police responding to a school for serious incidents was 10, the data sample shows. 

    That was May 17, 2023, at Burroughs High School in the Sierra Sands Unified School District in Ridgecrest, a desert city of 28,000 in eastern Kern County near Death Valley.

    The first occurred at 8:38 a.m. when a school resource officer arrested a student for battery and released him to his parents. District Assistant Superintendent Brian Auld, who’s in charge of security, told EdSource the student “didn’t even go to the police station.”

    That was followed at 9:09 a.m. by reports of two students who appeared to be under the influence of drugs. They were evaluated and returned to class. Another report of two students apparently under the influence came in at 10:26 a.m. One student was impaired and released to their parents, Auld said.

    Less than 10 minutes later, the resource officer responded to a student in “mental distress” who was taken for a psychological evaluation. 

    At 1:23 p.m., police were alerted to a terrorist threat that ended up involving a student threatening to beat up someone, Auld said. 

    About 20 minutes later, two girls began fighting in art class. 

    One grabbed what Auld called “an art project” — apparently a ceramic object — and allegedly swung it at the other girl’s head. Police called it assault with a deadly weapon, arresting the aggressor. “Deadly weapon sounds like a knife or a gun. The officer made the decision that (the object) could have done serious bodily harm,” Auld said. “I’m not downplaying it.”  

    At 3:14 p.m. a report of disturbing the peace came in. No details were provided.

    At 10:26 p.m, a vandalism report to the police turned out to be benign — police found that soon-to-graduate seniors had decorated the school with toilet paper.

    Ridgecrest is “a unique, isolated community” near a military base. The school district considers its relationship with the police as a successful partnership, Auld said.

    District officials “have some, or even total, discretion regarding whether or not an arrest is made,” he added. The district has 15 counselors, mental health therapists and a registered behavioral therapist, Auld said. It’s also implementing restorative practices and social-emotional learning to “change behaviors before they result in suspensions, expulsions and arrests.”

    The Kings of calls

    The most total call and dispatch records in the data for one school that relies on calling 911 was Lemoore High School, in Lemoore, a city of 26,600 in Kings County with 471 calls over a nearly six-month period.

    Lemoore police, which refers to school police as youth development officers, provided scant detail on the reasons for the calls, listing hundreds in records as premises checks. 

    In an interview, Lt. Alvaro Santos, who supervises Lemoore’s school policing, attributed the numbers to the department’s practice of having all available officers “drop what they’re doing” during the times students arrive at school and leave for lunch and later go home, basically surrounding the buildings, some on side streets out of view of students.

    “They’re around the school. They could be either parked on a side street or they could be driving by looking for vehicle code violations or anything that would pose a danger to the students,” Santos said. He said the schools are near a main road through the city and that there are concerns about drunk drivers in the area.

    More serious calls

    Sampled data shows that middle schools have a higher rate of serious incidents reported to police than high schools. At Cesar Chavez Middle School, in East Palo Alto, 41% of calls to police reported violent incidents, threats and sexual misconduct, data shows.

    In one of two calls that East Palo Alto police labeled “perversion report,” a student allegedly used a phone to make “a TikTok” of another girl using the restroom, according to a recording of a heavily redacted 911 call to police from a school official. Police refused to release any details.

    Fresno’s Gaston Middle School is in a neighborhood plagued by violence, gangs and drugs, all of which follow students through the school doors, both police and Fresno Unified Superintendent Bob Nelson said.

    A patrol car for a Fresno Unified student resource officer sits outside of Gaston Middle School and its health clinic.
    Credit: Lasherica Thornton / EdSource

    “I would love for there to be no acts of any physical harm on another person, but that’s impossible,” Sgt. Anthony Alvarado said.

    Fresno Unified has been debating what level of policing to have in its schools for several years. In 2020 police were pulled from the district’s middle schools but remained in high schools. After several violent incidents, police were returned to some middle schools in 2022 and the rest in 2023. 

    School “feels like a prison” 

    The daily presence of Kern High School District police at Mira Monte High in Bakersfield “feels ghetto,” sophomore Jose Delgado said.

    The school “feels like a prison. It’s like they don’t trust us at all.”

    Still, Delgado said, he understands the need for police, noting a lot of fights at the school. “It’s for the best, but it makes us feel ghetto.”

    Data shows 163 police call records at Delgado’s school for the five-and-a-half month period. They describe incidents including assault with a deadly weapon, an irate parent, out-of-control juveniles and resisting a police officer. 

    Delgado’s sense of school as a prison and not being trusted are among the reasons why the negatives of school policing “completely outweigh the positives,” Nanda, the Southwestern Law School professor said. 

    The students who police typically interact with “are not the children that are doing well in school,” Nanda said. “Part of why there isn’t an outrage, a global outrage, is because it’s not impacting the people that are in power, the people who have agency.”

    Children seeing police in schools can be akin to going to an airport and encountering armed officers at a security checkpoint, said University of Florida education professor Chris Curran, who has studied school policing extensively. “It’s natural to wonder what’s wrong, why are there people with guns?” he said.  “You find yourself saying, ‘What do I not know about? What’s this danger that has necessitated assault rifles?’”

    No state guidance

    When he was a state Assembly member in 2020, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, Assemblymember Mia Bonta’s spouse, clearly came down on the side of removing police from schools when he spoke at a forum after Floyd’s murder.

    “It’s just really important to call out this incredible moment,” he said, lauding districts, including Oakland, that ended policing. “There’s a general dehumanization of children of color, a belief that they need to be surveilled and monitored and watched and policed.” 

    “The outcomes don’t make our students safer,” he said. School policing is “not achieving what we’re seeking,” a video of the forum shows. It was hosted  by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond. 

    State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond.
    Credit: Andrew Reed/EdSource

    Asked recently if Bonta’s position on school policing as the state’s top law enforcement officer mirrors what he said in 2020, his press secretary replied “no” via email.

    Bonta, who’s expected to enter the 2026 governor’s race, “has always believed that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for school safety, and that schools need to work towards data-driven policies that fit their community,” Alexandra Duquet wrote.

    “School resource officers can be an important component of ensuring students and school personnel safety,” Duquet wrote. “Their primary focus should be ensuring the safety of all on campus — not discipline — and they be given tools such as implicit bias training that ensure the equitable treatment of all students.”     

    Thurmond, a declared 2026 gubernatorial candidate, took no position on school policing during the forum. He recently told EdSource he favors “well-trained school resource officers to handle serious situations.” He also called for “more training of school staff so they’re not calling police for something that’s a student discipline matter.”    

    Thurmond also said that during his time as a member of the West Contra Costa Unified School District board from 2008-2012 he saw police officers help students, calling them “some of the best social workers I’ve worked with.”

    State Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, who during Thurmond’s forum praised Oakland’s shuttering of its school police department, said in an interview that school districts should consider alternatives to police the way some cities have started using trained civilians to respond to 911 mental-health-crisis calls.

    State Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley.
    Credit: AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli

    “Kids are emotional. Kids don’t have impulse control the way adults should, and to bring an officer in, especially since all of our officers are armed, can, rather than defuse the situation, make it worse,” Skinner said. Kids can act out what they experience at home or on the street, she added.

    Skinner, the author of several major police accountability bills, also said she saw value in the data EdSource obtained and published.

    Police logs can help officials decide if civilian staff should deal with more school incidents at a time when California’s suffering a police shortage, she said. That could leave sworn officers available for “real public safety needs. We never want to prevent a school from calling 911 if that’s needed. However, there might be some appropriate guidelines or boundaries that cities and schools could work out.”

    Stopping a police chase

    The executive director of the Alabama-based National Association of School Resource Officers, Mo Canady, a retired cop, said districts would be mistaken to remove resource officers from campuses. Police will always be needed to respond to schools, and “we need for students and faculty to be able to feel like this officer is more than just a law enforcement officer, that they really are another trusted adult in that school environment.” A trained and well-known officer, “may be the person who comes into a situation with the coolest head,” he said.

    Loretta Whitson, executive director of the California School Counselors Association, has seen what can happen when police approach a student situation lacking the cool-headedness Canady described.

    As a school counselor in the Monrovia Unified School District in Los Angeles County, she once worked with a child who ran away from school multiple times. Finally, an exasperated principal called the police, who chased after the student.

    “The principal didn’t stop them. I felt as (officers) went on in their rant this kid is getting more damaged. So, I said, ‘Stop, stop,”’ Whitson said. “We already had a very damaged kid, and this wasn’t helping.” The student was later found to need special education services, she said.

    Tom Nolan, a retired Boston police lieutenant turned sociologist who’s taught at several universities and studied school policing, said when law enforcement officers are called into a school situation, “they become the shot callers,” deciding what to do whether it is in the child’s best interest or not. Too often, principals are calling them for minor problems like lost keys and disciplinary matters, he said.

