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  • ‘My mission’: Dolores Huerta Elementary Principal Estela Lopez extends support to community

    ‘My mission’: Dolores Huerta Elementary Principal Estela Lopez extends support to community


    Dolores Huerta Elementary principal Estela Lopez. Credit: Mallika Seshadri / EdSource

    When Estela Lopez was about 7 years old, her brother told her she could join in on an adventure — provided she stayed strong, followed instructions and didn’t cry. 

    After school one day, Lopez and her older brother trekked across the street to their local school in what used to be South Central Los Angeles and climbed over the walls, jumping from one room to the next despite hearing their mother calling their names. 

    By chance, Lopez stumbled on a recycling bin packed with paper worksheets. She grew excited and rummaged for more. 

    “I went into the trash cans, and I started looking at different worksheets, and I started taking them out,” Lopez said. “I had a younger sister, I was like, ‘You know what, we’re going to play school. I’m going to be the teacher. You guys are going to listen to me.’” 

    What started out as play that day — with her sisters sometimes complaining, “You always want to be the teacher; you always want to have us doing work” — led Lopez to begin her journey as an educator, as she began to notice the positive effects of her methods at home. 

    “One of my sisters was very strong in reading, but I saw that my other sister was struggling,” she said, so she just helped them with their homework. “The expectation, since I was the oldest, was to get home, help my sisters with homework, help around the house while both of my parents were working 12 hours a day.” 

    The community Lopez grew up in lies in what is now South Los Angeles — and she still lives and works just a five-minute drive from where she was raised on 49th Street. But since she took over as the principal of Dolores Huerta Elementary, Lopez has gone beyond teaching reading and writing — working her way from being a coordinator who supports English learners, to assistant principal, to a principal who extended her reach far beyond the classroom to help families secure housing and deliver critical supplies during the height of the Covid pandemic. 

    Ryan J. Smith, the chief strategy officer at the LA-based organization Community Coalition that works to “upend systemic racism,” said Lopez has worked diligently with LAUSD and has established various community partnerships to help create safe passage routes near the school. 

    And when a parent can’t take their child to school, Lopez and assistant principal Sandra Sandoval step in. 

    “We had a kiddo last year who is being raised by grandpa, and he was having a hard time picking her up from school. He was going through chemo treatment. … And so we took turns walking her home and picking her up in the morning so she would get to school safely,” Sandoval said. 

    “We will do whatever we need to do to make sure that our kids are safe and getting to school and … at least being kids and not dealing with big people problems for six and a half, seven hours a day.”

    Supporting students’ families 

    Virtual learning due to Covid was particularly challenging, Lopez said, as many students did not log onto their online coursework. 

    So, she and her fellow administrators began going door to door, but they quickly realized that a lot of the families also did not have masks to stay healthy. 

    “We would get to the homes, and we would ask them to come out, and they were like, ‘We don’t have any face masks,’ some of the essential things,” Lopez said. “So we started carrying them in the cars, and we started giving them to the families because these are the families we’re supporting. They don’t have face masks. They’re not protecting themselves.” 

    Around that same time — as rents skyrocketed — Lopez helped organize town halls and workshops for parents to learn about housing security in an attempt to avoid eviction. 

    “We find sometimes when we’re looking at enrollments, we see the same address three or four times,” Lopez said. “That means there’s three or four families living under one roof. And sometimes we find out it’s only a two-bedroom, and that’s what our kids deal with on a daily basis.”

    According to Ryan, that level of community outreach is critical, and Lopez has acquired a “profound” understanding “that students need all things to thrive.” 

    A time to heal

    For Lopez, however, that period of seclusion wasn’t just about supporting families in her community. It was also about healing herself. 

    Lopez missed the students when they were home during the pandemic. “I really did. I missed that laughter outside. I was only hearing the little birds,” she said. “But I think I needed that time because, during that time was when my son (Mauricio) passed away, and I wasn’t in a good place to be their school leader. I needed that time to cope, but I also needed that time to heal.” 

    Mauricio was the eldest of Lopez’s three sons, born when she was a 17-year-old high school senior. 

    She recalled that Mauricio was only 4 months old when he watched her take the stage as a high school graduate. And he watched her again, as an adult with a daughter of his own, when she shared her story for the first time at a celebration of the school’s 10th anniversary in 2019 — when Lopez also met civil rights icon Dolores Huerta in person for the first time and began her yearslong relationship with her. 

    “Sharing about becoming a teenage mom, sharing about the LA riots, sharing about the challenges of being a parent that was raising three Latino boys and the conversations with them. Sharing that I left (home) when I was only 15 years old. Sharing how difficult it was to grow up in a home where my dad was an alcoholic and how my ex-husband became an alcoholic and I didn’t want to continue that cycle with my son,” Lopez said. 

    While Ryan eventually convinced her to speak at the event, Lopez said, that was one of the hardest decisions she has had to make — but that it was ultimately an opportunity to honor the five most important people in her life who continually motivated her to keep going: her parents and her three sons, Mauricio, Ivan and Julian.

    Lopez said that after she spoke, Huerta embraced her and said,  “You’re strong, mi hija. You’re a strong woman.” 

