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Dozens of educators to be laid off in West Contra Costa

Dozens of educators in the West Contra Costa Unified School District will be laid off in the upcoming school year, including grant-funded positions the district can’t afford to absorb.

The district plans to eliminate 104 positions, nearly 40 of those grant-funded, according to district officials. Assistant principals, instructional specialists, psychologists, bilingual paraprofessionals, academic support providers, special education and general education teachers are among the positions being eliminated.

Although some educators received preliminary layoff notices on March 15, the board won’t finalize the total number of eliminations until May, officials said. Some of the eliminated positions were already vacant.

“We understand the community’s concerns about the impact of these layoffs on classroom staffing,” district spokesperson Raechelle Forrest said in an email. “It is important to note that the district is committed to hiring and maintaining qualified and credentialed individuals and that classroom teachers have not received preliminary notices.”

The school board approved layoffs at a meeting earlier this month. Dozens of parents, educators and students spoke during the public comment period, pleading with the board to vote against the layoffs. In particular, many people spoke about the importance of school community outreach worker positions that will be eliminated.

School community outreach workers serve as liaisons between schools and families. Many of those workers are bilingual and can help with translations and teaching non-English speaking parents and students how to navigate the school system. Outreach workers also connect families with resources and can help facilitate meetings when there are language barriers.

Outreach workers were among the grant-funded positions district officials said they couldn’t afford to keep without the extra money. The district would need about $9.4 million to keep the nearly 40 positions that are being axed, district data showed. Many of the positions relying on grant money provided extra support for students: bilingual instructional aides, graduate tutors, coordinators, academic support providers and bilingual paraprofessionals.

In the 2022-23 school year, nearly 32% of students in West Contra Costa Unified were English learners, according to data from the California Department of Education. The percentage of English learners in the district who became fluent in English has dropped significantly since 2018, data shows, dropping from nearly 13% to about 3% in the 2020-21 school year, the most recent data available.

The majority of English learners speak Spanish, about 27% or nearly 8,000 students in the 2022-23 school year. About 30,000 students are enrolled in West Contra Costa Unified.

During public comment, parents and teachers spoke about the vital role outreach workers have for schools and the community. Without them, people contemplated how some families would continue to stay engaged in school communities.

Educators were also outspoken about how the lack of staffing in schools has been affecting learning. Because of larger classes, there are fewer one-on-one opportunities; there’s an uptick in behavioral issues in classes with consistent substitutes, and teachers are losing prep periods in order to fill in for other classes. One student said he hasn’t had permanent teachers in core classes in recent years and, as a result, he hasn’t learned much.

Three complaints were filed with West Contra Costa Unified earlier this year alleging some schools failed to provide students with qualified teachers. The complaints also allege there’s been a pattern of filling vacancies with long-term substitutes, which attorneys at Public Advocates, a nonprofit civil rights law firm, say is illegal.

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07/06/2025
Glenn Kessler Fact-Checks Marco Rubio’s Claim that No One Died When Foreign Aid Stopped

Glenn Kessler is a professional fact-checker for The Washington Post. He recently reviewed a controversy about the consequences of the Trump administration’s shutdown of USAID. Democrats said that people have died because of the cuts; Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not agree. Kessler reviews the record.

He writes:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio: “No one has died because of USAID —”
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-California): “The people who have died …”
Rubio: “That’s a lie.”

— exchange at a congressional hearing, May 21

“That question about people dying around the world is an unfair one.”
— Rubio, at another congressional hearing later that day

When Rubio testified last week about the State Department budget, Sherman confronted him about numerous anecdotal accounts of people around the world dying because the Trump administration, at the direction of billionaire Elon Musk, dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development and shut down many of its programs.

Sherman used his time mainly to pontificate, and Rubio’s attention must have wandered. He asked Sherman to repeat the question after Sherman said: “We next focus on USAID. Musk gutted it. He said no one died as a result. Do you agree no one had died yet as a result of the chainsawing of USAID? Yes or no.”

Sherman repeated: “Has anyone died in the world because of what Elon Musk did?”

Rubio stumbled a response — “Uh, listen” — and Sherman cut him off. “Yes or no?” he said. “Reclaiming my time. If you won’t answer, that’s a loud answer.”

That’s when Rubio said it was “a lie.” As Sherman’s staff held up photos of people alleged to have died because they stopped receiving services from USAID programs, Rubio denounced the claim as “false.”

Later in the day, at another hearing, Rep. Grace Meng (D-New York) gave Rubio an opportunity to clean up his statement. “Do you stand behind that testimony?” she asked. “And has there been any assessment conducted by the department to this point of how many people have died?”

Rubio said it was “an unfair question.” He tried to reframe the question, arguing that other countries such as Britain and France also have cut back on humanitarian spending, while China has never contributed much.

“The United States is the largest humanitarian provider on the planet,” he said. “I would argue: How many people die because China hasn’t done it? How many people have died because the U.K. has cut back on spending and so has other countries?”

There’s a lot to unpack there.

The facts

At least until the Trump administration, the United States was the largest provider of humanitarian aid in the world — in raw dollars. In the 2023 fiscal year, the most recent with complete data, USAID’s budget was about $42 billion, while the State Department disbursed about $19 billion in additional aid, and other agencies (such as the Treasury Department) did, as well. Now USAID is all but gone, folded into the State Department. Nonetheless, when the dust settles, the United States might still be the biggest aid donor — again, in raw dollars.

When measured as a percentage of a country’s economy, even before the Trump administration, the U.S. was far behind nations such as Britain, Norway, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. The United Nations has set a target of contributing 0.7 percent of gross national income in development aid; the U.S. clocks in with less than 0.2 percent, near the bottom of the list of major democracies, according to a 2020 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Most economists would say that a percentage of a nation’s economy is a more accurate way to measure the generosity of a country.

