Students at Clairemont High School in San Diego participate in a national school walkout in 2018 to demand gun control — almost two decades after Columbine.
David Washburn / EdSource
“Four dead in shooting at Georgia high school, 14-year-old suspect in custody.” The ABC News headline blasts across my Apple Watch.
I am in the middle of teaching ninth graders how to draw inferences to support an interpretation of Roald Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter.” They’re captivated by housewife Mary Maloney’s stoic demeanor as she covers up her violent retaliation against her husband. I pause midstory to read the headline to myself, and without reacting, go back to modeling annotations as we uncover how Mary gets away with murder. The students are engaged, but I struggle to keep my own mind focused on the lesson, knowing classes are now canceled in another school, this time in Georgia.
Afterward, I sit at my desk surveying my classroom. I mentally map out safety spots, rehearsing scenarios for a lockdown. I wonder, “What will I do if we are at lunch? Or if there is a shooting between passing periods?” My thoughts teeter between precautionary mental plans and prayers of relief: t wasn’t us. I imagine many teachers, administrators and parents around the country are breathing that same sigh; thank goodness it wasn’t my classroom, my colleagues, my students, my child.
The cry for gun control and stricter safety measures seems to fade in the quiet period after a shooting, with little to no change after the national mourning. My anxiety as a teacher takes a hit every time we revisit this repetitive headline. It is personal and desperately frustrating to grapple with school shootings time and again. Amid the helplessness I feel in the aftermath, I start to think of ways to help my students and colleagues navigate through this repeated collective trauma. What can we do, within our community power, to process these tragedies?
Upon hearing that the shooter is 14 years old, my initial reaction is that school districts need to prioritize regular emotional check-ins for both students and staff. The research on the importance of social and emotional learning is clear: student perceptions of school safety and inclusion significantly improve with this support.
The age of the Georgia shooter underscores the urgency of this idea; an intentional emphasis on mental health in schools as a proactive measure can be instrumental in identifying those who may be struggling with psychological challenges. What violence markers were observed beforehand? How could this have been prevented? This is a challenging balance to navigate: ensuring that schools do not overstep in identifying potentially violent individuals while also teaching emotional intelligence as a preventive measure for students to handle stress. While fostering social and emotional learning within school curriculums cannot entirely eliminate the risk, mandating this is a proactive, researched step toward school safety.
School personnel also need proper professional development on how to handle trauma. When we see signs of stress, what do we do? We know students now, more than previous generations, buckle more frequently under emotional loads that impact their ability to learn, and teachers often feel ill-equipped to respond. We need structured systems of correspondence when we notice signs that someone — student or colleague — is struggling. Just as school safety plans are mandatory, there is a need for trauma-response systems and appropriate annual training.
One issue that has repeatedly surfaced in my classroom is the significant impact cyberbullying and social media have on today’s teenagers. How has technology hindered our efforts to keep students focused and, more importantly, to keep them safe? How has living in a virtual world affected students’ ability to navigate real-life interactions? While I recognize that school violence existed long before every teenager had a cellphone or access to social media, I can’t help but suspect a link between the rise in school-related violence and the fact that much of children’s social interaction now takes place in an impersonal, virtual environment.
As we respond emotionally to the shooting, the uncomfortably large elephant in the classroom is the urgent need for systemic change. Apalachee, Georgia, has been added to the list of communities grappling with the pain of government inaction. In the aftermath, schools across the nation are managing trauma response and reviewing their safety procedures, hoping to withstand a potential repeat event on their own campuses.
Wanting students and faculty to come home safely from school should not be a political issue; it is a basic expectation. The overwhelming responsibility for student safety falls on me and my colleagues to find creative ways to ensure our own safety. Instead, this pressure should fall squarely on our elected officials. While we wait for legislative action, we map our modes of escape, pay heed to the emotional toll these events have on our school communities, and pray fervently that we don’t ever experience our own versions of “Lamb to the Slaughter.” The shooting in Georgia is a reminder to check our own locks and security measures in case we become the unlucky next.
The opinions in this commentary are those of the author. We welcome guest commentaries with diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
Arkansas is deep-red, so of course the Legislature banned abortion. Supporters of abortion rights gathered enough signatures to put the issue to the voters, but the politicians knocked their referendum off the ballot. But the issue has not gone away.
I thought readers might like to read about the persistence of abortion right supporters.
The Arkansas Times is a dissident website that keeps readers informed about events like this one. If you want to know what Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders is doing, this is a great source.
For proof of the sorry state of reproductive rights in Arkansas, consider that for the second year in a row, no protesters even bothered to show at the annual Planned Parenthood Garden Party.
It’s been a brutal run here since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision of 2022 whipped away the national right to abortion access, pulling the trigger on an Arkansas law primed to ban virtually all abortions in the state as soon as our blood-red state government officials could get away with it.
Since then, the annual Planned Parenthood fundraiser still goes on. But the protesters who used to hoist their placards of bloody, dismembered fetus parts in view of the wine sippers and bidders at the silent auction tables aren’t a problem anymore. Transgender people and immigrants have displaced abortion care providers as the right’s new bogeyman, leaving reproductive rights advocates to regroup in peace.
Planned Parenthood Great Plains Executive Director Emily Wales was in town for a party nonetheless. And while she didn’t sugarcoat the status report, it wasn’t quite as bitter as you might expect.
“Arkansas has paved the way for some pretty awful policies, not just for abortion access, but also excluding us from the Medicaid program and then continuing to pass anti-abortion billswhen there is really no abortion that is accessible for people,” Wales said. “That is not about health care, it’s about messaging and fear.”
Arkansas’s consolation prize for winning this race to the bottom is that we’re down here pioneering tips and tricks to share with other states who find themselves shut off from access to necessary medical care. A decade ago, then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson blocked Planned Parenthood clinics in Arkansas from collecting Medicaid reimbursements for non-abortion services. (Federal reimbursements for abortions generally were banned even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.) Now, Planned Parenthood affiliates in other states are facing similar threats, and the Trump administration maintains a chokehold on the Title X federal funding that once helped cover the cost of family planning consultations, prescriptions and procedures.