    But in the wake of Mauricio’s death, Lopez questioned whether she should remain an educator. 

    “I went back and thought about the times that I wasn’t with him and the times that I felt that I invested so much on me and not on him … or my last conversation with him,” Lopez said. 

    “I was working on the main office to make it look pretty for our students, and he called me that Saturday, and he said, ‘Mom, are you coming home?’ And I said ‘Not yet, mi hijo.’ I said I want to finish painting the office because I don’t want to be here on Sunday. And he said, ‘That’s cool, mom. I love you. I’ll see you tomorrow.’”

    Ultimately, Mauricio’s wife, Alejandra, showed Lopez her son’s social media posts, which reminded her of her purpose. 

    “I’m very proud of you, mama. You make me strong,” Mauricio had written. “Keep the work going. You’re helping the little kids out.”

    Life at Dolores Huerta Elementary 

    Despite having had three sons and a granddaughter (who attends Dolores Huerta Elementary) of her own, Lopez has regarded the students as her “other children.” 

    “All I have to do sometimes is look at that window … and when they pass by, and they’re showing me their little cards or they’re smiling, that’s worth it,” she said.  

    When a student arrives late, Lopez said she immediately takes them to the cafeteria to eat something. When a student cries, she offers comfort. And when a student doesn’t seem responsive in the morning, she and her staff check on them throughout the day. 

    “I know how challenging it can be out there,” said Lopez, who views the school as a shelter for children from some of their difficulties. “I want to make sure that when we open the doors in the morning, everything is left outside.” 

    Students at the school, including Samantha Estrada Flores, said she has admired Lopez as an “amazing woman” who organizes fun activities for the children. And, Ernesto Gallardo, a fifth-grader running for student council president, said when he walks through the gates each morning, “I’m always happy.” 

    “At the beginning, when (Mauricio) passed away, it was hard for me to say I have three sons, but now, I have three sons: two with me, and one that’s not with me right now — but the one that taught me how to be a mom,” Lopez said. “And with that learning, I learned to be a strong leader and for my community to know that I’m here to support them in any way that I can. That’s my mission.” 





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  • Cal State extends general education requirements for transfers to first-time freshmen

    Cal State extends general education requirements for transfers to first-time freshmen


    Students walking on CSU San Marcos campus.

    Anne Hall/CSU San Marcos

    New general education requirements created for transfer students will now apply to all students, including first-time freshmen in the California State University. 

    Cal State trustees voted Wednesday to create a unified, simplified general education pathway for all students, despite opposition from faculty and students that the decision would eliminate classes that contribute to lifelong learning. 

    The decision effectively replaces the “CSU GE Breadth” and reduces the number of general education required credits from 39 to 34, by eliminating additional humanities and arts courses and classes identified as lifelong learning and self-development. However, it also adds a laboratory class to the requirements. Students would still be able to take many of these courses as electives. 

    The simplified pathway, known as Cal-GETC or the California General Education Transfer Curriculum, was first proposed in May 2022 as part of the Student Transfer Achievement Reform Act of 2021 as a way to improve the transfer experience for community college students entering the University of California and Cal State systems. The curriculum was developed by the academic senates of the CSU, the UC and the community colleges and goes into effect in the fall of 2025. 

    Although the new transfer pathway was created with community college students in mind, Cal State administrators and trustees chose to apply it to first-time freshmen, too.

    About 60% of Cal State’s first-year applicants have some type of transfer credit, many of them earned through dual enrollment courses taken in high school, said April Grommo, CSU’s vice chancellor for enrollment management, adding that some continuing CSU students also complete general education courses through their local community colleges. Without creating one pathway, Grommo said about 25% of undergraduates would have to complete more general education requirements. 

    “Aligning general education for all CSU students provides an equitable set of degree requirements for all undergraduate students,” she said. 

    Trustees said proceeding with two different systems could lead to equity concerns. 

    “I am concerned that if we have one path for community college transfers and one path for those students who begin with us, that there might be a feeling of inequity,” trustee Jack Clarke Jr., said. 

    Although most Cal State faculty support the new simplified path for transfer students, many said they opposed applying it to students who enter the system as freshmen. 

    Beth Steffel, chair of CSU’s academic senate, said despite claims that students can still take these courses, there is a chance that courses will be eliminated if not designated as part of general education. 

    “If a course is not required, it will not be offered,” Steffel said. “Resource constraints ensure this reality.” 

    Eliminating the courses from general education requirements could also have unintended consequences by reducing the potential for students to learn other languages through arts and humanities and create costs by adding an additional science laboratory, Steffel said.

    Steven Filling, an accounting professor at Stanislaus State, said losing the courses provided in CSU GE Breadth rquirements would be detrimental to students who enter the system as freshmen because they would miss out on the extra skills gained from social learning, communication and critical thinking. 

    For example, kinesiology classes, which is the study of movement, fall under the lifelong learning and self-development courses. Students interested in business fields like accounting, for example, could take golfing courses to prepare them for meeting with clients.

    “If you’ve never played golf and have no clue about it, well, you may have a little bit of trouble,” Filling said. 

