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Patrick Acuña is starting his final year as a social ecology major at one of California’s most prestigious universities. It’s in sharp contrast to his nearly 30 years inside state prisons on a life without parole sentence.
In the year since his release, Acuña transitioned between two historically dichotomous institutions: the prison he believed he would die in and University of California, Irvine brimming with opportunities for a man who completed high school while in juvenile hall decades ago.
“I’m so glad I didn’t get the death penalty,” said Acuña, who faced that sentence at age 19. “I would have never had the opportunity to get an education, to love, to make friends.”
Acuña’s transformation was decades in the making, with education remaining his constant guide.
“I wanted to prove that I was worthy … that I was more than just a prison number. And I wanted to show not just my loved ones, but society, that I was more than life without parole because life without parole is a death sentence and says that you are incorrigible,” said Acuña, 49.
Acuña began earning community college credits nearly two decades ago but didn’t think he’d go further.
“I always aspired to higher education, but it was just not available,” he said. “When Irvine came in with the opportunity to earn a bachelor’s, I wanted to take advantage of that.”
In 2022, the University of California inaugurated its first in-prison bachelor’s program, an expansion of college in prison. The community colleges run associate degree programs in almost all 34 state prisons, and the state university system runs nearly 10 bachelor’s programs. CSU Dominguez Hills is soon debuting the state’s first in-prison master’s program.
By chance, Acuña was not only at the same prison where the program launched but had just completed his second associate degree for transfer, which made him eligible to apply.
He became one of 26 incarcerated people at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego County admitted to UC Irvine through the Leveraging Inspiring Futures Through Educational Degrees, or LIFTED, program. Their studies are funded by the Blue and Gold Opportunity Plan, which covers tuition and fees for California residents with significant financial need.
Applying was challenging: With restricted internet access, he and his classmates couldn’t submit their own applications or request necessary information, such as Social Security numbers. They relied heavily on LIFTED to apply.
Acuña’s pursuit of higher education, along with involvement in activities like training service dogs, played a significant role in Gov. Jerry Brown commuting his sentence to 25 years to life in December 2018. He was originally sentenced when he was gang-affiliated and a lookout in a robbery that left a store owner dead.
A bill passed in 2018 that provided the chance to retry his case, and a judge found him not culpable for murder. He was released last October and moved to Irvine’s graduate student housing to complete his studies, the first from LIFTED to attend on campus.
He knows some people question why he should have this opportunity when his victim didn’t. “I can’t argue against that because I have personal responsibility,” he said. “I am sorry for what I’ve done, and I do regret what I have done.”
LIFTED became so crucial in Acuña’s life that its staffers picked him up after he was released. Their first stop, at his request, was UC Irvine.
“First thing I learned on campus was that nobody was taking it easy on students in [prison]. I was getting the same education inside that I was going to get outside,” he said.
He quickly learned how difficult the transition would be from studying in prison versus on campus.
With limited technology access, assignments were completed by hand or on highly restricted laptops. The technology barrier made the program far more demanding for students inside, said Acuña, but also presented a significant challenge when he got out because he hadn’t taken part in the momentous technology developments while incarcerated.
He initially felt intimidated. “I could be in a prison yard with a bunch of dudes that are in there for murder, and I was more intimidated sitting in the classroom at a university with a bunch of 19-, 20-year-olds,” he said.
It was the result of feeling like an impostor.
“I felt that I didn’t belong there, that I wasn’t smart enough to be there, that somehow, I was given some sort of leniency to be able to fit into the program, which it turns out is not true, but it felt that way,” Acuña said.
The prison environment was “toxic, highly alpha-driven, male-dominated,” he said. He quickly learned to navigate a distinct campus environment, noting he doesn’t always express himself in politically correct ways.
Perhaps most crucial was support from campus groups for students impacted by incarceration and foster care, which he was in for some time as a teenager. Acuña particularly credits three groups: LIFTED, Underground Scholars and Foster Youth Resilience in Education.
From a grant to fix his car’s transmission to navigating resources to making him feel welcomed, he said the groups “made the landing softer initially.”
“Without those three organizations, I don’t know if I would’ve stayed in school. And if I hadn’t stayed in school, I don’t know if I would still be in the free world,” said Acuña.
For most of his time incarcerated, community college was the only higher education option. Higher education for those inside is becoming increasingly possible, particularly with Pell Grant access recently reinstated.