“I don’t want to lean into our trauma or say that we’re resilient, because we’ve always been under attack,” Wales said. “But we have learned lessons about how to adapt and change and meet the moment. And right now, we have sister affiliates in Planned Parenthood who are trying to figure out what happens if they lose Medicaid, or if their Title X funding that was recently cut for many Planned Parenthoods doesn’t come back, what do they do? And for places like Arkansas, we are now in the position of advising other Planned Parenthoods on how you keep your doors open.”
Doesn’t seem like much to brag about until you consider that Arkansas’s two Planned Parenthood clinics – one in Little Rock and one in Rogers – are seeing increasing numbers of patients each year, even with the state’s abortion ban in place. The number of patients served by Planned Parenthood in Arkansas rose nearly 45% from July 2023 to July 2024. Turns out they really do provide lots of other medical services after all!
Iffy weather necessitated a change of venue for this year’s garden party, from the grounds of a historic home in the Quawpaw Quarter to the decidedly less garden-themed Next Level Events in the Union Station basement. The regulars showed up anyway, their numbers weighted toward people old enough to have a glimmer of memory of the pre-Roe days, but a three-dozen-strong corps of young volunteers organized the nametag table and passed out hors d’oeuvres.
Speakers skipped those apologetic qualifiers that used to precede seemingly every statement about abortion. None of that tired and defensive, “Nobody likes abortion, but …” anymore.
Instead, speakers leaned into the freedom that comes with having little to lose. The din of a chatty, tipsy crowd packed into a subterranean space helped, too. “I feel like I could say anything and you wouldn’t know,” Wales said. “I could be wildly offensive about, perhaps, the current administration, and no one would ever know.”
Other speakers laughed about the time Lori Williams, longtime clinical director at Little Rock Family Planning Services and the night’s winner of the Brownie Ledbetter Award, helped torpedo a 2013 bill to require ultrasounds for abortion access at six weeks by pulling out an alarmingly phallic vaginal ultrasound probe during a legislative committee hearing.
Sarah Thompson, a leader with Grandmothers for Reproductive Rights and winner of this year’s Christina Mullinax Persistent Spirit Award, lamented progress made and lost.
“When I needed abortion care in Arkansas, I had to leave the state, and it was a long time ago. And now young women still have to leave the state to obtain abortion care,” Thompson said. “I’ll never stop doing this work. It’s part of who I am for the rest of my life.” (It should be noted that many Arkansas women still do access abortion services without leaving the state thanks to the prevalence of mail-order medication for early term abortions — though many Republicans want to put a stop to that as well.)
Arkansas is part of Planned Parenthood of Great Plains, a consortium that includes Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri. Abortion is legal in Kansas, and last year, Missouri voters reinstated abortion rights, although state lawmakers there are angling to repeal them again. That kind of heartache is familiar to the 100,000+ Arkansans who signed a petition to give the state a chance to vote on reinstating abortion rights in 2024, only to see that opportunity smothered by dubious legal shenanigans.
“Care in Arkansas does not look the way we want it to, and eventually it will return to what it needs to be, but we’re going to keep working on that,” Wales said. “Until then, we will be creative and thoughtful, and we are not about to be intimidated by what’s happening at the federal level, because we are really, really good at undermining authority.”
San Diego County Attorney Sumner Stephan announces in 2019 the indictment of 11 individuals affiliated with A3 Education, including founders Sean McManus and Jason Schrock, who subsequently took a plea deal.
Credit: Office of the San Diego County District Attorney
A court-commissioned task force formed in the aftermath of a massive fraud by an online charter school network issued recommendations Wednesday to thwart the recurrence of similar operations.
State Controller Malia Cohen, who chaired the task force, said that the 20 recommendations for reforming the system for auditing schools should apply not only to charter schools but also school districts and county offices of education.
The report urges significant improvement in training, selecting, overseeing and disciplining school auditors as well as an expansion of their responsibilities.
“With the education of our children at stake and significant state investments of taxpayer money in education, it is crucial that all schools be held to the highest level of integrity, accountability, fiscal compliance, and transparency,” Cohen wrote in an introduction to the 50-page “Audit Best Practices for Detecting and Curtailing Charter School Fraud.”
There were multiple failures that allowed the Academics Arts and Action Education (A3) charter network of 19 schools to pilfer tens of millions of dollars in public funding. The multi-agency task force focused on strengthening the auditing process, because a system of detecting and quickly responding to possible fraud relies on effective annual reviews by professional, independent auditors, who are overseen by Cohen’s department.
San Diego Superior Court Judge Robert Longstreth signed an order in September 2023 establishing the multi-agency task force after observing how A3 exploited weaknesses in the auditing system. A3 fraudulently enrolled participants in its summer athletic programs into the charter school’s academic program so that it could claim average daily attendance funding, even though the students received no education services. Additionally, private schools and other programs that participated in the enrollment scheme received a portion of the state’s per-student funding while A3 pocketed the rest, according to the report.
In 2021, Sean McManus and Jason Schrock, A3’s founders, pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to commit theft of public dollars for the phantom enrollments. In return for serving four years on house arrest, the executives agreed to repay $37 million.
The State Controller’s Office and the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted A3, led the task force. It also included divergent perspectives from the California Charter Schools Association, the California School Boards Association, and the California County Superintendents.
Many of the recommendations will require legislative action and additional funding to implement, as noted in the report in a section titled “Obstacles and Solutions.” While charter school advocates and district authorizers agree in principle that there’s a need for changes, they have disagreed in the past over specifics of added regulation. The report called for collaboration among those with differing perspectives.
This is the third significant report this year that looked at the multiple breakdowns of oversight responsibility and holes in transparency laws that failed to spot flagrant violations by A3 and now-defunct Inspire Charter Schools, a home-school charter network that could not account for tens of millions of dollars in state funding.
Both groups made similar recommendations for stronger oversight, including demanding that nonprofit charter school boards scrutinize third-party contracts for conflicts of interest.
The authorizers’ task force called for establishing a statewide Office of Inspector General to investigate and prosecute financial fraud in school districts, community colleges and charter schools.