Rubio is correct that Britain and France have cut back, and that China has not been much of a foreign-aid donor. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, for instance, said he would pay for increased defense spending by cutting the foreign-aid budget from roughly 0.5 percent of gross national income to 0.3 percent. (That is still higher than the U.S. share before President Donald Trump began his second term.) China’s aid budget is a bit opaque — numbers have not been published since 2018 — but it appears to be an average of just over $3 billion a year, according to the Brookings Institution.

But when it comes to whether people have died as a result of the Trump administration’s cuts, we have to look at how the cuts unfolded. Starmer announced his plans in a pending budget proposal. Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 imposing a 90-day freeze on all U.S. foreign aid — and then Musk forced out thousands of employees who worked at USAID, helping to manage and distribute funds. The resulting chaos was devastating, according to numerous news reports.

Sherman’s staff held up a photo of Pe Kha Lau, 71, a refugee from Myanmar with lung problems. On Feb. 7, Reuters quoted her family as saying she died “after she was discharged from a U.S.-funded hospital on the Myanmar-Thai border that was ordered to close” as a result of Trump’s executive order. The International Rescue Committee said it shut down and locked hospitals in several refugee camps in late January after receiving a “stop-work” order from the State Department.

Another photo held up as Rubio said the death claims were false was of 5-year-old Evan Anzoo. He was featured in a March article by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof titled: “Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True.” Kristof focused on South Sudan and the impact that a suspension of HIV drugs — under a George W. Bush program called PEPFAR — had on the poor country ravaged by civil conflict. PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, is regarded as a singular success, saving an estimated 26 million lives since it was created in 2003. Kristof focused on individual stories of people who died after they lost access to medicines because of Trump’s order.

“Another household kept alive by American aid was that of Jennifer Inyaa, a 35-year-old single mom, and her 5-year-old son, Evan Anzoo, both of them H.I.V.-positive,” Kristof wrote. “Last month, after the aid shutdown, Inyaa became sick and died, and a week later Evan died as well, according to David Iraa Simon, a community health worker who assisted them. Decisions by billionaires in Washington quickly cost the lives of a mother and her son.”

Anecdotal reports can go only so far. It’s clear that people are dying because U.S. aid was suspended and then reduced. But it’s difficult to come up with a precise death toll that can be tied directly to Trump administration policies. The death certificates, after all, aren’t marked “Due to lack of funding by U.S. government.”

Kristof cited a study by the Center for Global Development that estimated how many lives are saved each year by American dollars: about 1.7 million HIV/AIDS deaths averted; 550,000 saved because of other humanitarian assistance; 300,000 tuberculosis deaths prevented; and nearly 300,000 malaria deaths forestalled. But that shows the positive impact of U.S. assistance, not what happens when it is withdrawn.

Brooke Nichols, a Boston University infectious-disease mathematical modeler and health economist, has developed a tracker that attempts to fill this gap. As of Monday, the model shows, about 96,000 adults and 200,000 children have died because of the administration’s cutbacks to funding for aid groups and support organizations. The overall death count grows by 103 people an hour.

With any calculation like this, a lot depends on the assumptions. The methodology uses a straight-line estimate of program terminations based on 2024 data and published mortality data to estimate the impact of loss of treatment. Nichols said that because it is not entirely clear what aid has been restored, she has not updated the tracker to account for that. But she noted that Rubio claimed on Capitol Hill that “85 percent of recipients are now receiving PEPFAR services.”

“For HIV, the total mortality estimates reflect either a 3-month complete cessation of PEPFAR, or 12 months of PEPFAR reduced by 25 percent (the total results are the same),” Nichols said in an email. “If what Rubio says is true … and 85 percent of PEPFAR is back up and running, then the numbers here are still very accurate.”
In a statement to The Fact Checker, the State Department put it differently from Rubio: “85 percent of PEPFAR-funded programs that deliver HIV care and treatment are operational.” We asked for documentation for the “85 percent” figure, because the phrasing might not include funding for drugs that prevent HIV infection. We did not receive a response.

Nichols acknowledged that the tracker was not adjusted for double counting — a child counted as dying from malnutrition and diarrhea — though she didn’t think it would affect the overall results much. Some of the estimates are based on country-specific information; others are not. Data limitations required her to assume an equal distribution between children treated for pneumonia and diarrhea through USAID.

“The biggest uncertainties in all of these estimates are: 1) the extent to which countries and organizations have pivoted to mitigate this disaster (likely highly variable), and 2) which programs are actually still funded with funding actually flowing — and which aren’t,” Nichols said.

A key source document for the tracker is an internal memo written on March 3 by Nicholas Enrich, then USAID’s acting assistant administrator for global health, estimating the impact of the funding freeze on global health (including how such diseases might spill over into the United States). Enrich, a civil servant who served under four administrations over 15 years, estimated that a permanent halt in aid would result in at least 12.5 million cases of malaria, with an additional 71,000 to 166,000 deaths annually, a 28 percent to 32 percent increase in tuberculosis globally and an additional 200,000 paralytic polio cases a year.

As a result of writing the memo — and others — he was placed on administrative leave.

Nichols said the death toll would not be so high had the administration pursued a deliberate policy to phase out funding over a 12-month period, which would have permitted contingency planning. “It’s true that other countries are cutting back on humanitarian spending. But what makes the U.S. approach so harmful is how the cuts were made: abruptly, without warning, and without a plan for continuity,” she said. “It leads to interruptions in care, broken supply chains, and ultimately, preventable deaths. Also, exactly because the U.S. is the largest provider of humanitarian aid, it makes the approach catastrophic.”

When we asked the State Department about Rubio’s dismissal of the idea that anyone had died as a result of the suspension of aid — and that it was clearly wrong — we received this statement: “America is the most generous nation in the world, and we urge other nations to dramatically increase their humanitarian efforts.”