    These classes are called “lifelong learning” because they help students discover how to cope and deal with the world around them, he said. 

    There’s another reason some CSU faculty oppose Cal-GETC: Much of the curriculum was chosen with the UC system in mind. 

    “The UC has a pretty strong position of, ‘Well, if we don’t agree to it, we’re not going to do it,’” Filling said. “If you look at Cal-GETC, you’ll notice a strange similarity between that and the UC’s present (general education) programming.” 

    Filling said one problem with that is the UC and Cal State systems have different missions and, although there is overlap, educate different types of students. For example, the UCs are tasked with admitting the top 9% of high school graduates.

    “To think that somebody in the top 5% of their high school class is going to be at exactly the same level as somebody who is at the 30th percentile is unrealistic,” he said.

    “It’s clear our students need different things than what UC students do,” he said. “It may be the case that the community colleges, with the resources they have, can provide the additional support those students need to get them up to the level where UC students are. It’s far from clear to me that that works for students coming into the CSU.” 

    The new simplified pathway represents both systems, said Laura Massa, Cal State’s interim vice chancellor for academic and faculty programs. For example, Cal-GETC includes ethnic studies and oral communication requirements that were required for CSU but not UC.

    Student trustee Diana Aguilar-Cruz said some of the opposition from students arises from their rising distrust of the board and administration’s decisions. Students have been calling for some analysis of the current general education path before making any change. 

    “Especially with all the prior decisions that we’ve been making throughout the year,” Aguilar-Cruz said, referring to the tuition increase. “They really need to see this data. … That has really fractured the trust that students have.” 

    However, trustees said they did not want to proceed with two different systems for meeting general education requirements.

    Despite opposition from faculty and students to the change, Cal State officials said they worked collaboratively with both groups on understanding the pros and cons and took both groups into consideration. 

    “Shared governance doesn’t always mean agreement,” CSU Chancellor Mildred Garcia said. “The success, sustainability and continued growth of our institution depends on our ability to recruit, serve and guide our students through our universities to remove barriers that sometimes we put in their way and provide clear and direct pathways to a degree and a fulfilling profession for us. And for me, I believe a single GE pattern for all CSU students achieves that goal, and it advances our mission of student success for all.” 





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  • California extends state financial aid deadline until April 2

    California extends state financial aid deadline until April 2


    Sierra Community College in Rocklin.

    Credit: Sierra College / Flickr

    Este artículo está disponible en Español. Léelo en español.

    California officials are giving students an extra month to meet the state financial aid priority deadline, saying fewer high school seniors have finished paperwork so far this year due to delays in the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and uncertainty about federal education policy and immigration enforcement.

    The California Student Aid Commission, whose executive director approved the 30-day extension from March 3 to April 2, reported a 25% drop in the number of California high school seniors who have completed financial aid applications this year compared with the same point in 2023.

    The April 2 state priority deadline is the date by which students planning to attend a four-year institution must file applications for most state aid programs, including the Cal Grant. Students seeking Cal Grants to attend a community college can apply through Sept. 2. Students have until June 30, 2026, to complete the application for federal awards like Pell Grants.

    The decline in completed applications is due in part to a two-month delay to the start of the federal 2025-26 financial aid application cycle, commission officials said. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, opened on Dec. 1 following the troubled rollout of the 2024-25 FAFSA. The form is typically available to students on Oct. 1.

    People who work directly with students also say that concerns about the administration of President Donald Trump are giving some families pause about whether to file for federal student aid this year. The decision is especially fraught for students with undocumented family members in light of Trump administration rhetoric promising an unprecedented crackdown on unauthorized immigration. Federal law bars the use of data submitted through the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, for any use other than determining financial aid, but both the National College Attainment Network and the California Student Aid Commission have cautioned mixed-status families that the federal form may not protect their data going forward. The California commission has recommended that families fearful of federal immigration enforcement complete the California Dream Act Application, or CADAA, a state financial aid program that does not share information with the federal government. 

    “Some of the parents are saying, ‘If they take me, they take me. But my kid is going to apply for financial aid for college’,” said Jasmin Pivaral, senior director of college culture at the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, an organization that works with five high schools in Los Angeles Unified. “It’s been really sad and really challenging to hear that parents are having to make this difficult decision, and we have no sense right now what kind of mental toll this is taking on students.”

    The Trump administration has also threatened to shut down the U.S. Department of Education and pursued other efforts to freeze federal funding. Linda Doughty, the director of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Cal-SOAP Consortium, which works to boost college participation, said some families have mistakenly concluded that federal student aid will not be available next school year as a result.

    “Our parents thought they canceled financial aid,” said Doughty, whose group is helping to organize several free financial aid workshops at area schools this weekend. “That’s misinformation.”

    Doughty and her Cal-SOAP colleagues are among the organizations around the state working with the commission to host Cash for College workshops where students and their families can get advice from financial aid experts to file the FAFSA or CADAA. As of Thursday morning, there were 140 such workshops scheduled virtually as well as in person in cities including Bakersfield, Norwalk and San Bernardino.

    EdSource reporter Zaidee Stavely contributed to this article.





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