The LAO-FCMAT report also called for limiting small school districts’ ability to authorize large-scale charter networks. Not only do they lack the knowledge and capacity to monitor complex operations, but the oversight fees they can charge, sometimes reaping millions of dollars yearly, could create an incentive to look the other way. Dehesa School District, with one school in the San Diego County foothills, chartered three A3 and two Inspire charter schools.
The failure of an audit to catch A3’s “exponential” fluctuations in enrollment was one area that the report said needed fixing. It recommends tracking enrollment and attendance changes monthly; had this been in place, an auditor may have identified a potential for fraud.
Other recommendations
Qualifying, certifying and evaluating accountants: Currently, only 22 certified public accounting firms — less than 0.1% of licensed accounting firms in California — audit 93% of school districts and charter schools, according to the report. As a result, the report stated, “The poor performance of any one CPA firm may significantly impact the quality and reliability of school audits.” And those auditing schools have not been required to have any training specifically on auditing schools.
The report recommends:
Requiring 24 hours of training on school auditing before an auditor can be listed among certified public accountants eligible for school auditing.
Requiring the State Comptroller’s Office to do a quality review after an auditor’s first school audit.
Adding conditions for deleting a poorly performing auditor from the state’s auditor eligibility list.
Frequent turnover in a charter school’s auditors can be “a red flag” for a subpar auditor or a district with possible misconduct. The report recommends monitoring for these trends.
Conflicts of interest: Some cases of charter fraud have revealed collusion between vendors with close personal ties to charter leaders, self-dealing by charter CEOs and other conflicts of interest that could lead to fraud or waste. Some boards of directors have failed in their legal responsibility to identify and prohibit them.
The report recommends financial disclosure statements for the top five highest-paid school employees, the 25 highest paid vendors, and disclosure statements for charter schools’ contracts with charter management organizations.
The report reiterates a best practice that some auditors apparently did not follow: To preserve independence, an auditor should never allow a school district or charter school to determine which financial transactions and enrollments should be sampled for an audit.
Some of the most visible cases of abuse have occurred with non-classroom based charter schools. Those are charter schools in which less than 80% of instruction occurs in person.
Consisting of hybrid charter schools and home schools, they comprise about a quarter of the state’s 1,300 charter schools and nearly 40% of charter school students. Exclusively online charter schools are only a small piece.
Non-classroom-based charter schools are also increasingly popular with parents seeking scheduling flexibility and more options in their children’s education.
In 2019, the Legislature imposed a two-year moratorium on approving new non-classroom-based charter schools and has extended it twice.
Thus, there will be pressure on the Legislature to consider the auditing and oversight reforms that the three reports have suggested before the moratorium ends in 2026.
Courtesy of California State University, Bakersfield
Vernon B. Harper Jr. is scratching the word “interim” from his nameplate at California State University, Bakersfield.
Harper, who has served as the university’s interim president since the end of 2023, was named CSUB’s permanent president on Wednesday, the second day of a Cal State board of trustees meeting dominated by discussions about the financial pressures facing the university system. The system is projecting a $400 million to $800 million budget gap in 2025-26 as state leaders signal their intention to reduce funding for CSU.
CSU Bakersfield has been able to prevent students from feeling the effects of a reduced budget, Harper said, buoyed by growing enrollment this school year. His focus is on making what he calls a “pivot towards the community” — expanding programs to boost the number of Kern County high school graduates and community college transfer students who enroll at CSUB. The Central Valley is growing rapidly but has lower college attainment than the rest of the state.
Harper envisions the university taking a more active role alongside local K-12 schools to increase the number of students who meet A-G requirements, the coursework that makes students eligible to start college at a Cal State or University of California campus. Only 36% of Kern County high school graduates completed such coursework in the 2022-23 school year, according tostate education data, compared with 52% of high school graduates statewide.
“That’s the real transition that the institution is making. It is to accept those problems as our own,” Harper said. “We’re partnering with our K-12 providers and making sure that we’re doing absolutely everything we can to raise that statistic. We’re not just going to sit back passively and watch our community go in a direction that we don’t want it to go.”
One example of the work Harper hopes to get done: CSUB’s teacher education program is forming a task force with the Kern County Superintendent of Schools Office and the Kern High School Districtin a bid to increase the number of students who are A-G qualified, he said.
The campus is also experimenting with ways to get local students thinking about college even before they leave middle school. It recently started a pilot program with four middle schools and four high schools in which students as young as 12 will receive notices that they are guaranteed admission to CSUB so long as they meet A-Grequirements.
“We’ve seen that with young people, especially in under-resourced populations, their vision is truncated by their circumstance,” Harper said. “Whatever we can do, we have a responsibility to do, to extend that vision as far as it can go.”
The past decade has seen rising graduation rates at CSUB. Among first-time, full-time freshmen who entered Cal State Bakersfield in 2017, 49% graduated in six years, an almost 10 percentage-point increase from 2007. But the school has not caught up to some of its Cal State peers. Systemwide, the six-year graduation rate for the same group of students in the fall 2017 cohort was roughly 62%.
Harper said that the intervention that seems to have the most impact on improving graduation rates is pairing students with an academic adviser who works with them throughout their time at CSUB, guiding them through unforeseen challenges, like switching into a course that fits the student’s work schedule.
“As much as we can invest in that activity, the more positive outcomes that we (see),” he said.
The university is also experiencing some of the same longstanding graduation equity gaps that exist across California higher education. The six-year graduation rate among Black students who entered CSUB as freshmen in the fall 2017 cohort was 40%, lagging Asian, Latino and white students.
Harper has backed several CSUB initiatives to attract and retain Black students. Harper said that community college students at Bakersfield College who participate in the Umoja program, which includes courses on African American culture as well as mentorship and academic counseling, will find they can continue receiving similar support now that CSUB has its own Umoja program for transfers. The campus plans to open a Black Students Success Center in the spring and has already hired a group of faculty members whose work is focused on minoritized communities, Harper said.
Harper’s tenure as CSUB’s permanent president begins at a moment when the California State University system is raising financial alarm bells.
Cal State leaders are anticipating that a $164 million increase in revenue from tuition hikes will not be enough to alleviate other stresses on its budget. The system expects that state general fund revenue will drop nearly $400 million, according to a September budget presentation, and that $250 million in compact funding will be delayed. The university system also faces rising projected costs, including for basics it can’t avoid like increased health care premiums and utilities expenses.