    “The research is unequivocal in demonstrating that the police coming into schools, or police being assigned to schools, is almost always a bad idea. It has bad outcomes for children. It has bad outcomes for school safety.”

    Nolan said police are not school counselors and shouldn’t play that role. “That’s something that’s a very specific skill set that is attained through years of graduate level study by mental health practitioners and clinicians.”

    The California Police Chiefs Association declined to make anyone from its leadership available for an interview. In an email, its executive director described school policing as a matter best discussed at local levels. 

    Brian Marvel, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, a powerful federation of police unions, wasn’t available for an interview, a spokesperson said. In a statement, Marvel, a San Diego police officer, said cops assigned to schools “play an important role in” schools. They act  as “educators, emergency/crisis managers, first responders, informal counselors, mentors, and model the kind of behavior that builds trust and respect between law enforcement and the communities they serve.” 

    Data shows that sometimes, regardless of who might be available to counsel or advise a student, one may just do something dumb, like putting a death threat in writing. 

    On June 15, 2023, James Morris, the county administrator who also acts as Inglewood Unified superintendent, received a death threat via email, police call records show. Morris, a veteran administrator, was brought on to lift Inglewood out of years of state receivership because of fiscal woes.

    “I can just say, generally, it was a student,” Morris said when asked about the threat. Police took a report, but Morris said he didn’t want charges filed.

    “I’ve been doing this for 44 years. It takes a lot to rattle me,” he  said. “It was a young person who just needed help.”





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  • Going police-free is tough and ongoing, Oakland schools find

    Going police-free is tough and ongoing, Oakland schools find


    Eddie Franklin, the culture and climate ambassador for Oakland Unified, stops a student while they are walking to class and asks how their day is going.

    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    Across the Oakland Unified School District, the mantra for school staff is to call city police only as a last resort. If a disturbance occurs, they should rely first on in-house staff who don’t carry guns and can’t arrest anyone.

    Since voting in June 2020 to disband its police department, Oakland has pursued one goal — to defuse conflict and avoid bringing in police and exposing students to the possibility of arrest. Oakland’s preference is for restorative justice, which emphasizes circle-of-trust interactions to improve how students treat one another. 

    “Most of the time, it’s just having conversations with them (students),” said Eddie Franklin, a former security guard who is now part of the district’s new police-free staffing. “Let them authentically be themselves, and the goal becomes to chip away at the rough edges they might have.”

    It’s a strategy credited by the district with drastically reducing the 911 calls to city police from 2,128 during the 2019-20 school year, the last year the Oakland district had its own police department, to 200 in 2022-23.  

    But an EdSource analysis of data from the police shows a higher number of calls from just eight of the district’s 18 middle and high schools in half a year. The period from January to June 2023 shows those schools made 225 calls, with 105 considered “serious” for reasons including assault with a deadly weapon, suicide attempts, battery and terrorist/criminal threats.

    The Oakland data was part of a statewide investigation of school policing across California. EdSource gathered nearly 46,000 police logs of calls from and about 852 schools.  The data collection was designed as a representative sample of California schools.

    Police track all calls from and about eight of the district’s 18 middle and high schools, while the district’s data captures calls made to police from all 106 schools.

    Misha Karigaca, Oakland Unified’s director of student support and safety, could not fully reconcile the differences between the police call logs and the district’s record of internal calls to police for the same time period.

    “If a 911 call comes from a cell phone and the call doesn’t get reported to my department, we will not have information about the call which can also account for significant discrepancies,” he said.

    Karigaca and Board President Sam Davis acknowledged that while staff are trained when not to call 911 and to report any calls that they make, it doesn’t always happen. “We don’t capture every call in our data as (school) sites are required to notify us if law enforcement comes on campus; but we know of times when this hasn’t always happened,” Karigaca said.

    Davis said it’s also possible other staff are calling 911 for nonemergent reasons because “a lot of people reach the end of their rope for all sorts of reasons.”

    The Oakland schools included in EdSource’s data are McClymonds, Castlemont, Fremont, Oakland, Skyline high schools and Montera, West Oakland and Westlake middle schools.

    “We’re not in a place where we can have completely police-free schools. That is our goal and what we’re working towards, but unfortunately, there are times when we do need police support,” Karigaca said. “It was our conditioning, whatever we needed they (police) would respond. It’s almost similar to our communities and our society — there’s not many other options. Anything that revolves around safety, we’re conditioned to call police.”

    In place for two school years, the new police-free plan is being evaluated locally and nationally on whether it is achieving what it set out to do.

    The Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank, in describing its study, put Oakland on the “leading edge of an emerging violence-reduction practice” happening in schools across the country, according to Jesse Jannetta, a senior policy fellow at the institute. Study results are expected in August.

    Not everyone supports the decision to disband the district’s police department.

    Board member Clifford Thompson said it was wrong for Oakland to disband its police department. “There’s little benefit to not having police at schools,” he said. “Totally eliminating the force without having a backup for those who need that type of force, it might not have been the best thing to do.”

    Getting to police-free

    The Black Organizing Project, a Bay Area community organization focused on racial, social and economic justice, has been advocating for the end of the police department since 2011. It finally happened in June 2020 with a unanimous vote of the school board.

    Oakland has had a fraught and violent history of racism and police abuse of Black people for nearly 80 years, which factored greatly into the final push to disband the department following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020.

    The city’s Black population increased dramatically during World War II when slave descendants migrated west from Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. Police officers from those states were quickly recruited and stationed in Black neighborhoods. In 1950, a civil rights leader told the state Assembly that Black people lived “in daily and nightly terror” of Oakland police, according to a 1950 State Assembly report. The police department in Oakland Unified was born in 1957.

    After more than 60 years of having an embedded police department in Oakland schools, educators, city officials and community partners are working to untangle the decades of policing culture and running its own police department.

    There’s no contract or memorandum of understanding with the Oakland Police Department, but the district shares what staff are taught about when to call 911 and how to interact with police. 

    Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention recently reported to a joint council-district committee on the plan’s progress. The city of Oakland invested $2.4 million in the 2022-23 school year to address violence in schools by creating a School Violence Intervention and Prevention Program and hiring life coaches, violence interrupters and gender-based violence specialists to four comprehensive high schools and three continuation high schools. 

    Gender-based violence specialists are unique to Oakland, Jannetta said. The specialists have workshops about dating violence, stalking, sexual harassment, sexual assault and commercial sexual exploitation.

    Through surveys, officials found these extra staffers have more relatability to students, can focus on individual needs, and alleviate some of this work from teachers.

    It’s too early to evaluate whether it is working, but the district is going in a positive direction, said Jessica Black, director of administration for the Black Organizing Project.

    Getting to a police-free school environment also faces challenges. City and school officials say violence especially among 14 to 18-year-olds in the city bleeds into the school district. 

    During the 2022-23 school year, there were more than 600 high school suspensions and two shootings at OUSD high schools, according to the report. One of last year’s shootings was at Skyline High School, and just last month, another shooting occurred during the high school’s graduation that injured three people.

    The city’s analysis of school violence puts some of the blame on the heightened crime in the city. According to the report, there’s been an increase in violence on campuses “that is related to community conflicts as well as an increase in instances of non-students showing up at school campuses with weapons to fight students.”

    Despite the challenges, the school board has not considered reinstating the district’s police department, Davis confirmed. Oakland Unified Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell declined to comment through a district spokesperson.

    When to call police

    One of the Black Organizing Project’s goals was to “uproot the security structure,” said Jasmine Williams, development director. With community support, the project pushed to restructure campus police, including getting rid of badges or anything that emulates the police and installing new titles, training, and redesigning the shirts they wear.

    “The district is not coming up with this stuff on their own,” the project’s Jessica Black said. “We’re literally pushing the district to think differently.”

    Oakland administrators can call for “nonviolent de-escalation support” from staff known as culture and climate ambassadors when there are fights, a student is causing harm to themselves or others, or unwelcome visitors are on campuses, according to the School Administrator Guidance to Police Free Response. There’s a nonemergency line administrators can call to dispose of firearms or illegal drugs, when there’s suspicion of a crime, or during lockdowns. For mental health crises, administrators also have different people to reach out to depending on the situation. 

    Students can still be disciplined, including suspended, but that’s rarely the first option, Karigaca said. Most of the time, interventions take place.

    “It’s offering a conduit of other opportunities, such as a restorative session, once both parties are in a place to have a restorative session,” Karigaca said. “Sometimes it’s going to take a walk or going to a different office; sometimes it’s calling parents or connecting with a community resource.”

    District police-free guidelines give a variety of reasons when calling 911 is appropriate: active shooters, fire, medical emergencies, a person with a gun or explosive, bomb threats, serious injuries, hostage situations, abduction or kidnapping, violent crimes, death at a school site, emergency evacuations, or any situation posing danger to health or safety. 