Still, only about 230 of the state’s 95,600 incarcerated people are enrolled in bachelor’s programs this fall. Being released midway through such programs, as Acuña was, is even less common.
“We engage in education because once we get a taste of it, we understand that it transforms our lives in ways we don’t even initially understand. It broadens our perspective,” said Acuña about attending college while incarcerated. “You see there’s more to life than those blocks that you’re willing to die for and your friends have died for.”
He attributes that transformation as the reason why many of his classmates applied to UCI despite knowing they’ll remain in prison for the rest of their lives.
“One of the harshest things about being sentenced to life without parole… is that it’s a sentence to hopelessness. Every human being needs hope to thrive, to live,” Acuña said. “Whether you can do anything with that education as far as the outside world or career — you get to think and share ideas.”
Turning point in solitary
While in solitary confinement in his early 20s, an older man deeply entrenched in gang culture became Acuña’s mentor. It’s this man whom Acuña credits with setting him on his current path.
“He was guiding me out of the gang culture, but he could not openly guide me out because that would be a death sentence for him,” said Acuña. “He didn’t want me to make the same mistakes he had made and always told me: ‘You remind me of me when I was your age.’”
Acuña received his mentor’s copy of “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius and read it multiple times, afraid of not knowing an answer if questioned on the book about the musings of a Roman emperor and philosopher.
“There’s this pressure to walk this fine line; it’s like you’re walking on rice paper and trying not to tear it,” said Acuña about navigating prison without getting hurt. But his mentor was uninterested in punishments.
Instead, it became the first book Acuña wanted to read, even as he struggled with then-undiagnosed learning disabilities of dyslexia and dyscalculia.
Courtesy of Patrick Acuña
Patrick Acuña
“Something was awakened in me. I didn’t read better, but I got a taste of new understanding. I was hooked as if it was a drug on education and learning new things,” Acuña said. “That moment really changed my life.”
His mentor died in solitary, as they knew he would, but Acuña holds his lessons close, becoming emotional when he’s mentioned. He no longer has the book; he said a guard discarded it during a cell search.
“One of the last things he did was to help set me on a path that he knew was right, that he wanted for himself, but he was too entrenched to ever make the decision to do anything else,” Acuña said of his mentor. “In the pages of that book, he gave me a gift, not just education but a different life path. Something beyond the life we had lived up to that point.”
The book was filled with life lessons, such as: “Do not act as if you had 10,000 years to live. The inescapable is hanging over your head; while you have life in you, while you still can, make yourself good.”
Soon after, Acuña joined others appealing for education while at the Central Valley’s Corcoran State Prison.
“I started thinking: What does it mean to be a man or an adult?” he said. He saw education as the only way to “show [the next generation] that just because we come from not the best of areas … that they don’t have to travel the path that I traveled and endure the hardships that I endured as a result of it and at the same time have to live with the guilt of harming others.”
He’d struggled through grade school, unable to memorize multiplication charts or read by the third grade. From teachers, he received high marks in effort even as he internalized comments he received elsewhere: “that I didn’t try hard enough, I was just stupid, I’ll never be any good,” he said.
It took meeting his mentor in prison to give school another chance.
Acuña can’t recall his first interaction with police. He grew up in the South San Gabriel neighborhood of Los Angeles during the 1980s gang epidemic, where such contact was incessant.
“When we start peeling away the layers of when was the first time you came into contact with a policing system, for many of us, it’s almost impossible to say,” Acuña said.
Paired with negative academic experiences, Acuña saw few options for his future. “It was either military, labor jobs, or prison … and a lot of it was prison,” he said about the adults in his family.
“I kind of just fell through the cracks and wound up getting involved with other students that were probably falling through the cracks,” said Acuña. “And eventually that led to anti-social behaviors, gang affiliation, more crime and prison.”
Acuña, who identifies as Native American and Latino, was first arrested at 14 for robbery. He remained tied to the justice system through his teenage years. Then, at 19, he was arrested for murder.
“The damage I did was irreparable and so far-reaching that it goes beyond what I can imagine, and that’s just the immediate victim and the family,” Acuña said during a 2020 parole board hearing.
His attorney described Acuña that day as having transformed “from a violent, scared, damaged, terrifying young gang member to an upstanding person, a man with respect, integrity, who can be part of our society and give back to others.”
By then, Acuña had internalized the wide impact of crime on communities. He remains in school to reduce the damage.