The Pinocchio Test

Given numerous news reports about people dying because they stopped getting American aid, you would think Rubio’s staff would have prepared him with a better answer than “lie” and “false.” His cleanup response wasn’t much better. The issue is not that other nations are reducing funding — but how the United States suddenly pulled the plug, making it more likely that people would die.
There is no dispute that people have died because the Trump administration abruptly suspended foreign aid. One might quibble over whether tens of thousands — or hundreds of thousands — have died. But you can’t call it a lie. Rubio earns Four Pinocchios.

Four Pinocchios

The Fact Checker is a verified signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network code of principles

Glenn Kessler has reported on domestic and foreign policy for more than four decades. Send him statements to fact check by emailing him or sending a DM on Twitter.

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07/06/2025
Bill would expand nursing bachelor’s degrees to California community colleges

Credit: Riverside City College / RCC.edu

Community college leaders will once again attempt to offer bachelor’s degrees in nursing, renewing a fight with the state’s universities over whether expanding to the two-year sector eases California’s nurses shortage or increases competition.

The bill, authored by state Sen. Richard Roth, D-Riverside, would allow 15 yet-to-be-selected community college districts that already provide associate degrees in nursing to offer bachelor’s degrees in the field.

While California State University has yet to take a position on Roth’s bill, it’s clear the system has a stake in whether community colleges are allowed to serve students who may otherwise attend CSU or private school programs.

The majority of bachelor’s and advanced nursing degree programs are taught by independent and private colleges, which hold about 51% of the market. Statewide, there are 48 bachelor’s degree nursing programs. At least 17 Cal State campuses and six University of California campuses offer a bachelor’s or master’s nursing program within their systems.

Enrollment in bachelor’s nursing programs has also increased statewide, with much of the growth in the private sector. In 2021, 9,179 new students entered these programs — nearly 2,500 more than the previous year, according to a 2023 state nursing board report conducted by UC San Francisco. Meanwhile, fewer students are enrolling in associate degree nursing programs, which are mostly at public community colleges.

“The workforce need has only grown,” said Kaylie Schmidt, a spokesperson with the Community College League of California, a nonprofit organization advocating in favor of the bill, SB 895. “We have nursing shortages like we’ve never seen before, and many of our districts are in communities that have workforce shortages.”

Schmidt said in some areas of the state, nursing students will leave their smaller communities that are in desperate need of health care professionals and migrate to other regions that offer them an opportunity to pursue the bachelor’s nursing degree.

Some estimates show that California is facing a shortage of about 36,000 licensed nurses — a need that is expected to grow “substantially by 2030,” said Andra Hoffman, a trustee for the Los Angeles Community College District. “This tremendous gap continues to widen as current nursing baccalaureate degree programs have demand greater than their enrollment capacity,” she said.

This isn’t the first time the community colleges have pushed the Legislature to approve offering nursing baccalaureate degrees. Ten years ago, the state’s community colleges began offering bachelor’s degrees in certain programs and at specific colleges to address unmet workforce needs. Back then, community college leaders warned that nursing shortages would continue if California didn’t allow the community colleges to offer nursing degrees. The state approved the pilot community college bachelor’s degree program but excluded nursing because state law bars the colleges from offering programs already offered by the universities.

SB 895, which would change that law, is expected to be heard by the Senate Education Committee on April 10.

Rehman Attar, Cal State’s director of health care and workforce development, said CSU has not taken a formal position on the bill but welcomes the Legislature to fix the problems like clinical placements and faculty shortages in nursing education within all three systems.

Registered nurses are not legally required to have a bachelor’s degree to practice. But a growing number of employers and health facilities require registered nurses to have, or be in pursuit of, a bachelor’s degree. A 2010 Institute of Medicine report recommended that the proportion of registered nurses with bachelor’s degrees increase to 80% by 2020. Meanwhile, in California, a 2021 Health Impact report found more than 54% of the state’s hospitals preferred hiring nurses with bachelor’s degrees.

A common misconception is that increasing the capacity of BSN-trained nurses at CSU would solve the nursing shortage, Attar said.

Instead, the problem is much larger than that, he said. Solving it means increasing more capacity for students to get clinical training and hiring more faculty to teach the courses for the community colleges and the universities.

“That’s a big limiting factor and a bottleneck for us to increase capacity,” Attar said.

Both associate degree and bachelor’s degree nursing programs require practical experience, or clinical education, in health care settings. But many health care facilities have a limited number of spots available to offer that experience to students. Creating new nursing programs would only add more students competing for that limited space. Attar said some universities outside of the CSU system also pay or incentivize for clinical placement spots for their students. Getting students into clinical training is an additional challenge all colleges face. Attar said CSU doesn’t pay or incentivize health care facilities for clinical placement spots because the practice isn’t equitable or fair for all students.

Schmidt said the bill would use clinical space already offered to these community college districts. Would that mean students within a single community college are facing greater competition against each other for clinicals? Schmidt said it would be on the community college to determine how it wants to use the clinical space it has between students earning an associate degree and a bachelor’s degree.

A separate bill authored by Roth, SB 1042, plans to address the clinical placement problem by requiring health facilities to work with public and private nursing programs to attempt to make the necessary number of placements available to them to meet the schools’ demand.

Statewide, there has been growth in nursing programs offering bachelor’s degrees. According to a 2023 report from the California Board of Registered Nursing, the number of bachelor’s programs in the state increased from 43 in 2020 to 48 in 2021. However, that 20% growth in programs took place in the private sector.

Alex Graves, vice president of government relations for the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities, said the organization has not taken a formal position on SB 895, but they do have concerns about it exacerbating the challenge of finding faculty for bachelor’s nursing programs.

“The reality is if there are additional courses that are going to be required for community colleges to offer BSN programs, it will likely mean there will be additional faculty demands coming for those programs,” he said. “That will just make it all the more difficult for all of us to find those folks to fill those positions in our programs.”