Speaking at a Sep. 24 meeting, trustee DiegoArambula said the university system has “almost been too effective at making these cuts year over year over year” without explaining to legislators the impact those budget reductions are already having on students.
“We are doing everything we can to make them as far away from students, but a hiring freeze is a hiring freeze, and that does impact students if we’re not bringing someone into a role that we know is important,” Arambula said. “It’s impacting our staff, who are taking on more to try and still meet the needs of the students who are here.”
CSUB officials last spring said they planned to cut the school’s 2024-25 net operating budget by about 7%, citing a decline in enrollment and increased salary and benefits costs. The school had less than a month of funding in its rainy day fund in 2022-23, slightly less than the net operating budget across the CSU system at that point.
But Harper said enrollment this year is up between 4% and 5%, driving tuition growth that is alleviating some budget pressure. The campus also has made temporary cuts to areas that aren’t student-facing, he said, such as professional development.
“We’ve been able to really, really shield any negative effects on students,” Harper said.
Harper succeeds Lynnette Zelezny as president. He was previously Cal State Bakersfield’s provost and vice president for academic affairs. He will receive a salary of $429,981 and a $50,000 housing allowance.
Harper was first hired at CSUB in 2016. Prior to his arrival at Cal State Bakersfield, he worked at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, Wilkes University of Pennsylvania and the State Council for Higher Education of Virginia.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in communication from Pennsylvania State University, a master’s degree in rhetoric from West Chester University and a doctorate in human communication from Howard University. He served eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve.
This article was rewritten and reposted on Sept. 27 to clarify that the lawsuit’s aim is to prevent underfunding of Proposition 98 in future years. The earlier version misstated that the lawsuit asserted the current state budget as enacted also violated the funding law.
Although the 2024-25 state budget shields school districts and community colleges from funding cuts, the California School Boards Association is suing the Newsom administration over a provision that the school boards association claims is unconstitutional.
The change to the Education Code would deny schools money they would be entitled to under some conditions in future years, setting a dangerous precedent, CSBA argued in a lawsuit filed this week.
The school boards association is asking the Superior Court in Sacramento County to invalidate that section in the education budget bill. CSBA argues it violates the letter and spirit of Proposition 98, the formula that determines how much of the General Fund must be allocated to schools and community colleges.
The Department of Finance inserted the little-known statutory wording into the budget trailer bill in the final days of the legislative session in June, with no discussion or notice. It was not mentioned in the budget analysis that legislators reviewed before passing the budget.
“CSBA’s defense of voter‐approved Proposition 98 is nonnegotiable, as is the obligation of the state to follow the Constitution that governs it,” CSBA President Albert Gonzalez, a Santa Clara Unified school board member, said in a statement.
On behalf of Newsom, the California Department of Finance refuted CSBA assertions in a series of exchanges with legislative leaders in July. All of its actions were legal, Joe Stephenshaw, director of the Department of Finance, wrote.
The lawsuit would not affect this year’s budget, which took effect July 1. However, the tense negotiations and controversial revenue maneuvers preceding the budget’s passage were very much on the minds of Newsom’s financial advisors when they wrote the statutory change that the school boards association opposes.
It pertains to the unusual challenge that Newsom and the Legislature found themselves in trying to write the 2023-24 budget. Because of the devasting impacts of winter storms and floods, the federal government and the state pushed back the tax collection deadline from April to November 2023. Without having tax receipts in hand, Newsom and the Legislature made a best-guess estimate of what Prop. 98 minimum guarantee would be for 2022-23. As it turned out, the minimum guarantee was $8.8 billion less than what they appropriated.
Rather than cut funding for school districts and community colleges after the 2022-23 fiscal year had ended and money had been spent, Newsom left what he called “an overappropriation” alone. Two of the main formulas to determine the Prop 98 minimum guarantee incorporate what the state spent on schools in the prior year. So, the over-appropriation in 2022-23 would increase the amount that the state owed schools in 2023-24, 2024-25 and beyond. his initial 2024-25 budget in January, Newsom proposed allowing schools to keep the $8.8 billion for 2022-23 but to exclude the money when calculating the Prop. 98 minimum guarantee for 2023-24 and 2024-25.
CSBA and other education groups opposed that move. They said that dropping Prop. 98 below what the Legislature had approved violated the initiative that voters passed in 1988.
In most years, the Legislature’s Prop. 98 appropriation becomes the base amount for the following year, then is adjusted for enrollment growth or decline, inflation, or increases in economic growth per student. That assures that Prop. 98 minimum funding guarantee will grow over time, CSBA said.
Faced with strong opposition from a coalition of school groups, Newsom eventually gave up on lowering the minimum guarantee. But still short of funding to pay for it, Newsom turned to a series of multiyear maneuvers: suspending the minimum guarantee in 2023-24, deferring funding from one year to the next, draining the rainy day fund, and creating a multi-billion dollar debt that the General Fund, not future Prop. 98 revenues, would pay back over several years. All of these tactics were legal.
Newsom tries again
But Newsom and Finance officials hadn’t given up on the idea of revising the Prop. 98 minimum guarantee downward when tax revenues come up short. They quietly inserted language into the trailer bill to limit the state’s funding vulnerability in the event of another tax filing delay in the future.
It says that when the filing deadline for personal and corporate income taxpayers is pushed back at least two weeks, then the state will revert to the previous year’s minimum guarantee. After the new taxes are collected, the state will recalculate the new Prop. 98 minimum and determine the difference between the original and revised Prop. 98 minimum. The “excess” appropriation won’t be able to raise the Prop. 98 minimum that year and for subsequent years, the statute says.
CSBA criticized this “unlawful provision” for “artificially lowering the baseline upon which future years’ school funding is established.” The lawsuit argues that voters passed it to assure a “stable and predictable source of funding that is not subject to political influence or manipulation.”
“When the Newsom administration proposed a budget maneuver in January to exclude some school funding from the Prop 98 formulas, education groups opposed it because it was unconstitutional. The budget language passed this summer to allow a similar manipulation of the guarantee in the future would be similarly unconstitutional,” said Rob Manwaring, senior policy and fiscal advisor for the nonprofit Children Now and an advisor on the lawsuit.