There are many inside prison who are “languishing and have so much to offer,” he said. But because of “cruel and unusual” sentences like life without parole, he added, they don’t get to show any of their rehabilitation.
“As somebody serving the sentence of life without parole, you have no incentive to educate or stay out of trouble — yet they’re doing it,” said Acuña. It shows they’re not incorrigible, can be rehabilitated and deserving of having their cases reviewed, just as his was.
There was a time when he needed to be in prison, he acknowledged, but “did I need to be there indeterminately? No.”
Acuña currently advises professors teaching inside prisons and is a service-dog trainer; there was a time when he wanted to pursue a career in veterinary medicine. He isn’t sure what he’ll do after completing his degree, but he knows he’s staying in school. He’ll now have options: Those studying in prison are limited to the majors offered to them, most often in the humanities.
“You think there’s nothing else out there because you can’t see past those city blocks that there’s a whole world out there and you have every right to it,” Acuña said of his early life. “You don’t have to be redlined and cast aside, you don’t have to be cheap labor. You have options. And the key to that is education.”
Jennifer Molina produced the video for this story.
Democrats are tied up in knots trying to frame “the right message.”
Republicans are focused relentlessly on stupid, misleading culture war issues, invented out of whole cloth. They skillfully maneuver voters into arguing about fake issues, enabling them to sidestep their truly terrible policies and goals.
A few years back, Republicans launched a full-scale attack on “critical race theory,” which demonized any honest examination of American history. Parents turned out to school board meetings to protest the phantom CRT, which allegedly made white kids feel bad.
Republicans harped on the issue, and red states passed laws banning CRT and other “divisive” concepts. The base fell for the anti-CRT campaign hook, line, and sinker.
Have you heard about CRT lately? NO. It served its purpose. On to fomenting hate against other targets.
In the 2024 campaign, the Republican Party had two burning issues: transgender people and violent immigrants. They harped relentlessly on parents’ fears that teachers were indoctrinating their children to be gay, even to be transgender. School nurses, it seemed, were performing surgery at school so that students could switched to a different gender, even though the same nurses won’t prescribe an aspirin without parental permission.
Stoking hatred towards immigrants was equally successful for Republicans. Undocumented immigrants were here to rape and murder. When the election was over, Trump used the hatred he had stoked to unleash masked thugs to kidnap people off the streets and throw them into unmarked vans. The mass roundups continue, despite pleas by farmers and the tourist industry to leave their workers alone.
The centerpiece of Trump’s massive Big Ugly Bill was the billions allotted to dertaining and expelling the immigrants that Trump used to stoke fear and hatred.
Culture war issues are very successful for Republicans because they distract the public from what is really happening. They distract from informed discussions of the radical downsizing of the federal government, the shutdown of foreign aid, the elimination of programs authorized by Congress, the incoherent tariff wars that alienate our allies.
The latest culture war issue has been building against the new “Superman” movie. It is even more pointless than the war against CRT and trans kids.
So apparently Superman believing in “basic human kindness” is now controversial. Who knew?
James Gunn, director of the new Superman film hitting theaters this Friday, recently sat down with The Times of London for an interview about his take on the Man of Steel. His crime? Describing Superman as “the story of America” — specifically, as an immigrant story centered on the apparently radical notion that being kind to people is good, actually.
“I mean, Superman is the story of America. An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country,” Gunn told the newspaper. “But for me it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.”
Pretty anodyne stuff, right? The most famously wholesome superhero represents wholesome values. An alien refugee who becomes Earth’s greatest champion might have something to do with immigration. Real “water is wet” territory here.
But in the right-wing media ecosystem, Gunn’s comments were treated like he’d just announced Superman would be spending the entire movie reading The Communist Manifesto while wearing a pussy hat. Fox News immediately branded the film “Superwoke.”Jesse Watters suggested Superman’s cape should read “MS13.” Breitbart called it “terrible,” “superficial,” and “overstuffed” — which is impressive considering they hadn’t seen it yet. One OutKick writer declared that Gunn was “obviously upset that President Donald Trump is deporting illegal immigrants by the millions.”
All because a director pointed out that Superman — a character literally created by the children of Jewish immigrants — is an immigrant story about being nice to people.