    Students can be arrested for some of these incidents, Karigaca said, but usually students aren’t arrested as a result of staff calling 911. There are about four to five arrests every school year, and it’s typically because police are arresting students for something they did outside of school, he said.

    The district partners with organizations for alternative support, but sometimes they can’t immediately respond, Karigaca said. 

    “When we call CPS (Child Protective Services) or any other mental health crisis response folks, a lot of times their staff is also under-resourced and they aren’t able to respond,” Karigaca said. “Even they will tell us, ‘Call law enforcement.’”

    New titles for security guards

    As Eddie Franklin walked down the hallway of Bret Harte Middle School, it was as if every student knew who he was. Most would fist pump him or shake his hand and he knew every student’s name. 

    Eddie Franklin, the culture and climate ambassador for Oakland Unified, shakes a student’s hand while walking down the hallway.
    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    Franklin has been at OUSD for seven years and used to be a security guard who worked with police and used handcuffs for detaining students. He became a culture keeper four years ago. Now he’s what’s called a culture and climate ambassador.

    Franklin said he brings “an unbiased approach” to every situation even if the student is acting negatively. “Your goal is to actually make them (students) see and critically think about what’s in the best interest of both sides.”

    Security guards were replaced with culture keepers and culture and climate ambassador who have leadership roles and assist culture keepers when needed, Karigaca said. The main priorities for all roles are to de-escalate violence and create positive relationships with students and staff.

    The 63 culture keepers are spread around the district: up to three in middle schools; up to six in most high schools. Five elementary schools also have culture keepers. 

    When Franklin was a culture keeper, he said his day-to-day work evolved into understanding the different personalities on campus to get a better understanding of student behavior.

    “So you don’t overreact when they do some of the things they do,” Franklin said. “But also try to give them an idea of what they can do differently.”

    As a culture and climate ambassador, Franklin is deployed to different schools when extra support is needed, Karigaca said. Most of the time, they roam around different schools building relationships.

    Franklin said he oversees 13 middle schools and does check-ins with staff to talk about what kind of support they need. A big part is building trust, he said.

    When Franklin goes to a school, he said, his goal is “to act like a parent, a positive parent, let them know I actually care about you and support you in whatever you do, and I’m not going to be over the top if I react to something that you did negative.”

    To other districts looking at Oakland as an example, Williams, of the Black Organizing Project, said she doesn’t want the message to be “all you have to do is implement a policy.”

    “It took us 10 years of fighting to get here, and we are still fighting within the district,” Williams said. “It takes community to have even this much progress.”

    EdSource reporters Thomas Peele; Daniel J. Willis and Andrew Reed contributed to this report.





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  • Governor must OK expanded Cal Grant access for struggling students

    Governor must OK expanded Cal Grant access for struggling students


    The University of California, Riverside sign on University Avenue.

    Credit: UC Riverside / Stan Lim

    What does a Cal Grant signify for students embarking on their college journeys? For individuals like me, it embodies an unparalleled opportunity to traverse the realms of academia and pursue aspirations that once seemed shrouded in uncertainty due to the lack of financial resources. 

    Raised in a first-generation household where the prospect of higher education was esteemed but financially not realistic, attending college initially appeared impossible for me. When my parents discussed college, they explained that despite their desire for me to focus solely on my studies, it wasn’t financially feasible. My parents immigrated when they were 16 years old from a small Zapotec town in Oaxaca, Mexico. My dad works as a fry cook and my mom cleans houses; yet even with their long hours, they struggle to cover their own bills. They could only contribute about $20 every two weeks toward my education. 

    Qualifying for a Cal Grant made college feel like a possibility.

    Unfortunately, we know my situation is not unique. In my work in the financial aid office, where I field countless calls about Cal Grant eligibility, I have heard many students with similar predicaments voice their challenges. Many callers are desperate for assistance with steep tuition fees, housing fees and basic expenses such as food. Some students, even though their parents’ income surpasses the threshold to receive financial assistance, still struggle to afford tuition and rent and must work full time, which often results in missed classes and lower grades. There were numerous occasions where, after I had outlined the annual costs for a student, they opted to withdraw from the university due to the overwhelming expenses.

    But there is a beacon of hope for countless aspiring scholars who have long grappled with financial barriers: the Cal Grant Equity Framework, California’s commitment to reforming the Cal Grant to expand access to higher education. Approved in 2022, the framework is a set of strategies to promote equal access to grants for all eligible students, regardless of background or socioeconomic status. It does so by making it easier for students and families to understand what aid they’re eligible for, reducing eligibility barriers, aiming to cover the total cost of college, and more.

    But making this happen requires a dedicated push by California’s policymakers to fulfill their promise and fund the framework, communicate to students and families about this opportunity, and monitor its long-term effects.

    On May 30, the Legislature included funding in the budget plan to phase in implementation of the Cal Grant Equity Framework — and thereby begin comprehensive Cal Grant reform. The Legislature’s proposal would restructure and streamline the Cal Grant program, aligning eligibility with federal standards; include a cost-of-living adjustment for the new Cal Grant 2 award that would go to community college students, and remove several barriers to access the new Cal Grant 2 and Cal Grant 4 (four-year college) award. The current 2.0 grade point average (GPA) requirement for community college students would still be in effect, but will be phased out over a four-year period. The current Students With Dependent Children grant would start at $3,000 for these newly eligible students, climbing up to $6,000 over the same four-year period as the GPA phase-out. All current Cal Grant and Students With Dependent Children recipients would see no reduction to their financial aid as they will all be grandfathered in during the Cal Grant reform phase-in period. Taken together, this proposal presents a low-cost option to begin the implementation of Cal Grant reform and expands crucial financial aid to students who need it. 

    By keeping Cal Grant reform in the final state budget this year, California is on a path to opening the doors of opportunity for an additional 137,000 students once fully implemented, further extending the transformative power of higher education to communities that have historically been marginalized. Among these beneficiaries, 11,000 Black students and 95,000 Latino students stand poised to embark on their academic journeys, armed with the tools and resources necessary to thrive in an ever-evolving world.

    These reforms come at a critical juncture when California students’ basic needs insecurity has reached alarming levels. While Cal Grants provide substantial assistance, it’s imperative to recognize that covering tuition alone falls short of addressing the needs of many students, who often struggle to secure housing and may lack sufficient access to food. Our universities also have a role to play by leveraging their institutional aid to cover non-tuition costs.

    Embracing the principles outlined in the framework, California is taking steps toward realizing the state’s vision of an educational system that is accessible and equitable for all. By actively addressing systemic inequities and providing robust support for underserved communities, California is paving the way for a brighter, more inclusive future in which the transformative power of education is fully harnessed.

    The Legislature has now made clear their commitment to putting a down payment on Cal Grant reform in the 2024-25 state budget and the final decision is in the hands of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

    Governor, we are counting on you to approve the Legislature’s path forward for Cal Grant reform and the futures of thousands of students.

    •••

    Carmen Abigail Juan Reyes is a 3rd-year Political Science, Law and Society major at the University of California, Riverside and the UC Student Association’s Fund the UC Vice Chair for the 2023-2024 academic year.

    The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.





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  • Safety concerns on the rise in LAUSD; Carvalho looks to police

    Safety concerns on the rise in LAUSD; Carvalho looks to police


    Four years after removing district police from individual campuses, the Los Angeles Unified School District has temporarily restored officers to two schools — reviving longstanding debates and dissatisfaction over school policing. 

    Superintendent Alberto Carvalho attempted to restore officers to 20 school sites to make campuses safer, according to a May 13 memo to school board members. Those campuses were chosen based on “relevant safety data.”

    “As we near the end of the school year, we continue to refine our protocols to ensure our schools are safe and welcoming environments for students and staff,” he said in the memo. “It is critical that we are aware of the specific needs of our schools, and respond accordingly.” 

    A day later, amid a backlash, Carvalho’s plan collapsed, with the district limiting police to only two of the 20 schools until the end of the school year because of “heightened activity” in the region: Washington Preparatory High School and Northridge Middle School. At each of the campuses, police could be stationed either all day or during specific times, including dismissal, according to an LAUSD spokesperson.

    The district will decide weekly whether to keep police in place. It is unclear what the district will do next. 

    The district’s own data shows a 45% spike from 2017-18 to 2022-23 in incidents involving suicide risk, fighting/physical aggression, threats, illegal/controlled substances and weapons. And 25% in the year ending 2022-23.

    Weapons incidents rose from 994 to 1,197 in the year ending 2022-23.

    Police were restored to the two campuses after gun incidents. In one, a student died in a shooting a few blocks from Washington Prep. During that incident, a member of the Safe Passage program — which involves community members monitoring routes to and from school to keep students safe — allegedly failed to intervene. 