Encouraging qualified nurses to teach in both associate and bachelor’s degree programs has been challenging for nearly all programs because colleges and universities can’t compete with the salaries nurses make working in health care settings.

Although faculty vacancy rates have fluctuated over the years, in 2022, the state nursing board reported a 12.1% faculty vacancy rate — the highest it had been in 10 years. Many colleges have compensated by hiring more part-time nursing faculty, but that hasn’t diminished their need for more faculty overall. The board found nearly 70% of nursing programs reported faculty working “overloaded” schedules, of which 94% reported paying their faculty extra for the additional work.

“We’re fortunate enough that we have doctoral programs that focus on creating nurse educators,” Rehman said, speaking for the CSU system. “But again, that pipeline gets restricted at the associate’s and bachelor’s degree level, so if we’re not able to increase that pipeline of students to become nurses, it restricts us in terms of producing nursing faculty, as well.”

Rehman called it a “domino effect.”

“When we’re able to address these core fundamental nursing issues of clinical placement — and just starting with that — that’s going to start alleviating some of the pains that we find with faculty,” he said.

Addressing the constraints on clinical placements and the shortage of nursing faculty are the best ways to get more nurses into the profession, Graves said.

Instead, Graves said there are better examples of collaboration between community college and university nursing programs that provide a clear path for students to achieve their bachelor’s without compounding the faculty and clinical placement challenges. Those examples are in concurrent enrollment or associate degree to bachelor’s nursing degree programs.

Partnerships

The number of associate degree programs partnering with bachelor’s degree nursing programs has also increased. Private universities and some Cal State campuses have formal concurrent enrollment nursing programs with community colleges that allow students to earn both degrees simultaneously. The state nursing board reported such partnerships have increased over the last 10 years from 50.8% in 2012 to nearly 60% in 2021.

CSU has more than 10 such partnerships across its campuses and wants to add more.

“These ADN to BSN pathways have been really helpful,” Rehman said. “We’ve been able to streamline our curriculum with the community colleges to really reduce the time to graduation. … We’re also having coordination with our clinical placements.”

The partnerships could be an alternative to allowing community colleges to offer the bachelor’s degree directly.

That collaboration with the community colleges creates better clinical placement schedules to get students in and out of the program more quickly. Traditionally, it can take a nursing student up to six years to complete their bachelor’s degree. However, the associate-to-bachelor’s nursing partnerships reduce that time to three to four years, allowing more students to graduate, Rehman said.

“It’s a win-win, and we’re always looking to grow it,” he said. “We’re going to continue to keep on trying to grow it and make it more accessible to all of our community college partners.”

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07/06/2025
Why I love my urban public school
Two San Francisco parents promote the city’s public schools at a city resource fair.

Credit: SF Department of Children, Youth and Families

If you live in San Francisco or have been here recently, you may have started seeing window signs or bumper stickers that say “I love my SF public school.” And if you’re not a San Francisco public school parent or student, you might be surprised to see these signs, given the prevailing narrative about the public schools in our fair city and in other urban areas. It turns out there are plenty of satisfied — even enthusiastic — public school parents and students in our big cities.

In California, and across the country, there is a pervasive narrative that urban public schools are “bad” and suburban schools are “good.” (Example: The San Francisco Chronicle reported that a small East Bay suburb has “better” schools than San Francisco like it’s an objective fact.) Describing a school, let alone an entire school system, as “good” or “bad” is lazy at best and coded racism at worst. Why? Because we typically rely on test scores and numerical ratings to identify a “good” school, and those ratings are highly correlated with race and income.

And there is so much more to a school than reading and math test scores.

Instead, we should talk about “fit” because a school that is a great fit for one kid may be a terrible fit for another. I am a graduate of the vaunted Palo Alto public school system. It was a good fit for me because I thrived (mostly) in a competitive academic environment; it was a terrible fit for one of my relatives, whose special needs were never adequately met in that system.

To determine a good fit, we parents and caregivers have to get really specific about what we’re looking for in a school and what each of our kids needs. Do we want rigorous academics? Arts education? A focus on social justice? Support for social-emotional development? A diverse student body?

Next, we need a reliable source of information. You can certainly learn something from looking at numerical data, like the School Accountability Report Cards. But if you really want to know whether a given school has what you’re looking for, the best source of information is current students, parents and caregivers.

If you ask urban public school parents what they think of their public schools, you will certainly hear both positives and negatives, as you would anywhere, including the suburbs. Since you can find a litany of complaints via a quick Google search, and in the spirit of the “I love my SF public school” campaign, I will focus on the positives. Here are the many things those of us displaying the signs in San Francisco — and sharing similar sentiments across the state — love about our kids’ schools:
- The rich diversity of our cities is reflected in our schools. San Francisco middle school parent Jessica Franklin appreciates that her kids “are learning to engage with, interact with and learn from so many people who are so different from themselves.” Hanson Li says that, as a first-generation immigrant, he appreciates the district’s “continued commitment to immersive language programs.” His high schoolers are fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese after attending elementary and middle schools with language programs.
- Our teachers are incredible. They are skilled and experienced: At her kid’s elementary school in San Francisco, Autumn Brown Garibay says five teachers have been at the school for more than 20 years, and many teachers sent their own kids to the school. They are dedicated: Sonia Gandiaga’s eighth grader in San Francisco has an “incredibly committed math teacher” who made her love math and feel confident in her math skills. They are committed to learning the latest, most effective teaching methods: At my son’s school, teachers learned how to teach a research-based phonics program and supported each other to implement the program.
- Our schools have a strong sense of community that is intentionally cultivated by teachers, school leaders, and families. Oakland middle school parent Monica Purdy appreciates how effectively her son’s school is supporting his transition into sixth grade, with camping trips to build community, weekly mentoring and individual counseling. In Los Angeles, Sara Light appreciates that her kids’ school draws from the surrounding neighborhood, which helps facilitate the feeling of community.
- Our children have access to enrichment programs and field trips that come with living in a world-class city. At the middle school Franklin’s kids attend, in just one year, students participated in collaborations with six different arts organizations, including the San Francisco Opera, Hip Hop for Change, and Alonzo King LINES Ballet.
No school or school district is perfect. As public school parents, we are the first to admit that our schools have areas that need improvement. Still, there are many things we love about our urban public schools.