Delays in the tax deadline as occurred in 2022 and laid out in the provision will presumably be rare, but CSBA said the integrity of Prop. 98 must be preserved.
The Legislature has no authority to amend the wording of Prop. 98 – only voters can do that, CSBA argued.
This is an amazing story about the new Pope. Not only is he the first American-born pope, not only is he the first Peruvian pope, but he is descended on his mother’s side from Afro-Caribbeans.
Robert Francis Prevost, the Chicago-born cardinal selected on Thursday as the new pope, is descended from Creole people of color from New Orleans.
The pope’s maternal grandparents, both of whom are described as Black or mulatto in various historical records, lived in the city’s Seventh Ward, an area that is traditionally Catholic and a melting pot of people with African, Caribbean and European roots.
The grandparents, Joseph Martinez and Louise Baquié, eventually moved to Chicago in the early 20th century and had a daughter: Mildred Martinez, the pope’s mother.
The discovery means that Leo XIV, as the pope will be known, is not only breaking ground as the first U.S.-born pontiff. He also comes from a family that reflects the many threads that make up the complicated and rich fabric of the American story.
The link is a gift article so feel free to open it and read about the genealogical research.
Early this year, the California Department of Health Care Access and Information introduced the new Certified Wellness Coach program, aimed at improving the state’s inadequate capacity to support growing behavioral and mental health needs in California’s youth.
The program is part of the historic five-year, $4.6 billion state-funded Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative, of which the Department received $278 million to recruit, train and certify a diverse slate of mental health support personnel, or certified wellness coaches, in schools and community-based organizations across the state.
Sharmil Shah, assistant deputy director of the California Department of Health Care Access and Information.
According to Sharmil Shah, assistant deputy director of the California Department of Health Care Access and Information, certified wellness coaches work under a care team of licensed clinicians and professionals in pre-K, K-12 and post-secondary school settings. Most coaches have relevant associate or bachelor’s degrees in social work and human services and are trained in nonclinical behavioral health support.
Shah says the program strives to become a long-term response to a long-term crisis in California — that rates of anxiety and depression among the state’s children shot up by 70% between 2017 and 2022, and that following the COVID-19 pandemic, many adolescents experienced serious psychological distress and reported a 20% increase in suicides.
As part of a five-year initiative’s broader push to redefine student success, the program builds on research that behavioral interventions also improve academic performance and attendance in schools. In fact, anxiety, depression and mental health are the top health-related drivers of absenteeism since the onset of the pandemic, according to the Los Angeles Trust for Children’s Health. Simply put, students who feel better do better in school.
EdSource interviewed Shah about the new wellness coach program. Her remarks have been edited for length and clarity.
Describe the Certified Wellness Coach program. What can young people expect from the new wellness coaches?
Certified wellness coaches are meant to be an additional, trusted adult on a school campus — whether it’s an elementary school, middle school, high school or a college campus. This is a person that young people can turn to in times of need. Coaches would offer preventive and early intervention services and are intended to support a child or even a 25-year-old before a severe behavioral health need arises.
Some of the things that a parent or a child might see are classroom-level presentations, supporting school counselors with [mental health] screenings, individual and small group check-ins, wellness education and referrals to advanced behavioral health providers in times of crisis, among many other services.
What are the two types of wellness coaches, and how are their roles different?
There is a Certified Wellness Coach 1 and Certified Wellness Coach II. The Certified Wellness Coach 1 offers entry-level behavioral health supports, such as structured curriculum, to small groups or classrooms, which are focused on wellness promotion and education, mental health literacy — understanding the language of mental health — and life skills. They also support screenings for young people, connect them to behavioral health resources and professionals. If it becomes apparent that someone has a more significant need for behavioral health services, they’ll do a warm hand-off to a higher level of care.
The Certified Wellness Coach II provides a little more in-depth prevention and early intervention support to children and youth. They provide structured curriculum for groups or classrooms that’s focused on enhancing awareness of common behavioral health conditions like depression, anxiety. The Certified Wellness Coach II can help young people overcome maladaptive thinking patterns, distraction strategies and emotional regulations, and are able to do higher level interventions than a Certified Wellness Coach 1.
To support a mental health screening, a Certified Wellness Coach 1 can give the child some information about it, but they won’t administer the questions. The Certified Wellness Coach II can actually facilitate a screening process, be in the room and get everything set up, but they must still all be under the guidance of a school counselor who has qualifications to administer the screening and ask the questions, for example.
Why was it important to implement the program at all levels of schooling — from early education to community college?
It’s essential for children and youth to get help earlier on in the continuum of care, especially before a crisis arises. We believe that by supporting them at a younger age, we can provide them with the tools and skills to support their behavioral health and build resilience as they age. Wellness coaches can support youth through all the different changes, not only as related to age, but to life in general. We start at a very young age and then continue to an age where they can actually remember and hold onto the skills that they’ve learned.
How did the pandemic shape your vision for the program?
For students, we saw increased levels of anxiety, depression, social isolation, a disruption in their education, economic difficulties, and, of course, a lot of loss and grief. Children and adolescents lost family members who did not survive the pandemic. From research, we knew that there was already a youth mental health crisis in the state of California. The pandemic exacerbated it.
One system alone cannot address these challenges, but the school system is where all the kids are. There’s just not enough school personnel to address the need across the state. Through the development of this workforce, we hope that we can complement the incredible work that the educators are already doing by being a partner in their students’ health. Our wellness coaches can focus on social isolation, anxiety, feelings of sadness, and feeling connected and able to talk to somebody.
In a 2022 survey, about 55% of teachers said they would retire earlier than planned due to burnout from the pandemic. Could wellness coaches help relieve some of that ongoing burnout?