    Meanwhile, at Northridge Middle School, police came to arrest two students who had brought loaded semi-automatic handguns. Afterward, members of United Teachers Los Angeles rallied in support of student safety, alleging the district failed to issue a lockdown and did not communicate adequately. LAUSD did not respond to the union’s allegations.

    Members of United Teachers Los Angeles rallied in support of student safety at Northridge Middle School in May.
    Credit: Courtesy of UTLA

    “The recent uptick in interest in bringing police back to schools happened because of a few incidents on campuses,” said Amir Whitaker, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California. “And, as always, the immediate response is to bring in police — when oftentimes we know the police wouldn’t have prevented the situations in the first place.” Whitaker is also the primary author of a 2021 report titled “No Police in Schools,” which concluded police in schools have “devastating and discriminatory impacts on tens of thousands of California students.”

    How LAUSD is dispatching its police is part of a continuing EdSource investigation that revealed the vast presence of police in K-12 schools in California. EdSource obtained nearly 46,000 call logs from 164 law enforcement agencies for the period January to June 2023. LAUSD’s police department refused to release its data.

    The current debate over school police is part of a longstanding tug-of-war over student safety. Some community members have advocated during board meetings for more law enforcement, while others maintain that school police should be abolished altogether. 

    “There isn’t security on campus, and that obviously affects our children,” said Efigenia Flores, a district parent and member of Our Voice/Nuestra Voz, a group of Latino parents that has consistently advocated in meetings with district officials for an increased police presence, alongside mental health and counseling supports. 

    “This is unacceptable,” she added in Spanish. “That is why we want a clear and transparent plan that incorporates our voice.” 

    According to a recent district safety and school climate presentation, a range of safety concerns have increased across the district in recent years, leaving many parents worried about their children’s well-being and eager for the district to restore a presence on individual campuses. 

    Last Tuesday, a fourth grader at Glassell Park Elementary brought a loaded handgun to school. Nobody was injured, and Principal Claudia Pelayo said in a message to the campus community that the school acted immediately and asked the Los Angeles School Police Department and Region West Operations to investigate.

    “In alignment with our commitment to comprehensive safety measures and as an ongoing practice, we continuously review relevant statistical data and implement enhanced on-campus support from a number of departments within our District as deemed necessary,” a district spokesperson said in a statement to EdSource.

    Uneven access to community-based safety 

    Several community organizations, however, have maintained that law enforcement heightens fears around racial profiling and violence against students of color — and say the district has “really failed to commit to implementing” community-based safety efforts that could help tackle “root causes” of violence, according to Joseph Williams, director of Students Deserve, a community organization focused on “making Black lives matter in schools.”

    Those community efforts include Safe Passage and restorative justice practices, which are designed to help students understand the impact of negative behavior and address underlying challenges that may have caused them to occur in the first place. 

    LAUSD spokesperson Shannon Haber maintained, however, that the district has “really leaned into our safety initiatives and restorative justice practices,” citing efforts to hire more mental health professionals and partnerships to promote safe passage, among other initiatives.

    School board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin has long supported restorative practices in the district — and said the fears Black students experience around police “is not something I want to perpetuate, personally.”  

    “Everybody’s job in the school district is to make sure kids are safe; and, some people think only officers focus on safety,” Ortiz Franklin said in an interview with EdSource.

    “Your teachers are focused on safety, your principals focus on safety, your campus aides are focused on safety — everyone understands that is our primary concern. And so, where we need to improve and grow as a system is not just with one department. It’s with everyone.”

    LAUSD’s current law enforcement landscape 

    In 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police in Minneapolis, LAUSD’s school board voted to cut the district’s Los Angeles School Police Department by 35% and remove police officers from all campuses. 

    The district’s police department saw a $25 million reduction in the 2020-21 budget, including more than $14 million in salaries and over $10 million in overtime pay, according to a Dec. 15, 2020, report by the Board of Education.

    Since then, the district has adopted a “patrol model,” where an officer is assigned to patrol a neighborhood in a car, both before and after the school day. 

    Some officers also patrol during the evenings when there could be potential trespassing or vandalism — and they are often present during evening events, including football games, Ortiz Franklin said.

    If an incident takes place on campus, she said, a school principal or designee can call the police, and the district department has a response time that ranges from three to seven minutes. 

    The district did not disclose how many calls were made to district police over the past several years. 

    “We have public education dollars to spend on teaching kids to get ready for college, career and life; and, if we choose to spend education dollars on law enforcement, that to me feels like a disservice and a missed opportunity,” Ortiz Franklin said, while emphasizing that the district anticipates “dire budget cuts” in the coming years. 

    With incidents on the rise since 2017-18, some parents are asking for more police in schools to keep their children safe. 

    “Because there is no security, this will continue: the distribution of drugs, fights, bullying and sexual harassment,” said Maria Hernandez, a mother of four LAUSD students and a member of Our Voice/Nuestra Voz. 

    “There are many mothers who are saddened by the deaths of their children, and I don’t think they are hoping for more,” she added, speaking in Spanish. 

    Evelyn Aleman, who runs Our Voice/Nuestra Voz, added that “we, as the adults, really have to step in and take charge of the safety of the students.”

    She also questioned whom principals would call in an emergency if there aren’t district police at schools. 

    “They’re going to call LAPD. Do we want the principals doing that?” 

    ‘A visceral response’

    Venice High School senior Lindsey Weatherspoon saw a man in a blue uniform enter her classroom a couple of weeks ago. Aware of allegations that district police had targeted students of color, she panicked. 

    “I could just feel my heart literally beating out my chest — thinking it was wrong, and they’re conducting random searches or something,” Weatherspoon said.

    Fearing police violence, she wondered: “‘Is this going to happen to me? Is this going to happen to one of my friends?” 

    The uniformed person entering the school turned out to be a maintenance worker, but Weatherspoon found it “mind boggling” to have “such a visceral response.”  

    Weatherspoon is part of the ACLU of Southern California’s Youth Liberty Squad, one of many community organizations that has called for an end to school policing altogether — whether by district or municipal law enforcement agencies.

    Several students from these organizations also attend district board meetings and speak out against policing during public comment sections — claiming the district police force has disproportionately profiled and policed students of color and consistently posed a threat to their emotional safety at school.

    Despite being roughly 8% of LAUSD’s population, Black students account for roughly a quarter of arrests, citations and diversions, according to a 2022 report released by the Police Free LAUSD Coalition, a group of community organizations that oppose school policing. 

    “Rather than arresting (students) and pushing them out of our schools, we truly need to find out the root cause of what is really going on with our youth. What is it that’s going on at home? What’s going on mentally, as well?” said Steven Ortega, the director of youth organizing at the East Los Angeles-based non-profit InnerCity Struggle. 

    “We’re not saying, ‘Let’s let young people get away with anything.’ We’re saying that there still needs to be accountability, but more holistically.” 





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  • San Bernardino County: Growing hot spot for school-run police

    San Bernardino County: Growing hot spot for school-run police


    In eastern San Bernardino County, a cluster of five school districts take a different approach than nearly all the rest of California when it comes to school policing: they not only buy books for kids, they also buy bullets for cops. They run their own police departments. 

    There are just 19 school-run police forces in California spread over 10 counties. They include Los Angeles and San Diego unified, the state’s two largest districts. In all, 15% of California K-12 students — more than 863,000 kids — attend districts with their own police departments.

    Those students are more likely to be exposed to police than students whose schools rely on officers from municipal police departments or sheriffs offices to respond, a far more common model, an EdSource analysis shows.

    Studies show that student exposure to police raises fear and anxiety, especially for students of color who come from over-policed communities where friction with, and distrust of, police are common. A 2021 study by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California found that students of color and disabled students were far more likely to be arrested in schools with assigned officers than those without. Black students’ arrests were 7.4 times higher in schools with assigned law enforcement. 

    Outside of San Bernardino, school-run police departments are waning. Oakland Unified disbanded its force in 2020 after the videotaped murder of George Floyd, who died at the hands of city police in Minneapolis. Baldwin Park Unified in Los Angeles County closed its in 2021. Inglewood Unified’s will shutter at the end of this month. San Jose’s has but one officer — its chief.

    Combined, the 19 school police departments in the state have fewer than 500 officers, state records show. Some have as few as four. Others have had troubles: police chiefs sued, arrested and a department sharply criticized for abusing students. The unified districts with their own police departments are: Apply Valley, Hesperia, San Bernardino City, Fontana Unified and Snowline Joint.

    But San Bernardino’s cluster will soon expand. Trustees of the Victor Valley Union High School District, based in Victorville, voted in March to form a police department and begin searching for a chief to head it.

    “We need to take our safety to another level,” district Superintendent Carl Coles said prior to the board’s unanimous votes. He cited no crime data or examples of student violence. He told EdSource by email that student suspension rates declined in the last year.