•••

Jennie Herriot-Hatfield is a K-12 education consultant, former elementary school teacher, and public school parent in San Francisco. She serves on the board of directors for SF Parent Coalition, which advocates for a thriving, equitable school system.

The opinions in this commentary are those of the author. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
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07/06/2025
California Community Colleges approves 6 new bachelor’s degree programs

Dental hygiene program at Fresno College.

Credit: Fresno City College

Six additional bachelor’s degree programs have been approved across California’s community colleges, the state chancellor’s office for the college system announced.

With the approvals, there are now 39 bachelor’s degree programs that are being offered or will soon be offered across the community college system.

The latest programs to be approved include respiratory care at Antelope Valley College, paramedicine at College of the Siskiyous, dental hygiene at both Cypress College and Oxnard College, paralegal studies at Santa Ana College and respiratory care therapist at Victor Valley College.

“Through the Baccalaureate Degree Program we are broadening the reach of higher education and skill development to a greater number of students by offering affordable and quality opportunities close to home,” Aisha Lowe, an executive vice chancellor for the college system, said in a statement.

There are now 32 different community colleges across the state with at least one bachelor’s degree program. A few colleges have multiple offerings, including Antelope Valley, Cypress and Santa Ana with their latest approvals.

The number of bachelor’s degrees being offered across the community colleges will likely continue to increase. In January, colleges submitted another 13 program applications that are currently under review.

Under a 2021 state law, the community college system can approve up to 30 bachelor’s degrees annually, across two cycles each year. The degrees are all offered in high-demand career fields such as dental hygiene and automotive education.

By offering those degrees at the community college level, students can earn a bachelor’s degree for a fraction of what it costs to get one at a four-year university. In some cases, the degrees are also more accessible, since there are some community colleges offering them in parts of the state where there isn’t a University of California or California State University campus.

To get approved, the programs must first go through intersegmental review, a process in which the California State University and the University of California systems get to say whether they object to the degrees. Under state law, the programs can’t duplicate programs that are offered at UC or CSU.

That has been a point of contention, particularly with CSU, which has raised duplication concerns about several programs that community colleges have proposed, something that has delayed the approval process. Currently, 11 programs remain under intersegmental review.

Community college officials say they are working with CSU officials to establish a better process for resolving those disputes more quickly in the future.

Because the community colleges can’t create bachelor’s degree programs that are already available at CSU and UC, they have been prevented from offering degrees in some fields with worker shortages, such as nursing. Newly proposed legislation aims to change that: Senate Bill 895 would allow 15 community colleges to begin offering bachelor’s degrees in nursing.

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06/06/2025
It’s Dangerous to Call Him “TACO” Trump

Tim O’Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion News. He writes here about why it is dangerous to call Trump “TACO Trump,” a moniker given to him by Robert Armstrong of the Financial Times.

TACO means “Trump Always Chickens Out.” It refers to his brash statements about draconian tariffs, followed by his usual backing down and deferring them. It happened on “Liberation Day,” April 2, it happened with his shakedown of Canada and Mexico, then his latest occurred when he announced 50% tariffs on the EU and the very next day, postponed them until July 9.

O’Brien writes about Trump’s huge and fragile ego. Although he evaded the draft when he was draft-eligible, he needs to be perceived as strong, tough, fearless, and fierce. A super-hero. A warrior. A man with nerves of steel.

O’Brien has a long history with Trump. In 2006, he wrote a book about Trump called TrumpNation. In the book, he said that Trump was not a billionaire, that he was worth only $150-200 million. Trump sued him for $10 billion for defamation. The suit was tossed out in 2009.

Being called “chicken” makes Trump very angry, O’Brien says.

^{“That’s a nasty question,” he told a reporter who asked about the TACO moniker at a White House press briefing on Wednesday. “Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question. … To me, that’s the nastiest question.”}

^{Trump, who fashions himself a brilliant dealmaker and strategist despite ample evidence to the contrary, is, of course, always going to bristle at the notion that he is a chicken — and a predictable one at that. He also routinely peddles himself as an infallible winner, so the nastiest question is also one that speculates about whether he’s mired in a losing streak. His tariff policy, unleashed on allies and competitors alike, has been rolled out on a seesaw and riddled with economically damaging ineptitude.}

O’Brien says we must prepare for a Trumpian show of force. He must show the world that he is no chicken. Not Putin’s puppet! Not a chicken! Tough! Strong! Never chicken!

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06/06/2025
Nearly all school parcel taxes pass, but mixed results for school bonds in March election

The March 5 primary proved to be a good day for passing school parcel taxes, but not so good for school construction bonds.

With fewer than 1% of votes statewide remaining to be counted, it appears likely voters in 10 of 11 districts approved parcel taxes. Although a small sample size, the 91% passage rate beats the historic 65% pass rate for primary elections, according to Michael Coleman, who publishes election results at CaliforniaCityFinance.com (see note below). The sole defeat was the Petaluma Joint Union High School District’s eight-year proposed tax at $89 per parcel.

Voters in 24 of 40 school districts passed school facilities bonds: 60% compared with the historic 73% primary election approval rate. And the winners include two tiny school districts in Sonoma County that looked like they would be defeated on election night but picked up enough mail-in or provisional votes to eke out a win.