I was a PTA president, and I was in those environments in which I saw that there’s a child in the classroom that clearly looks like they need behavioral health services, and the teacher is spending maybe 90% of his or her time on that student, and the rest of the [students] are just kind of running around in circles. The current counselor-to-student ratio in California is about 1 to 464. It’s impossible, and it’s nearly double the recommended ratio. As the staff that spends the most time with students, the burden of supporting student behavioral health often falls on the teacher. That’s just not sustainable. That’s not helpful for the teachers, and they can’t do their job. By adding additional behavioral health professionals on campus, like wellness coaches, we can hopefully alleviate some of that burden and allow teachers to focus on the academic success of their students.
How will certified wellness coaches serve youth from multilingual or multicultural backgrounds? Will coaches reflect the demographics and experiences of their school’s student body?
Equity and effective access to care is a cornerstone of our programs. We have been recruiting diverse candidates to become wellness coaches and making sure that we adequately address cultural responsiveness and humility as part of their training. We have done very extensive marketing and outreach campaigns that use a variety of channels and messaging to get to as many populations as we can, including underserved and underrepresented communities.
We also selected our employer support grant awardees, mostly schools and some community-based organizations, based on geographic spread, to make sure that all 58 counties were represented and could hire coaches. And then we also provided special consideration to Title 1 [low income] schools, organizations whose staff speak multiple languages, and organizations that support Medi-Cal students. And then we had two scholarship cycles to support students who wanted to become wellness coaches. We [will support] their tuition and living expenses, especially for those who came from different backgrounds or didn’t have a lot of resources.
We are also partnering with California community colleges, which offer resources and support for underserved and underrepresented populations to enter the wellness coach system. What we found in our research is that 65% of their students were classified as economically disadvantaged. So we’re already addressing those groups.
And as part of our certification requirements, we’re focusing on specific degrees such as social work, human services and addiction studies, which already include cultural responsiveness and cultural humility as part of their key learning outcomes. What we’ve heard anecdotally from a lot of young people is that, “I don’t see myself in the people that are helping me or serving me,” and we want them to feel safe and comfortable with the person that they’re talking to.
Where are you in the rollout of the program?
In February 2024, we launched the certification program for wellness coaches. As of Sept. 17, we have certified 383 coaches, and that number is steadily growing. We’ve done so much outreach and engagement and social media blips and radio ads, because we need to be able to reach the young people where they are. As of August, the Department executed 64 21-month grant awards of $125 million to employer support grants for schools and community-based organizations to hire wellness coaches. That will fund the placement of more than 1,500 certified wellness coaches between this school year and next school year. And then, also, in August, we awarded 99 individuals with scholarships totaling about $2.8 million for those pursuing degrees with which they apply to become a certified wellness coach.
How can the program address broader post-pandemic issues such as chronic absenteeism and declining school enrollment?
We’re hoping that wellness coaches will strengthen young people by providing them with a safe place to share their fears and teaching them the skills necessary to cope with life’s challenges. We believe that equipping them with these skills will decrease absenteeism, help them focus on their schoolwork and also be able to have them integrate themselves into the school environment. Young people with behavioral health conditions are sometimes isolated, bullied, made fun of and may not even like school as a result of all of those things that are going on. If they have a safe place, a safe adult, a safe person that they can talk to about some of the feelings they have, they will be happy to come back to school, look at it as a place of learning and a place to make friends.
What kind of challenges do you foresee in keeping the program running and successful?
Sustainability. Everything runs on the mighty dollar. We are in the final years of the [Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative] right now, and we can use those funds to sustain the program for probably another year or two. We are actively partnering with the Department of Health Care Services, and other state departments, to make certified wellness coaches’ services billable through Medi-Cal [and commercial insurance], which will support sustainable financing in our schools [beyond the five-year initiative].
Extensive research has demonstrated that students who feel like they belong in schools perform better in the classroom and have better rates of attendance. This not only benefits the student, but it also potentially benefits the schools in retaining coaches, as school finances are based in-part on school attendance.
What kind of feedback have you received about the program?
I had a student who said, “I didn’t really feel like there were a lot of places to go to, even though they had help available. I didn’t trust people to confide in.” You never want people to feel like they have nowhere to go or that they’re alone. This was a student who would then become a wellness coach. Another student who became a wellness coach said that she didn’t feel there was enough support when kids needed help where she lived. She said, “If I’m struggling, I want to know there’s someone there for me if I genuinely need it.” She said she’s had really hard days, but being able to open up and talk about it makes the world seem a little more colorful. It makes her feel lighter on her feet.
We had some parents indicate that wellness coaches are a great way to give back to the community, because they’re giving back to our future, our children. It’s helping them be productive members of society and be the best version of themselves.
Teacher apprentice Ja’net Williams helps with a math lesson in a first grade class at Delta Elementary Charter School in Clarksburg.
Credit: Diana Lambert / EdSource
This article, originally published on Sept. 14, 2022, has been updated to reflect changes in state law that impact teacher credentialing requirements in California.
Over the last decade, Gov. Gavin Newsom and California legislators have poured billions of dollars of state money into special grants and programs to recruit, train and retain educators in order to ease the state’s persistent teacher shortage. Lawmakers have, since the pandemic, also made permanent changes to teacher credentialing requirements to make it easier to become a teacher.
Teacher candidates have many choices. They can take the traditional route — attend a teacher preparation program and complete student teaching — or they can take part in a residency, apprenticeship or internship program that allows them to complete required coursework while teaching.
Residencies
Prospective teachers can apply for residency programs through a university teacher preparation program that operates in partnership with one or more school districts. During their residency, candidates are paired with experienced teachers for a year of clinical training and are usually paid a stipend.
Internships
Teacher candidates can also enroll in a commission-approved district intern program or a university internship program. Both allow candidates who have bachelor’s degrees to teach while they complete their teacher preparation coursework. Instead of being a student teacher, interns are generally the primary teacher in the classroom. They hold intern credentials until they complete the requirements for a preliminary credential.
Apprenticeships
There are also apprenticeship programs that allow teacher candidates to work as a paid member of school staff, while they gain clinical experience and complete their bachelor’s degree and a teacher preparation program. Generally, they receive free or reduced-price tuition.
Most apprenticeship programs in California are limited to early childhood education, but the state is developing a registered apprenticeship program for K-12 teachers that will greatly expand access.