    Among the reasons he gave in March: Victor Valley needs to keep up with its neighbors, five districts that have their own police departments, rather than rely on school resource officers provided by contract with the county sheriff.

    Board members were quick to agree.

    “The way things are right now, our resource officers, they get called away and sometimes you never see them,” trustee Rosalio Hinojos said before the vote. School-employed officers are more stable, always on campuses and “have a good rapport” with students, he said, referring to districts that employ their own officers. “I don’t think that’s happening right now.” 

    Just before the vote, Hinojos struck an ominous tone, saying it was “not a question of if, but a question of when” police would be needed in the nine-school district. He declined an EdSource request to clarify the remark.

    Why San Bernardino?

    San Bernardino, the largest U.S. county outside of Alaska and nearly the size of West Virginia, isn’t a place where much discussion about defunding police departments occurred after Floyd’s murder. It’s so deeply conservative that voters approved a 2022 ballot measure instructing officials to explore seceding from California. 

    “When you look across our county, we do have pockets of areas that may statistically have more crime that takes place,” San Bernardino County Schools Superintendent Ted Alejandre told EdSource. 

    “That may be one influence on why a school may want to have more protection.” He said his office gives no guidance on the matter, but added that local superintendents and school board members in the Inland Empire have deep interests in “keeping their campuses safe.”

    In Fontana, a city of 212,000 known for its steel mill and NASCAR track, school police are deployed “full force at the high schools and middle schools and elementary schools,” board President Marcelino Serna said in an interview.

    He cited fear of “school shootings” and potential threats “of people coming on campus,” as primary reasons for the department’s existence. “It’s sad that anyone would want to commit harm to any children. We’re always having to be vigilant.” 

    The department had 15 sworn officers as of April, state records show. The cops, Serna said, like to show off their police cars and dogs to students, as well  as “their weaponry, if kids are wanting to see that.”

    In nearby Apple Valley, a town of 75,000, police presence on campuses became spotty because deputies from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department were often called away from schools to perform other duties, Rick Roelle, an Apple Valley Unified School District board member and retired sheriff’s lieutenant, said in an interview.

    That “would leave the schools kind of high and dry,” he said. The district formed its own police force in 2002. It had nine officers as of April, records show. 

    Apple Valley Unified has experienced rises in “drug use, violence and disruptive behavior,” Roelle said. “What we’re seeing today is violence where kids are getting kicked in the head, and they’re getting smashed up against walls, and they’re getting severely injured on campus. So, if there’s no police there to take someone into custody for doing that, who’s going to do it?”

    An EdSource investigation into school policing gathered nearly 46,000 logs of calls for police from and about a sample of California schools from Jan. 15, 2023 to June 30, 2023. In Apple Valley, 4.9% of its nearly 1,500 calls were for fights, assaults, battery, and disturbing the peace — the second-lowest rate among the 10 districts with their own police departments included in EdSource’s sample. Inglewood Unified led the category with nearly half of its 196 calls reporting such events. 

    Apple Valley Superintendent Trenae Nelson declined interview requests, as did school Police Chief Cesar Molina. Nelson also didn’t respond to emailed questions about the police department.

    Comparing districts with their own police and those that rely on outside departments:

    • Students in high schools with district-run police were more likely to encounter officers than other high schools. The average number of calls for police was 88 in districts with their own departments compared with 57 in districts with outside police.
    • School districts that employ police officers break up fights more than other districts: 4.6% of incidents in high schools without in-house departments were calls about fighting or disturbing the peace, compared with 6.6% in high schools with outside police.
    • School district police officers are dispatched to counsel students over 10 times more than other officers. In the 76 high schools with their own departments, police officers were dispatched to counsel students 63 times, and in the 209 high schools without their own district officers, they were called 16 times. 

    Police “really are just ill-suited to address mental health concerns, not because of training, but really it’s not their role or their expertise to be handling these types of things,” said Cal State Long Beach education associate professor Caroline Lopez-Perry, who studies school counseling.

    Carl Cohn, a former State Board of Education member and superintendent at Long Beach Unified in the 1990s, said he was pressured to create a district police department by the school board after the 1992 riots triggered by the police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles. 

    A board member who was a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff “was adamant we needed it,” Cohn said.

    But Cohn said he was skeptical, thinking, “Do we need to take scarce resources and actually set up our own school-district police force?” He had long meetings with city officials trying to create a coverage plan using Long Beach police officers that would meet district needs. When the department’s chief told him, “‘Look, if we can’t protect kids we shouldn’t be in business,’’ he went with the city. It was a decision he doesn’t regret. Other superintendents have expressed regrets to him over having school departments, calling them a financial drain, he said.

    Who’s watching the watchers?

    When school officials sign contracts with cities or sheriffs for school policing or just rely on responses to 911 calls, they tap into a system where a city manager oversees police, and in some cities where police commissions add a level of oversight. Elected sheriffs are answerable to voters about their departments.

    When school districts create their own police departments, they take on that oversight themselves, which in California comes with laws limiting public accountability and granting officers deep job protection and privacy rights.

    “Police just do a better job when they have accountability,” said Lauren Bonds, executive director of the National Police Accountability Project, a nonprofit watchdog.  At small agencies like school-police departments, more power is vested in fewer individuals, like a chief or small cadre of officers. They may not have trained internal affairs investigators, leaving chiefs to conduct their own misconduct probes. “There’s just not the infrastructure.” At small public agencies, “There’s little oversight that’s happening outside of the department as well.” 

    A leading California policing expert agreed.

    “Any department or any entity that polices itself is ripe for corruption,” said retired state Superior Court Judge LaDoris H. Cordell, the first Black woman appointed to the bench in Northern California. She also worked for five years as the City of San Jose’s independent police auditor.

    In response to EdSource questions to districts regarding outside oversight, officials at seven districts reported having none. Stockton Unified reported it has a community advisory group “which meets quarterly and reviews quarterly reports on employee statistics, complaints, and calls for service,” Superintendent Michelle Rodriguez told EdSource. In Riverside County, Val Verde Unified has a group of students, parents and others that meet with police but don’t have oversight authority. 

    While independent oversight of all law enforcement is critical, Cordell said, it should be especially so for school-run departments, considering they primarily police children. As San Jose’s police auditor, she published a multilanguage student handbook titled “A Student’s Guide to Police Practices” that advised juveniles on their rights during police encounters.

    Her main concern about school policing, she said, is inequitable treatment of students of color. Some police “focus primarily on kids of color, Black and brown kids,” she said.  “Just the melanin in the skin raises  suspicion.”  

    Scandals

    In April, the state Department of Justice (DOJ) ended five years of oversight of the Stockton Unified police after an investigation found officers “routinely violated the civil and constitutional rights of Black and Latino students and students with disabilities.”

    DOJ investigators found police routinely arrested the students for “defiance, disorderly context, fights without injuries, using profanity and loitering” that civilian personnel should have handled.

    “School police were out of control, arresting and traumatizing kids for acting like kids,” Linnea Nelson,  a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Northern California said in a statement. “Those disparities still exist, and we will continue to monitor the District’s progress to prevent resurgent discrimination.”

    Stockton school police took “important steps to address concerns regarding 

    interactions between police officers and students and to promote an equitable and positive learning environment,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement. 

    There have also been problems at school police departments involving leadership.

    A former chief and lieutenant of the Inglewood school police department are scheduled for sentencing Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court after being charged in a 2022 corruption investigation. 

    According to court records, the former department lieutenant, Timothy Marks, hired then-Chief William T. Carter as a security guard at a marijuana facility in San Bernardino County. Carter worked there when he was supposed be on duty at the police department. He “boasted to his security coworkers of his ability to do whatever he wanted because he was a police chief,” prosecutors wrote in court papers, adding, Carter drove his school-police car to the job “using his lights and sirens to get there faster.”

    After being charged with embezzlement, conspiracy and perjury, Carter and Marks both cut deals and pleaded no contest in April to petty theft. Carter agreed to repay the district $15,722 and Marks, $3,006. The agreement calls for each man to be sentenced to 50 hours of community service and a year of probation. 

    James Morris, a former school superintendent who is working to help the district out of years of state receivership because of fiscal woes, said he is “pleased that the outcome will return funding to the students of Inglewood Unified.”

    In San Diego, Chief Alfonso Contreras of the school district police department abruptly retired last month after less than two years in the post after 11 officers — nearly a third of  the department’s ranks — sued him in December. Those officers alleged that Conteras and several supervisors who are his friends, and one with whom he is romantically involved, discriminated against others based on sexual orientation, gender and race. Conteras had been on paid suspension since January. The lawsuit remains in early stages, court records show. San Diego Unified spokesperson Maureen Magee said she couldn’t discuss ongoing litigation. 