It takes a 55% majority vote to pass a bond, and in Fort Ross School District, two votes made the difference for the $2.1 million bond; the 158 to 126 vote was 55.6% to 44.3%. Supporters of the $13 million bond in the Harmony Union School District picked up 6 percentage points since election night to end with 56.3% of the vote.

School districts can choose the March primary or November general election for a parcel tax or school bond. Most traditionally choose November, when more voters cast votes. But others gamble on the primary election, when there’s less competition, with fewer state bond issues and many initiatives competing for dollars on the ballot.

The most recent proposal for a state school construction bond, which would have provided matching funding for local school bonds, was also on the statewide primary ballot in March 2020, and it lost — the first in decades to lose. But it coincided with the emergence of the Covid pandemic, adding an edge of anxiety for voters. It also had the misfortune of coincidentally being designated Proposition 13, which likely caused confusion among voters with the 1978 anti-tax initiative that substantially restricted property tax increases and required a two-thirds voter majority to pass new taxes, including parcel taxes. (Voters lowered that threshold for school facilities bonds to 55% with Proposition 39 in 2000.)

The Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s aides are negotiating whether to place a school facilities bond proposal on the November ballot. With student enrollment declining statewide, most of the money would be designated for renovations and repairs, not new construction.

Brianna Garcia, vice president of School Services of California, a school consulting company, doubted that the lower-than-average passage rate for bonds would predict the outcome in November for local and state bond proposals. Many more districts will place bonds before voters, and the passage rate will revert to the norm for November elections, which is over 80%, she said.

While agreeing with Garcia, Eric Bonniksen, superintendent of Placerville Elementary School District in El Dorado County, cautioned that people struggling financially “are looking at every avenue to fit within their budgets, including school bonds.” A drop in interest rates, even if not large, which economists are forecasting, “may make people feel better about the economic outlook,” he said

Voters, Bonniksen said, want to see something visible, like remodeling a building, reconstructing a field or painting a school. “If a bond only fixes sewer and electrical lines, they will question, ‘What did you do for this money?’” he said.

Voters passed about $3 billion worth of projects, not including interest, generally paid over 30 years at rates of $15 per $100,000 of assessed property value in Sunnyvale to $60 per $100,000 of assessed property value in Benicia, Hayward, Culver City and Desert Sands unified districts. The largest bonds approved are for $675 million in Desert Sands, $550 million in Hayward, and $358 million in Culver City.

The largest bond that failed was for $517 million in Tamalpais Union High School District in Marin County; as of March 22, it was 1.25 percentage points shy of 55%. Opponents, led by the Coalition of Sensible Taxpayers, questioned the scale of the work and said the money would disproportionately go to Tamalpais High, with not enough to two other high schools. The district last approved a construction bond two decades ago.

Parcel taxes

Only about 1 in 8 school districts, primarily in the Bay Area and districts with wealthier families in the Los Angeles area, have passed one. Parcel taxes are one of the few sources of funding for districts to supplement state or local funding. Because Proposition 13 bans tax increases based on a property’s value, parcel taxes must be a uniform amount per property, regardless of whether it’s a cottage, a 10-bedroom house, or an apartment building.

Courts have ruled, however, that parcel taxes can be assessed by the square footage, and three of the 11 on the ballot (54 cents per square foot per year in Berkeley Unified, 55 cents in Albany Unified, and 58.5 cents in Alameda) passed. School boards in high-cost Bay Area districts argue that parcel taxes are critical because state funding under the Local Control Funding Formula doesn’t take regional costs into consideration.

The approved parcel taxes range from $75 per year for eight years in Martinez Unified to a $768 per year extension of an existing parcel tax, with an annual cost of living adjustment, in Davis Joint Unified.

Note: Updated data indicated that parcel taxes in Manhattan Beach Unified and Petaluma City Elementary School District, along with bond proposals in Fort Ross and Harmony Union school districts picked up enough support to pass.

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06/06/2025
FAFSA delays make it difficult for students to finalize college decisions

A student heads toward the Student Services building at Los Angeles Pierce College

Credit: Delilah Brumer/EdSource

Waiting for college financial aid offers has been worrying for Kamila Juarez, a high school senior at Grace Davis High School in Modesto. The prolonged timeline of this process, caused by a delayed release of this year’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, has added to the uncertainty.

“It’s kind of stressful, just because I know that when I do know how much I get, it’s going to be pretty fast,” Juarez said. “So knowing that I have all this waiting time, I can’t really do much about it besides apply for scholarships and wait to hear back from those scholarships. It’s pretty suspenseful.”

The U.S. Department of Education launched a renewed version of FAFSA on Dec. 31, 2023 — three months later than the usual release each Oct. 1 — because the new form was not ready to be rolled out on time. The new FAFSA was said to be simpler and more efficient for families to complete, with the intention of providing more students with aid due to a new formula.

With FAFSA’s availability issues, about 5.7 million students have successfully completed the application, compared to the average of 17 million applicants at this point in previous years. The compressed time schedule strained families applying for financial aid.

The Education Department’s deadline for getting student financial aid data to colleges and universities was last week, so schools are only now receiving that information. And on Friday, complications piled up, as the Education Department announced that a miscalculation in “the formula of the FAFSA resulted in incorrect financial need information for several hundred thousand students being sent to colleges and universities.”

The delays led all nine UC campuses to push back their Intent to Register deadline to May 15, while all 23 CSU campuses to no earlier than May 15. Despite the 15-day commitment deadline extension, some students said they are facing difficulties in making a decision without knowing their financial aid package for the 2024-25 academic year.

On Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill extending the state’s financial aid deadline to give students more time to apply for state aid programs.

Juarez said she has received scholarships from Sonoma State University and California State University, Monterey Bay but is waiting until she knows what financial aid she’ll get from every school before making her decision.