Classified school employee program
The state also has a California Classified School Employee Teacher Credentialing Program, which offers financial assistance and academic guidance to school staff who want to complete an undergraduate degree and earn a teaching credential. The staff members must work in districts that have been awarded a grant through the state.
College students who know they want to be a teacher before completing their degree can select a university that offers an integrated undergraduate program that allows them to complete teacher preparation coursework during their undergraduate education.
Choose a teaching credential
Most California teachers hold one of three basic teaching credentials — multiple-subject, single-subject and education specialist. Multiple-subject credentials are for elementary school teachers, single-subject credentials are generally for middle and high school teachers who teach one subject, and an education specialist credential is for special education teachers.
There also is a newly authorized PK-3 early childhood education specialist instruction credential. The credential is intended to meet the need for qualified teachers specially trained to teach preschool through third grade students.
But before earning a clear credential, all teachers must first earn a preliminary credential and complete a two-year induction program. The induction program provides additional training and mentorship during the first two years of teaching. Teachers with preliminary credentials who are nationally board certified in either early childhood or middle childhood do not have to participate in induction.
To earn a preliminary teaching credential, a teacher must have:
A bachelor’s degree.
Completed an accredited teacher preparation program.
Completed 600 hours of student teaching.
Been fingerprinted and passed a background check.
Taken required tests or completed university-approved coursework.
Completed a course or passed a test on the provisions and principles of the U.S. Constitution.
Earned a recommendation from their teacher preparation program.
A preliminary credential is good for five years.
Tests and their alternatives
Teachers must prove they have the skills needed to educate students. Before the pandemic, tests were traditionally used to determine if a teacher candidate was ready for a teacher preparation program or the classroom, but new legislation gives them the option to use university-approved coursework or a college degree in most cases. Teacher candidates can check with their teacher preparation program administrator to determine which courses to take or have their transcript evaluated by the Commission on Teacher Credentialing.
Basic skills requirement
For years, teachers have been required to take the California Basic Educational Skills Test or otherwise prove they have the basic skills to teach – generally, before they begin a teacher preparation program. The 2024-25 state budget trailer bill has removed the requirement for those who have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher.
Subject-matter competence
Teacher candidates are required to demonstrate proficiency in the subject they will teach before they can earn a credential. This has traditionally been done by passing the appropriate tests in the California Subject Examinations for Teachers, or CSET, but teachers can have the option to take coursework or a combination of tests in the CSET and coursework to satisfy this requirement.
Teacher candidates also can complete a bachelor’s degree in the subject area of the credential they are seeking. A teacher preparation program will evaluate the major to see if it is acceptable, but the Commission on Teacher Credentialing will make the call for candidates who have a degree major that aligns with a statutory single-subject area, and who are applying to the commission directly for credentials, such as those seeking emergency-style permits.
Reading Instruction Competence Assessment
The RICA measures how well candidates for multiple-subject credentials and education specialists teach reading. The test is scheduled to be eliminated in 2025 when it will be incorporated into the Teacher Performance Assessment, which requires teachers to demonstrate their ability to teach.
Performance assessment
Once a teacher is in the classroom, they are required to complete a performance assessment that demonstrates how well they assess students, design instruction, organize subject matter and perform other skills. There are three assessment models — the California Teaching Performance Assessment, edTPA and Fresno Assessment of Student Teachers. Each requires that teachers take video clips of classroom instruction, submit lesson plans, student work and written reflections on their practice to prove they are prepared to become teachers.
Special education credentials
Special education candidates must complete all the basic requirements of other teachers, as well as instruction in one of four areas — mild to moderate support needs; extensive support needs; deaf and hard of hearing, visual impairments; and early childhood special education — to earn a credential in that specialty.
Out-of-state teachers
Teachers moving to California must submit their college transcripts and a copy of their out-of-state teaching license, as well as proof they have been fingerprinted to the Commission on Teacher Credentialing.
To avoid taking unnecessary tests and training, the commission recommends that applicants submit their score on out-of-state basic skills tests and proof of two years or more of teaching experience.
Where to apply
Applications for California-prepared teachers are generally submitted by the teacher preparation program to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. Out-of-state applicants must submit documents directly to the commission. It generally takes about 50 business days for the commission to process applications. Application fees vary depending on the document, but generally are under $100 each.
Heather Cox Richardson recounts the important exchanges between the new Pope, Leo XIV, and JD Vance, on the subject of immigrants. Vance, a convert to Catholicism, described Catholic doctrine and was quickly rebuffed at the time both by Pope Francis and by the future Pope. So, JD Vance has the dubious distinction of being rebuffed by two Popes!
Today, on the second day of the papal conclave, the cardinal electors—133 members of the College of Cardinals who were under the age of 80 when Pope Francis died on April 21—elected a new pope. They chose 69-year-old Cardinal Robert Prevost, who was born in Chicago, thus making him the first pope chosen from the United States. But he spent much of his ministry in Peru and became a citizen of Peru in 2015, making him the first pope from Peru, as well.
New popes choose a papal name to signify the direction of their papacy, and Prevost has chosen to be known as Pope Leo XIV. This is an important nod to Pope Leo XIII, who led the church from 1878 to 1903 and was the father of modern Catholic social teaching. He called for the church to address social and economic issues, and emphasized the dignity of individuals, the common good, community, and taking care of marginalized individuals.
In the midst of the Gilded Age, Leo XIII defended the rights of workers and said that the church had not just the duty to speak about justice and fairness, but also the responsibility to make sure that such equities were accomplished. In his famous 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, translated as “Of New Things,” Leo XIII rejected both socialism and unregulated capitalism, and called for the state to protect the rights of individuals.
Prevost’s choice of the name Leo invokes the principles of both Leo XIII and his predecessor, Pope Francis. In his own lifetime he has aligned himself with many of Francis’s social reforms, and his election appears to be a rejection of hard-line right-wing Catholics in the U.S. and elsewhere who have used their religion to support far-right politics.
In the U.S., Vice-President J.D. Vance is one of those hard-line right-wing Catholics. Shortly after taking office in January, Vance began to talk of the concept of ordo amoris, or “order of love,” articulated by Catholic St. Augustine, claiming it justified the MAGA emphasis on family and tribalism and suggesting it justified the mass expulsion of migrants.