    A chief’s perspective 

    The president of the California Association of School Police Chiefs disagrees that these agencies, typically smaller than most municipalities’, need more oversight.  

    At smaller agencies, “you have to be even more critical of your department and policies to ensure you are always in compliance,” Mark Clark, chief of the Val Verde Unified School District Police in Perris, Riverside County, wrote in an email in response to questions.

    Clark, who’s spent his career at school departments, said that the in-school department offers school districts more control over how officers on their campuses are hired and trained.

    Clark wrote that he formed Val Verde’s committee in 2017. It’s made up of parents, staff, students and other organizations within the district that have made recommendations to the board on procedures, staffing, and equipment. Although it is not an oversight panel, its input has been helpful, he said.

    The committee, he said, has offered “nothing but support for hiring more officers.”

    EdSource reporter Michael Burke contributed to this story.





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  • Research casts doubt on proposed legislation ending teaching performance assessments

    Research casts doubt on proposed legislation ending teaching performance assessments


    Senate Bill 1263 will be heard by the full Assembly if it makes it through the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

    Credit: AP Photo/Terry Chea

    A bill wending its way through the California State Legislature could remove a valuable tool to evaluate teacher preparation programs, according to research conducted by the Learning Policy Institute, a nonprofit research organization headed by State Board of Education President Linda Darling-Hammond.

    Senate Bill 1263, sponsored by the California Teachers Association, would do away with teaching performance assessments (TPA), which require teachers to demonstrate competence via video clips of classroom instruction, lesson plans, student work and written reflections on their practice before they can earn a preliminary teaching credential.

    The legislation could also remove the last test that teachers are required to take to prove they are prepared to teach.

    Supporters of the bill say the assessments are expensive and stressful for teacher candidates, duplicate other requirements they must fulfill to enter the profession, are ineffective at preparing teachers for the classroom and result in fewer people becoming teachers — especially people of color.

    TPA data could help improve preparation

    Recent research from the Learning Policy Institute offers another view. It found that candidates who passed the TPA were more likely to be in programs that offered better preparation and more support. Eliminating TPAs would make it difficult to know which programs need support from the state. Instead, the assessment data could be better used to strengthen preparation statewide, it concluded.

    “This research was an attempt to understand what may explain that variation and found that certain types of preparation experiences are associated with better performance on a TPA,” said Susan Kemper Patrick, the author of the study.  

    “Overall, preservice candidates were more likely to be successful on a TPA compared to internship candidates. Candidates attending programs offering certain types of support and preparation experiences were also more likely to be successful on a TPA.”

    The Learning Policy Institute study does not examine the relationship between passing rates on the TPA and teacher performance or student achievement. California doesn’t typically tie student achievement to teacher identifiers. 

    Teacher candidates are currently required to pass either the California Teaching Performance Assessment (CalTPA), the Educative Teaching Performance Assessment (edTPA) or the Fresno Assessment of Student Teachers (FAST).

    A previous narrowly focused study of the Performance Assessment for California Teachers — the precursor of the edTPA — indicated that scores on that test predicted student achievement gains, according to the report. Research from other states has also shown that scores on teaching performance assessments can predict teaching effectiveness. 

    The assessment is usually completed during student teaching, residencies or internships, allowing candidates and their preparation programs to identify strengths and weaknesses in instruction, according to the policy institute study. 

    “I feel like that (the report) sort of documents what we already suspected, which is that teacher credential programs vary in quality, and we know that there are some that are not doing a very good job of preparing teachers to teach.”

    Brian Rivas, Education Trust-West

    Learning Policy Institute researchers analyzed surveys taken by 18,455 candidates who had completed a teacher preparation program and had taken a teaching performance assessment between Sept. 1, 2021 and Aug. 31, 2023. They found that passing rates on the assessments varied across teacher preparation programs. During the two-year period, nearly two-thirds of the 263 programs analyzed had more than 90% of their tested candidates pass the assessment, and 23% had all candidates pass. Fourteen programs had passing rates under 67%. 

    Two-thirds of the people surveyed, who had completed teacher preparation programs to teach elementary and secondary school, reported feeling well- or very well-prepared for their TPA, 22% felt adequately prepared and 11% felt they were not prepared. The more prepared candidates felt, the higher their TPA passing rates.  

    Some have called the performance assessment a barrier to a diverse teacher workforce, but the policy institute research shows that disparities in passage rates by race and ethnicity are minimal. There were no significant differences in pass rates by race and ethnicity in programs with passing rates above 90%, according to the report.

    “I feel like that (the report) sort of documents what we already suspected, which is that teacher credential programs vary in quality, and we know that there are some that are not doing a very good job of preparing teachers to teach,” said Brian Rivas, senior director of policy and government for the Education Trust-West, a social justice and advocacy organization.

    Rivas expressed concern that, without a teacher performance assessment, educators who attended low-performing preparation programs will end up teaching the state’s most vulnerable students.

    “We think because of the turnover in low-income communities and communities serving students of color, that they are going to be more likely to be taught by the teachers that are not really prepared fully to teach,” he said.

    Currently, TPA passage rates are tracked by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, which offers staff support to programs with low passing rates through the accreditation process. Instead of eliminating the assessment, the report calls for more resources and opportunities for improvement for teachers and programs. 

    Bill to end TPA to be heard by Assembly

    SBill 1263 has passed the state Senate and will next be heard in the Assembly committees on education and higher education. The legislation, as amended, also eliminates the requirement that teachers pass an exam proving reading instruction proficiency.

    It is the latest in a long line of legislation to reduce the number of assessments teachers have to take to earn a credential. In July 2021, legislators gave teacher candidates the option to take approved coursework instead of the California Basic Education Skills Test, or CBEST, or the California Subject Examinations for Teachers, or CSET. 

    Last summer, legislators passed SB 488, which replaced the unpopular Reading Instruction Competence Assessment, also known as RICA, with a literacy performance assessment. The Commission on Teacher Credentialing has developed the assessment over the last year with the help of a work group of literacy experts. 

    In January’s tentative budget, Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed eliminating the CBEST and allowing the completion of a bachelor’s degree to satisfy the state’s basic skills requirement. If it is passed in the budget, and SB 1263 becomes law, candidates will no longer have to take a licensure test to become a credentialed teacher. 

     “A survey of more than 1,000 educators showed strong consensus that the TPAs do not help in preparing educators for the classroom,” said Leslie Littman, California Teachers Association vice president. 

    “What does help to prepare educators is collaborating in classrooms with mentor teachers, working with clinical support supervisors, and quality teacher preparation programs. In fact, elements from this latest study from LPI underscore the value of teacher preparation programs including clinical support and content-specific preparation.”





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  • How to give everyone a fair shot in college admissions

    How to give everyone a fair shot in college admissions


    Credit: Courtesy of CollegeSpring

    Much of the focus on systemic inequality in America — in education or other sectors — has rightly been through retrospective or historical accounts about present-day conditions, or through cries for social reform based on egregious incidents and related frustrations. It’s a rare occasion, however, when we have the opportunity to reflect upon a slow but potentially pernicious systemic change that’s taking place in real time, right before our eyes. 

    Within higher education, there’s a new inequitable system in the making — or worse, a re-entrenchment of an old one — that stands to sharply divide and negatively affect society, communities and the future workforce. 

    As we end one admissions cycle and reflect on the testing policy changes in college admissions in 2024 alone, Ivy League schools like Cornell, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, other highly selective universities like CalTech and UT-Austin, and now Stanford, reversed test-optional policies to begin requiring the SAT and ACT again. The flood of announcements made it easy to dismiss or tire of them, since most of these colleges are already viewed as out of reach for the majority of students, calculated on one basic fact: grades.

    All students know — or at least used to — that at minimum, you need stellar grades and a good test score to get in. Today, however, it seems that will only be true of some exceptional schools. With test optional-schools, it’s less clear-cut whether test scores matter and/or how good your grades and scores need to be.

    Wealthier, more privileged students combat the complexity by continuing to prepare for and take the SAT or ACT — no matter the school — while lower-income students with less access to quality counseling and information are told the tests are less important in college admissions overall. This effectively takes any of the above-mentioned schools off the table for them, and also lowers their chances even at the other test-optional schools. More and more, students will pursue only the colleges they think they’ve been prepared for — while taking themselves out of the running for schools that could admit them.

    I fear we are on the precipice of recreating systemic divisions that are reminiscent of those of the not-so-distant past — the mid-20th century — when people went to schools with others who were assigned to the same station in life. The Harvards of the country selected students from local or known elite circles. There were different standards for women, who went to colleges that prepared them for support roles, not leadership. Black students predominantly went to Black colleges — mostly for Black men. People of certain classes, genders, religions, and races were grouped together —all according to their expected roles and objectives in life. 

    So what can we do now to stem this growing inequity?