“My biggest (factor), I would say, is financial aid, as well as location,” Juarez said.

Juarez said she hopes to be able to go to either Cal Poly San Luis Obispo or UCLA and major in city planning or geography and environmental science.

Finean Hunter-Kenney, a senior from Lowell High School in San Francisco, said the FAFSA delays have also heavily impacted his decision in committing to college.

“I can’t make any decision on where to go to college without all the financial info,” he said. “Right now I’m in the process of committing to Chapman University to play baseball, but I can’t make that decision final until I see how much FAFSA will pay for, because the tuition is really expensive.”

Hunter-Kenney said he feels pressure to say “yes,” because the deadline is May 1, but he can’t accept the offer until FAFSA releases financial aid information. For him, there is “definitely a limit” when it comes to the cost of tuition, and while aid is not “make or break,” it will still affect his college decision.

“I am pretty stressed about where to go,” Hunter-Kenney said. “The financial aspect is stressful as well, because without all the information, I don’t know how much in loans I’m going to have to take out, and that’s something I want to know before I decide to go anywhere.”

For Isabella Gentile, a communication studies major at Pasadena City College, financial aid was one of the main reasons she decided to focus her transfer applications on in-state public universities and avoid the financial uncertainty that can come with private or out-of-state schools.

“I know I would receive more money from (my) grant if I attended a UC school versus if I attended a private school, which impacted my decision to not apply to somewhere like USC,” Gentile said.

However, Gentile also said that the transfer and financial aid process has been “good and easy” overall, because she was able to submit everything she needed to.

Other students filling out this year’s FAFSA have faced technical difficulties, according to Laura Burtness, a college and career adviser at Hillsdale High School in San Mateo. Some of these issues are related to her students’ citizenship status.

“There is difficulty for mixed residency families, or families where not all claim U.S. citizenship,” Burtness said. Error messages and application rejections have been common when parents don’t have social security numbers — classified as “eligible non-citizens” for FAFSA purposes. Families calling the help line have reportedly been met with recordings of outdated information or advice to try to fill out the form again later.

The Education Department announced in late February that students who have at least one parent without a social security number would be able to successfully submit FAFSA forms in the first half of March.

Burtness mentioned the urgency and concern she’s had for the students she has worked with all year.

“I think this is going to be a big deal because we’re running out of time. Hillsdale’s graduation is on May 30, and we’re doing anything we can to help,” she said.

Los Angeles Pierce College political science major Eric Guerrero faced the more common technical difficulties; he said he spent weeks troubleshooting his FAFSA form before he was able to submit it in late January.

Guerrero plans to transfer to a four-year university this fall and has his sights set on UCLA. He said the challenges he faced with FAFSA have made his transfer process harder.

“Every time I tried it, it was crashing or it wouldn’t load,” Guerrero said. “It was so hectic. Trying to get it done was horrible, and I was really nervous. Eventually, one random night at like 2 in the morning, it finally went through.”

Ashley Bolter is a fourth-year journalism student minoring in French and ethnic studies at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Delilah Brumer is a sophomore at Los Angeles Pierce College majoring in journalism and political science. Kelcie Lee is a first-year student at UC Berkeley majoring in history and sociology. Abbie Phillips is a third-year journalism student minoring in Spanish at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. All are members of EdSource’s California Student Journalism Corps.

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06/06/2025
Florida: DeSantis Degraded Education at Every Level

Governor Ron DeSantis has done everything possible to destroy education in Florida. He apparently hates public schools. He pushed through an expansion of vouchers that provides a subsidy to every student in the state, no matter if the family is rich or poor. Of course, most of those using the voucher never attended public schools. Most vouchers go to students in religious schools. Florida currently spends $4 billion annually on vouchers, a sum sure to increase.

Bad as public K-12 education is, the state’s public higher education system is in worse shape. DeSantis has placed political cronies in charge of every state university. He took charge of tiny New College (700 students) because he was offended that Florida had one progressive institution of higher education where students were encouraged not to conform. DeSantis replaced the board with conservatives who put a political extremist in President. What was once a haven for free-thinking students was transformed into a school for jocks and business majors.

The editorial board of the Sun-Sentinel summarized DeSantis’s record of using higher education as patronage for political cronies:

When Gov. Ron DeSantis won his landslide re-election in 2022, a half-fawning and half-fearful Florida Legislature gave him whatever he wanted.

The Harvard graduate could have used that power to burnish Florida’s celebrated universities. He could have chosen the best and brightest to lead schools already among the nation’s best. He could have been the education governor.

That — not a bellyflopping bid for the White House — could have cemented his legacy.

Instead, DeSantis has earned a doctorate in cronyism. He’ll be remembered as the governor who did everything in his power to erode higher education and independent thought. He puts politics above merit and qualifications, with sham “searches” and secret deals.

College and university campuses are now soft-landing patronage pads for Republican allies, at sky-high salaries.

Former House Speaker Richard Corcoran was installed as president of New College in Sarasota. Another politician, former House Majority Leader Adam Hasner, was handed the FAU presidency. A run-of-the-mill former legislator, Fred Hawkins, won the presidency of a state college in Avon Park despite lacking academic qualifications.

Former Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez is now president of Florida International University. Former U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska was given the prestigious UF presidency, then flamed out amid reports of over-the-top spending.

It’s no surprise, then, that Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, a former Republican legislator from Hialeah who oversees state colleges and K-12 education, will slide into the presidency of the University of West Florida in Pensacola.

For DeSantis and Diaz, no university is too big and no kindergarten picture book is too small to escape being recast in the governor’s philosophy.

Step 1: Stack the board

First, DeSantis stacked UWF’s board of trustees. Then, newly appointed trustee Zach Smith quickly made clear that UWF president Martha Saunders was unwelcome.