The manufactured outrage machine kicked into overdrive so fast, you’d think Gunn had suggested replacing the S on Superman’s chest with a hammer and sickle. But this isn’t really about Superman. It’s about how conservative media takes the most innocuous statements and transforms them into culture war ammunition. It’s about how the right-wing ecosystem has become so reflexively oppositional that even “basic human kindness” reads as a partisan attack.
And perhaps most tellingly, it’s about what happens when you’ve built an entire media apparatus that needs a constant supply of things to be mad about — even if that means getting upset that Superman, of all characters, stands for truth, justice, and helping people.
Let’s trace how this nonsense actually unfolded, because watching the outrage assembly line in action is genuinely instructive.
The Times interview dropped on July 6. Within hours, the right-wing media apparatus had stripped Gunn’s comments of context and repackaged them as an assault on American values.
Fox News didn’t just report on Gunn’s comments; they created an entire narrative. “Superwoke” became their branded shorthand, repeated across segments like a mantra. Kellyanne Conway appeared on the network to declare, “We don’t go to the movie theater to be lectured to and to have somebody throw their ideology onto us.” Because apparently, suggesting people should be kind is now “ideology.”
But it was Jesse Watters who really went for it, quipping, “You know what it says on his cape? MS13.” Yes, the Fox News host actually tried to connect Superman — SUPERMAN — to a Salvadoran gang. Because he’s an immigrant, get it? Real subtle stuff.
The escalation was predictable. Ben Shapiro released a YouTube video through The Daily Wire, focusing his ire on lead actor David Corenswet’s refusal to say “the American way” in interviews. Instead, Corenswet had said “truth, justice, and all that good stuff,” which apparently constitutes treason in Shapiro’s America. “The reality that Hollywood is so far to the left that they cannot take a core piece of Americana and just say it’s about America,” Shapiro complained, seemingly unaware that “the American way” wasn’t even added to Superman’s motto until the 1950s.
The coordination across outlets was almost impressive. All the right-wing news organizations hit the same talking points within 48 hours. “Go woke, go broke” appeared in nearly every piece, because if there’s one thing conservative media loves, it’s a catchphrase that rhymes.
What’s particularly rich about all this pearl-clutching is that these same outlets constantly complain about “cancel culture” and “mob mentality.” Yet here they are, organizing a pre-emptive boycott of a movie because its director said… checks notes… immigrants can be good people and we should be nice to each other.
There is more to her brilliant critique. Open the link and finish reading. I subscribed.
Meanwhile, the actual film is getting great reviews and audience reactions. We are all in danger of being nice and kind to one another.
Oakland International High math teacher David Hansen teaches newcomer immigrant students fractions using the game of checkers.
Theresa Harrington/EdSource
As soon as Jenna Hewitt King asked students in her senior English class for newcomers to introduce themselves, she knew she was in over her head.
“I saw this look of fear in their faces, like, ‘What? I have to talk out loud?’ There was a lot of whispering in their home language,” said King, who also wrote a commentary about the experience for EdSource. “We were both looking at each other like deer in headlights and you could sense this was not something that any of us were prepared for.”
A bill signed over the weekend by Gov. Gavin Newsom, Assembly Bill 714, will begin to provide much-needed guidance and data for teachers like King, who often don’t have training or experience in how to teach newcomer students — defined as students between 3 and 21 years old who were born in other countries and have attended school in the U.S. for fewer than three years.
King had expected to be able to teach the class in a way similar to how she teaches other senior English classes at San Leandro High School in Alameda County. Those students read three novels over the course of the year and write multiple essays.
But the students in her newcomer class had recently arrived from other countries and did not know much English. Most of them spoke Spanish, and a few spoke Mandarin or Cantonese.
King speaks only English and had no experience or training in teaching English language development to students learning English as a second language, let alone students new to the country.
“I was just ridiculously ill-prepared. Teaching English in high school, we don’t teach phonics, we don’t teach language in the immense detail that elementary or English learner teachers do,” King said. “Most of last school year was me running around like a crazy person asking ELD teachers on campus, ‘What am I doing? What can you share with me?’”
King’s experience is not an isolated one. Researchers and educators who work with teachers throughout California say it is common for teachers of newcomer students to feel unprepared.
“What happens is that they’re basically thrown into the classroom and it’s either sink or swim,” said Efraín Tovar, who teaches seventh and eighth grade newcomer students at Abraham Lincoln Middle School in Selma Unified School District in the Central Valley and is also founder and director of the California Newcomer Network.
Tovar said most school districts, charter schools and county offices of education do not have experts in teaching newcomers.