    Some might say the antidote would be that all colleges should have the same rules — either every college requires the test or they don’t. To be clear, I believe that would be the most fair thing to do. Test required or test blind, and nothing in between.

    I also believe that would be impossible, impractical and unrealistic to enforce.

    In the United States, we have a problem with standardization — and not just the testing kind. On the one hand, this nation was founded on the principle of equality, on sameness for all. That, however, stands in fierce tension with our desire for individualism and uniqueness. So, while I think the same rules and opportunities would undoubtedly lead to a fairer system and better outcomes for all people, I’ve realized that uniformity is not a rallying cry people will get behind.

    What we must get behind, then, is for every college to be as transparent as possible about how test scores are used. I commend schools like Dartmouth, which did the research to be able to say: To attend this school, you must submit a score, and if you are from an underrepresented background, we will factor your score in this way.

    Test-optional schools should develop a clear-cut rubric to give students a sense of how much weight they give to scores, or what minimum score they will need if their GPA does not meet a certain threshold. Even if this increased transparency from schools was made available to students, what all students need — and in particular students from low-income underrepresented backgrounds — is the same message that their more privileged peers are getting: “Take the test. It will likely help you. You might not need it for some schools, but at least you will have more options if you are prepared.”

    For students who do want to take the SAT or ACT and receive a score, testing companies and educators must ensure that they give them opportunities to do so. It’s troubling to read about lack of testing sites or canceled administrations, like the one that affected 1,400 students in Oakland on June 1.

    Those of us who educate and guide students should encourage and help them to set and reach high standards, not prepare them for the bare minimum. The way we do that is by ensuring all students are positioned at the starting line with the same information, not different interpretations of the admissions landscape.

    If we want as many Americans to have the highest quality education possible, this system-in-the-remaking is not sustainable. We now have a moment to pause and reflect upon the direction we’re headed and ask how we can use everything we know and see today to make our schools more inclusive, ensuring that they are engines of mobility for all students from all backgrounds, not just a select few.

    •••

    Yoon Choi is CEO of CollegeSpring, a national nonprofit that trains schools and teachers to provide SAT prep to students from low-income backgrounds.

    The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.





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  • How pro-Palestinian protesters at one UC campus got a deal

    How pro-Palestinian protesters at one UC campus got a deal


    The bell tower and UCR sign on the campus of UC Riverside.

    Credit: UC Riverside / Stan Lim

    Sitting across from UC Riverside Chancellor Kim Wilcox inside a conference room on the campus, Samia Alkam presented him with her Palestinian identification card.

    A doctoral student at Riverside, Alkam’s identification limits her to the West Bank in Palestine. She explained to Wilcox that even though she also has American citizenship, Israel bars West Bank residents like her from traveling to places such as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem without a special permit or visa. 

    That was relevant to the matter at hand, as Wilcox and Alkam deliberated over what to do about a summer abroad program offered by Riverside’s School of Business. As part of the program, students visit Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. 

    Days earlier, pro-Palestinian student protesters at Riverside erected an encampment and demanded administrators cut ties with Israel. Alkam, the lead negotiator for students, implored Wilcox to discontinue the abroad program, arguing it violated the university’s anti-discrimination policy because not all students could participate regardless of their country of national origin. 

    “They have students who are on campus who can’t participate in that program just because of their birth status,” Alkam told EdSource later. “It was really important for me to illustrate that in a very visual way for them.”

    According to the U.S. State Department, American citizens who are also residents of the West Bank need a visa or permit to enter Israel. Other Americans can use their passport to visit for business or tourism purposes without a visa.  

    Focusing on the study abroad program reflected the students’ strategy to try winning tangible changes at Riverside even if they couldn’t get the campus to divest financially from companies tied to Israel amid its war on Gaza, a key demand of protesters at campuses across the country.

    Aided by their faculty adviser, Christine Victorino, who previously was Wilcox’s chief of staff, the students came to the negotiating table with what they believed were reasonable asks. A spokesperson for Riverside said nobody on Wilcox’s staff was available for an interview, but directed EdSource to Victorino. With an intimate knowledge of how the chancellor’s office operates, she advised the students on making requests that had a chance to be successful.

    On the second night of negotiations, Alkam and other negotiators met with Wilcox for seven hours inside the conference room at Riverside’s Hinderaker Hall. By the next morning, they had their deal, which included terminating the abroad program.

    Rather than single out the program in Israel, Wilcox discontinued all of the business school’s global programs, which also operate in Oxford, Cuba, Vietnam, Brazil, China, Egypt and Jordan. Wilcox’s office declined to comment for this story, but according to his office’s website, officials learned “through our dialogue” during the negotiations that the abroad program was not “consistent with university policies.” 

    As part of the deal, Wilcox also agreed to consider whether campus vendors should be permitted to sell Sabra hummus products. Students at Riverside and other campuses across the country for years have targeted Sabra. One of Sabra’s owners is the Strauss Group, an Israeli food company that has long been scrutinized by pro-Palestinian activists over its support for the Israeli Defense Forces.

    While not committing to divestment, Wilcox said he would start a process to review the Riverside campus endowment’s investments. That was the most Wilcox could do because Riverside doesn’t manage its own endowment; instead, UC’s systemwide investments office does. Under the agreement, Riverside will explore the possibility of managing the endowment itself.  

    Wilcox made the concessions after two days of negotiations. In exchange, student protesters agreed to end their encampment just four days after they initially erected it. The campus also avoided the violence between pro-Palistinian protesters and Israeli supporters that had occurred earlier that week at UCLA, which negotiators believed was a motivating factor for Wilcox to get a deal. 

    As college protesters across California have demanded their campuses cut ties with Israel, few have gotten any formal concessions. Across most campuses, negotiations have either stalled or ended altogether. Several campuses have even resorted to calling in police to forcibly disband encampments and arrest students. 

    But at Riverside, the spring quarter is ending with little fanfare. A stark contrast to several other University of California campuses, Riverside has remained peaceful in the weeks since the agreement, which remains one of the few deals reached by campus protesters and administrators across California. Others to make deals include UC Berkeley and Sacramento State.

    Of UC’s seven campuses on the quarter calendar where classes continued into this month, Riverside was also the only one where academic workers did not strike. Graduate assistants and other student workers did strike at the six other campuses, arguing that UC violated union members’ rights by retaliating against them for participating in pro-Palestinian protests.

    “I knew that I would look more revolutionary if we stood firm and we kept our encampment up for longer, and we started getting arrests and getting the same press coverage as other universities,” Alkam said. “But to me, it was more important to get the material changes that we did get.”

    Avoiding violence

    Two nights prior to the main negotiating session at Riverside, counterdemonstrators at UCLA violently attacked the pro-Palestinian encampment there, injuring student protesters and sending some to the hospital. 

    Wilcox, students believed, did not want to risk a similar situation unfolding at his campus, which prides itself on being one of the most ethnically diverse and welcoming universities, including for Middle Eastern students. Riverside was the first in the nation to have a Middle Eastern Student Center, according to its website.

    “Their whole image is centered around them being progressive and them being diverse,” Alkam said. “They felt so much pressure to not look like UCLA.”

    Victorino, the faculty adviser for the students, agreed. She said in an interview that “as a former administrator, the main concern” was the possibility of violence. 

    It was that kind of insight into the chancellor’s office and how it operates that Victorino was able to provide to the students. Before last year, she had spent seven years as Wilcox’s chief of staff. In that role, she helped Wilcox navigate several major controversies and challenges, including the Covid-19 pandemic and a restructuring of the campus police department. 

    Victorino, now a professor of practice in Riverside’s school of education, only got involved in the encampment negotiations after being approached by Alkam. Alkam was previously Victorino’s teaching assistant and asked her to be the students’ adviser. Unsure if she wanted to involve herself in the negotiations, Victorino sought advice from Wilcox. He encouraged her to accept the role, so she did.

    She helped the students understand what would and wouldn’t be possible. Victorino, for example, explained to the students that Riverside’s endowment is managed by the systemwide office, giving Wilcox little control over the campus investments. With that information, the students compromised on their original demand calling for Riverside to immediately divest its endowment funds from any companies related to Israel. 

    Victorino even told them how Wilcox might react to certain requests. “We kind of just role-played what the meeting would be like,” Victorino said.

    Elsewhere, negotiations stall

    More than a month since their deal, Riverside remains one of the few campuses where protesters and officials found common ground. 

    At other campuses, like UC Santa Cruz, negotiations have gone south. About two weeks ago at that campus, after weeks of stalled negotiations, Chancellor Cynthia Larive called in police who disbanded an encampment there and arrested students. Police also have dismantled encampments and arrested protesters at campuses such as UC Irvine, UC San Diego and UCLA, where a second encampment was erected.