Smith, a Heritage Foundation fellow, had to reach back to six years ago to find even a speck of mud to throw: Two student-organized drag shows in 2019; social media messaging about a Black Lives Matter co-founder and a book, “How to be an Antiracist,” once recommended by university librarians.

It’s true that best-seller is full of provocative opinions. But so is Smith’s book, “Rogue Prosecutors,” which pushes dark conspiracies about prosecutors corrupted by a wealthy Jew.

That did not stop his nomination to the UWF board by DeSantis, who only last year declared war on campus antisemitism amid great fanfare.

The widely popular Saunders saw the writing on the wall, and she resigned.

A farcical scene

That board meeting was an ambush, said trustee Alonzie Scott. The next one was a farce.

Without a job posting or a search, Diaz’s name alone surfaced as a replacement. Just as quickly, a special meeting was called by UWF trustees. There would be no search for a temporary president and no effort to pick an interim leader from the university.

There was only a perfunctory vote to install Diaz. Then, farce upon farce, the board voted with a straight face to begin looking for a permanent replacement for Diaz.

Barring a political earthquake, that will be Diaz. As former Pensacola mayor and UWF alum Jerry Maygarden said at the meeting, what serious candidate would apply for a job that smacks of a done deal?

Even Diaz’s roots defy all logic.

UWF’s strength is its strong community support among residents and businesses, including Republican leaders. Diaz’s Miami-Dade home is a 10-hour drive, 700 miles and culturally worlds apart from Escambia County in “Lower Alabama.”

None of this is about rescuing students who feel intimidated and indoctrinated.

After all, a state-mandated 2022 Intellectual Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity report found that a majority of UWF students surveyed felt the school provided them the freedom to express their own opinions. Half said they had no idea if their professors were liberal or conservative.

New College 2.0

Never mind. In April, DeSantis told UWF to “buckle up,” announcing he would do for them what he did for New College.

It’s hard to see the success story in New College since the governor declared war on it. DeSantis’ hostile takeover of the tiny liberal arts college has devolved into a money pit: The state’s cost for each New College student shot to more than $90,000. Other state universities average roughly $8,000.

Last month, New College and the University of South Florida were found to be secretly working on a deal to “transfer” USF’s Sarasota-Manatee campus to New College. It’s dead for the moment. Community leaders, kept in the dark as usual, demand answers.

Meanwhile, USF has become the latest fertile field for DeSantis to reward his friends. USF’s president said she will resign, creating yet another job opportunity for a like-minded crony.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

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06/06/2025
Taxpayers deserve better performance audits of school construction bonds

Photo: Carol Davis/Flickr

California public school and community college district voters approved $20 billion of construction loans in 2022, with more passing in 2023, using the Proposition 39 financing capability. The California Association of Bond Oversight Committees (CABOC) estimates that a total of $197.8 billion of this type of construction loan now exists.

Proposition 39 made it easier to pass bond measures, but it also created a new emphasis on vigorous taxpayer oversight of construction expenditures. Indeed, when Proposition 39 was presented to the voters, the Legislature created a quid pro quo scenario, reducing the bond approval level to 55% from two-thirds, but requiring extensive taxpayer oversight and public visibility.

This oversight includes a performance audit that “… shall be conducted in accordance with the Government Auditing Standards issued by the Comptroller General of the United States for financial and performance audits.” Education code section 15286

When a standards-compliant performance audit is not present, however, laws can be broken, crimes committed, and voters are left to conclude that their tax money is not being spent wisely. A search engine’s worth of indictments, allegations and plea deals are discoverable on the internet, relating to school districts and construction. This is in addition to the traditional occurrence of excessive change orders, cost overruns and delivery delays.

For instance, the state’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) uncovered evidence of fraud, misappropriation or other illegal activities in 65% of the “extraordinary audits” it conducted between 2018 and 2023. While not all construction related, these cases were referred to law enforcement authorities.

In Santa Barbara County, an assistant school district superintendent and three construction company executives were charged with 74 counts of misappropriation of public monies, embezzlement of public funds, diversion of construction funds and grand theft. In San Francisco, a former school district facilities manager overseeing a district construction account pleaded guilty to fraud and tax evasion in an alleged scheme to divert $500,000 out of a construction escrow account.

But the greater mystery may be when there is no oversight performance audit and wrong-doing goes unexamined.

A statewide compliance survey released in October 2022 revealed that performance audits produced by most school districts fail to sufficiently comply with the required standards, according to a common sense, reasonable evaluation. Missing and non-standards-compliant performance audits deprive the public and those overseeing construction bond programs of valuable information that could be used to meaningfully evaluate the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars of public funds.

Many performance audits are just over two-pages in length, and include a single compliance audit objective. They typically fail to audit or provide information on program effectiveness and results, internal control or any prospective analysis of the construction program, which is usually the largest construction program ever undertaken by a school district.

The comptroller general’s government auditing standards manual describes how government officials, such as school districts, should use a performance audit to assure the public that its money is well-spent. These standards describe the categories of audit objectives: program effectiveness and results; internal control; compliance; and prospective analysis. It also lists 32 examples of audit objectives, illustrating each of the four categories. This information provides objective analysis, findings and conclusions in order to improve program performance and operations, reduce costs and increase public accountability.

School and community college districts engaging firms to produce the Proposition 39 performance audits should include audit objectives from a broad array of audit categories, so that the public truly understands the expenditure of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds.

And taxpayers should carefully review the Proposition 39 construction bond program documents of their school and community college districts, including the performance audit, which are required by law to be posted on district websites.

•••

Bryan Scott serves on two citizens’ bond oversight committees in Brentwood, and in 2023 he was named the Member of the Year by the California Association of Bond Oversight Committees. He is the creator of “Becoming an Effective Watchdog: A Necessary Primer for California School Construction Bond Oversight.”

The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.

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06/06/2025