Vance told Sean Hannity of the Fox News Channel, “[Y]ou love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.” When right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec, who is Catholic, posted Vance’s interview approvingly, Vance added: “Just google ‘ordo amoris.’ Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense.”
On February 10, Pope Francis responded in a letter to American bishops. He corrected Vance’s assertion as a false interpretation of Catholic theology. “Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity,” he wrote. “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups…. The true ordo amoristhat must be promoted is that which we discover by…meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
“[W]orrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth,” Pope Francis wrote. He acknowledged “the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival,” but defended the fundamental dignity of every human being and the fundamental rights of migrants, noting that the “rightly formed conscience” would disagree with any program that “identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.” He continued: “I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of good will, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters.”
The next day, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, who said he was “a lifelong Catholic,” told reporters at the White House, “I’ve got harsh words for the Pope…. He ought to fix the Catholic Church and concentrate on his work and leave border enforcement to us.”
Cardinal Prevost was close to Pope Francis, and during this controversy he posted on X after Vance’s assertion but before Pope Francis’s answer: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.” After the pope published his letter, Prevost reposted it with the comment: “Pope Francis’ letter, JD Vance’s ‘ordo amoris’ and what the Gospel asks of all of us on immigration.”
On April 14, Prevost reposted: “As Trump & [Salvadoran president Nayib] Bukele use Oval to [laugh at] Feds’ illicit deportation of a US resident [Kilmar Abrego Garcia], once an undoc[ument]ed Salvadorean himself, [Bishop Evelio Menjivar] asks, ‘Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?’”
The new Pope Leo XIV greeted the world today in Italian and Spanish as he thanked Pope Francis and the other cardinals, and called for the church to “be a missionary Church, building bridges, dialogue, always open to receiving with open arms for everyone…, open to all, to all who need our charity, our presence, dialogue, love…, especially to those who are suffering.”
As an American-born pope in the model of Pope Francis, Pope Leo XIV might be able to appeal to American far-right Catholics and bring them back into the fold. But today, MAGAs responded to the new pope with fury. Right-wing influencer Laura Loomer, who is close to Trump, called Pope Leo “another Marxist puppet in the Vatican.” Influencer Charlie Kirk suggested he was an “[o]pen borders globalist installed to counter Trump.”
In the U.S., President Donald Trump, who said he would like to be pope and then posted a picture of himself dressed as a pope on May 2, prompting an angry backlash against those who thought it was disrespectful, posted on social media that the election of the first pope from the United States was “a Great Honor for our Country” and that he looks forward to meeting him. ‘It will be a very meaningful moment!” he added.
Imagine a school where the principal spends less time buried in paperwork and more time in classrooms, supporting teachers and fostering an inclusive learning environment for students with disabilities.
Embracing artificial intelligence (AI) can make this vision a reality.
AI holds the potential to revolutionize school leadership by alleviating the administrative burden on principals. Principals are essential to developing school culture and steering our schools toward more inclusive practices. Their guidance and decision-making for professional learning, promoting specific desired outcomes, and allocating budgets and resources directly impact students’ experiences.
When a school leader is passionate about creating inclusive learning environments and ensuring students have more access to the general education curriculum, little can stop them — except, of course, the ever-increasing tasks and paperwork that keep them in their offices and away from the classrooms.
Just this past year, the Association of California School Administrators (ACSA) targeted the growing number of duplicative mandates that district and school leaders are spending valuable time on as one of their platforms for Legislative Action Day. Nearly 400 education leaders came together in Sacramento this past April to demand change in a handful of areas, including streamlined accountability: calling for less time spent on writing separate plans and reports for the many (often redundant or overlapping) state and federal programs, so more time can be spent in classrooms.
Not only are principals responsible for numerous plans required by the state, they also have school site plans, emergency plans, loads of evaluations to write, newsletters to the community, emails to respond to, websites to keep up-to-date, data to review and analyze, the list goes on and on. The workload on principals has dramatically increased over the years, and we should be concerned if we want effective leadership in our schools.
In much of my work with administrators on creating more inclusive schools, I address these issues through ideas like sharing responsibilities, delegating tasks and inventorying initiatives to help streamline resources, including time; and now I’m adding a new one: Embrace AI!
New tools, including AI virtual assistants, or SchoolAI and TeachAI, can automate routine administrative tasks like scheduling, attendance tracking, data analysis, and report generation. Tools like ChatGPT, Grammarly, and Co-Pilot can summarize our notes, edit our writing, and be thought partners when our brains are fried. Just this week I have used AI tools to help with rewording and editing my writing, drafting an agenda, and creating original pictures to use in presentations without having to search the web for what I need, all in all, saving me a few hours.
And imagine what our principals could be doing with a few extra hours a week — observing classrooms, providing instructional feedback and greeting students. At the Inclusive Leadership Center at Chapman University, I work with K-12 school administrators supporting their strategic planning and providing professional development. We hear again and again that one of the biggest barriers administrators face in creating inclusive environments for students with disabilities is a lack of time — so let’s remove this barrier.
As we work on improving the quality of education for students with disabilities, leveraging technology and AI to achieve this is a no-brainer. So why not use it as a tool for administrators and not just for our students?
In addition to taking on some of the mundane tasks, AI can even assist in identifying trends and areas for improvement through data analysis, helping principals make informed decisions that support all students. Once administrators embrace AI, think of how teachers can use it. The possibilities are endless and time-saving.
Of course, there are valid concerns about artificial intelligence, such as data privacy and the fear of technology replacing human roles. We need to think about AI as a tool to enhance human capabilities, not replace them. We need proper safeguards to address privacy concerns, but solving these issues should not stop us from using AI to the advantage of our communities and students. I am not advocating for AI to take over all our school leaders’ tasks, like generating all school communication, teacher evaluations, and individualized education plans. But it can assist through editing, clarifying and summarizing through the drafting process, even helping with communicating to specific audiences and tone. Most administrators, including myself, have sent an email we later wished we could have asked AI to check first.
By embracing AI, schools can empower their leaders to spend more time fostering an inclusive, supportive and effective learning environment. It’s time for education to harness the power of AI to benefit all students.
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