    Complicating the negotiations is the governance structure of the 10-campus University of California and 23-campus California State University systems. Both systems are governed by centralized boards and systemwide president’s and chancellor’s offices, limiting the autonomy of campus-level administrators.

    CSU system officials publicly scolded one campus president, Sonoma State President Mike Lee, for agreeing to seek “divestment strategies” and to not engage in study abroad programs in Israel. Lee was placed on administrative leave and, two days later, said he would retire. 

    “The chancellor and presidents have been in constant contact during protest activities on campuses with the intent that decisions at the university level are made in consultation with the Chancellor’s Office,” CSU spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith said in a statement to EdSource. 

    A UC spokesperson declined to comment. But UC said in a statement in April that it “opposes calls for boycott against and divestment from Israel.”

    At Santa Cruz, protesters initially set up their encampment about six weeks ago, but it has been more than a month since administrators have negotiated with them. Student protesters last submitted a set of demands to Larive’s staff on May 10, but “there’s been no official communication between us and the administration since then,” said Jamie Hindery, an undergraduate student at the campus and a spokesperson for the protesters. 

    A Santa Cruz spokesperson did not return a request for comment on this story. 

    Larive in a statement said the encampment was unlawful and a “dangerous blockade from the campus entrance.” She added that the encampment “disrupted campus operations and threatened safety, including delaying access of emergency vehicles.”

    Protesters, however, dispute that. “Copious eyewitness testimony, backed by photos and video evidence, contradict this account,” the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine said in a statement responding to Larive. 

    Hindery said the police activity eliminated any chance of negotiations resuming. It’s a reality he believes is true across most UC campuses, where finals are happening this week and commencement ceremonies are scheduled for this weekend. “People don’t want to attend their own graduations. Students feel betrayed and unsafe,” he said. “I would be very surprised if campus-level negotiations were to restart any time soon.” 

    Meanwhile, at Riverside, Alkam credited administrators for choosing “peace and safety” and compromising with the students.

    “That’s something that the other campuses should have learned from, and they definitely didn’t,” she said.





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  • Julio Frenk, University of Miami president, named next UCLA chancellor

    Julio Frenk, University of Miami president, named next UCLA chancellor


    Julio Frenk, president of the University of Miami, has been selected as the next chancellor of UCLA.

    Credit: UCLA

    Julio Frenk, the current president of the University of Miami and a public health researcher, will become the next chancellor of UCLA.

    The University of California’s board of regents on Wednesday unanimously approved Frenk, who was born in Mexico and will become the first Latino chancellor to lead UCLA.

    Frenk will earn an annual base salary of $978,904 and will start in the role Jan. 1.

    “I am eager to take this role for several reasons,” Frenk said Wednesday, addressing the regents. “This is a crucial moment for higher education. We need bold innovation, and UCLA has a track record of embracing that kind of innovation.” 

    Frenk, 70, will succeed current Chancellor Gene Block, who plans to step down from the role July 31. Darnell Hunt, UCLA’s executive vice chancellor and provost, will serve as the interim chancellor until Frenk takes over.

    Frenk’s appointment comes as UCLA reels from months of pro-Palestinian protests. Earlier this spring, Block was criticized for being unprepared after a mob of counter-demonstrators attacked a pro-Palestinian encampment on the campus. About two dozen pro-Palestinian protesters this week were arrested on the campus.

    “At this moment, campus communities across the country are facing complex questions related to protecting student well-being, stopping all forms of discrimination and upholding free expression rights,” Frenk said Wednesday. “University leaders must take up these issues thoughtfully while continuing to advocate for the immense value that higher education generates.” 

    Frenk has led the University of Miami since 2015. During his time there, he was credited with orchestrating a $2.5 billion fundraising campaign and leading the university through the Covid-19 pandemic, among other accomplishments.

    Frenk is the second high-profile education leader to leave the Miami area in recent years for Los Angeles. Alberto Carvalho, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District since February 2022, had previously served as the superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools.

    Prior to leading Miami, Frenk was dean of faculty at the public health school of Harvard University, the T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He was also previously the federal secretary of health in Mexico, where he was credited with reforming the nation’s health system. 

    “I am thrilled to welcome Dr. Frenk as the next chancellor of UCLA,” Richard Leib, chair of UC’s board of regents, said in a statement. “Dr. Frenk’s strategic and inspirational leadership, along with his extensive background in education and health, including his time as the Federal Secretary of Health of Mexico, uniquely positions him to guide UCLA into a future of impact and innovation.”

    Frenk was born in Mexico City in 1953. His father, who was 6 years old at the time, fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s along with his parents and sister. Frenk’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all physicians.

    Frenk earned his medical degree in 1979 from the National University of Mexico. He also received degrees from the University of Michigan, including a master’s in public health, a master’s in sociology and a joint doctorate in medical care organization and sociology.

    The pool of candidates for UCLA’s next chancellor “was remarkable,” but Frenk stood out “for his unique combination of scholarly, medical, administrative and political expertise,” James Steintrager, the chair of UC’s academic senate, said in a statement. “How he straddles the worlds of university research and health care delivery makes him an excellent fit for UCLA.”





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  • We must champion our student parents

    We must champion our student parents


    San Diego State University, Hilltop Way.

    Credit: Jazlyn Dieguez / EdSource

    As we honor the dedication and love of father figures this June, it’s critical to spotlight a demographic in urgent need of support: student parents. Between balancing coursework with child care, these parents are pursuing better opportunities for themselves and creating a foundation to uplift their families. And they are doing so while facing dubious odds as they navigate a higher education system built without their unique needs in mind.

    More than one-fifth of undergraduate students in the U.S. — about 3.7 million — are parents. However, only 37% of student parents graduate within six years, compared with nearly 60% of their peers without children.

    In California, the proposed GAINS for Student Parents Act (Assembly Bill 2458) aims to address this disparity. The bill would adjust student parents’ cost of attendance to account for child care and improve data collection on student parents — two vital pieces of the puzzle for identifying and addressing the unique hurdles faced by students with children. 

    I recently spoke with a student parent on the cusp of graduation about his experience. Larry, 40, is raising nine children, six of whom are still at home. That’s a heroic feat for any father, but Larry also graduated from CSU Bakersfield with degrees in sociology and communications just in time for Father’s Day this year. His story, while inspiring, highlights systemic issues in higher education that make success stories like his much too rare.

    Larry sits at the intersection of many identities: father, veteran and previously incarcerated. Through these identities, he has experienced bias, stigma, and barriers to opportunities that others on campus take for granted. His experience is not unique. A national survey found that 40% of parenting students feel isolated on campus, and 20% feel unwelcome.

    “My children have dealt with a lot. I’ll have my kids on campus while I’m in class, but since I’m older, people think I should have things figured out. If there was someplace for them to be or something for them to do while they were on campus — what am I supposed to do when I don’t have child care?” Larry said.

    According to a New America survey, nearly 40% of student parents who stopped out of college cited caregiving and school work as significant reasons. However, the number of colleges with accessible on-campus child care has declined. When it does exist, long waiting lists and high costs are serious barriers. This exacerbates time poverty, forcing student parents to make sacrifices that impact their academic outcomes and their children’s future opportunities. Passing the GAINS for Student Parents Act is critical to addressing these hurdles. 

    California has made strides with legislation like AB 2881, passed in 2022, granting student parents priority class registration to accommodate their demanding schedules. But there is still much room for improvement. 

    The GAINS for Student Parents Act can help create an education system that uplifts families. The bill aims to standardize the financial aid process across institutions, making automatic adjustments to the cost of attendance for student parents, who are often first-generation students of color facing additional financial burdens not covered by existing aid programs. Since colleges and universities currently lack a systematic approach to identifying student parents, the bill would also improve the collection of data to facilitate more targeted support for these students.

    Co-sponsored by the Michelson Center for Public Policy, along with The California Alliance for Student Parent Success, Cal State Student Association, Generation Hope, and uAspire, this bill made it out of the Assembly and moved on to the Senate where it was passed in the Senate Higher Education Committee. It is now waiting to be heard in Senate Appropriations.

    When asked about graduation, Larry said: “I didn’t think I was going to finish this. I’m blown away. I’m graduating with a degree — what is that? A college degree!”

    Father’s Day graduation success stories like Larry’s should be more common and less fraught with tribulations. Student parents are resilient and strive to do what is best for their children. But as policymakers, leaders, administrators and practitioners, how can we build a more equitable system for parenting college students nationwide?

    By supporting student-parent success, we ensure the success of their children and future generations. So, this Father’s Day, how will you join the movement to ensure every student father and every student parent has the support they need to succeed?

    •••

    Queena Hoang is the senior program manager for Michelson 20MM Foundation’s Student Basic Needs Initiative. The initiative aims to tackle the real cost of college, especially the nontuition costs that place students in positions of housing insecurity, homelessness, food insecurity, and overall financial instability. 

    The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.





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