Assembly Bill 714 will require the California Department of Education to put together a list of resources on best practices and requirements for teaching newcomer students. In addition, the law requires the state to consider including content on newcomers in the next revision of the English Language Arts and English Language Development curriculum framework and to include resources on newcomer students in any new instructional materials for grades one to eight.
“As a teacher, I’m excited. It’s historic. It’s a light. It’s hope,” Tovar said. “Finally, newcomers are being brought to the forefront.”
The bill also requires the state’s Department of Education to report the number of newcomer students enrolled and their countries of origin. There were about 152,000 newcomer students enrolled in California schools in 2020-21, according to data obtained from the state by Californians Together, but this data is not readily available to the public.
Separating data on newcomers from other English learners is important, said Jeannie Myung, director of policy research at Policy Analysis for California Education, or PACE, an independent research center at Stanford University that focuses on education.
“We know that what we don’t measure, we don’t really understand, and what we don’t understand, we can’t really improve,” Myung said.
The bill originally would have also required the department to report newcomers’ scores on standardized tests, to be able to compare them to other groups of English learners. But that requirement was removed from the final version of the legislation.
In 2021 and 2022, PACE brought together leaders from California’s departments of Education and Social Services, the Legislature, school districts and universities to discuss how to improve newcomer education, resulting in six reports on newcomers in the state.
Myung said there is expertise and knowledge about how to best teach newcomers, and how it is different from teaching other English learners, but that information is not reaching most teachers.
“California’s a local control state, and local control is often good in decision-making. But local control shouldn’t mean that every teacher in every classroom is repeating the wheel when it comes to how to educate newcomer students,” Myung said.
Myung said an example of best practices is materials created for older newcomer students. Most texts available for English learners are created for younger students, but many newcomers are often teenagers, who would find a picture book about playing with a toy too juvenile. They need access to materials that are at their level of English but also deal with content at their age level, she said.
In addition, teachers need to know how to help students who speak different home languages talk to each other in English.
In King’s class at San Leandro High, she relied on Google Translate to communicate with her students. After realizing her students would not be able to read the novels she had planned for other seniors, she scrambled to find other materials. She found one novel written in short poetry with pictures, and she had her students watch a movie version of another novel and then read short excerpts of it rather than the whole text. This year, she is using some books in students’ home languages, but she is still struggling to figure out how to facilitate discussion between them.
“If you can imagine having a group of newcomers where you have three, four, five, maybe up to eight languages represented in your classroom, that requires a special skill set,” Tovar said.
Newcomer students also need support understanding their new communities in the U.S. and how they fit into them, said Magaly Lavadenz, executive director of the Center for Equity for English Learners at Loyola Marymount University.
“It’s not just about teaching them to learn English better, but how to better integrate into society and be a fully participatory citizen,” Lavadenz said.
Lavadenz said it is crucial for schools to help newcomer students and families access social services they may need, like food, housing and mental health therapy.
As a teacher in Glendale Unified in the early 1990s, Lavadenz said she saw many students who had fled war in Central America draw pictures of the violence they had witnessed. She saw that again while conducting a case study of San Juan Unified’s newcomer program, published by PACE. She said children were asked to draw the flags of their countries and one boy from Afghanistan described his drawing by saying, “Red is the color of blood spilling on the streets.”
“These are things that children should not see, that we should not see as adults. They’re seeing this and they’re experiencing this, and those images stay with them,” Lavadenz said. “That experience opened my eyes about what the effects of trauma are on young children and how schools could be more ready.”
King said AB 714 is a small but good step forward.
“I still haven’t received any additional training,” she said. “Each time I ask, I’m told, ‘Yeah, find a training.’ I don’t know where to go or what to do.”
The Transfer and Reentry Center in Dutton Hall at UC Davis helps transfers get acclimated to their new environment.
Credit: Karin Higgins/UC Davis
In a bid to make it easier for California’s community college students to transfer to the University of California, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation Tuesday to create a new transfer pathway between the two systems.
The transfer pathway created by Assembly Bill 1291 will start as a pilot program at UCLA, with students getting priority admission if they complete an associate degree for transfer in select majors beginning in the 2026-27 academic year. The specific majors haven’t yet been determined, but UCLA will have to identify at least eight and another four by 2028-29. At least four of the majors will be in a science, technology, engineering or math field.
The new pathway would expand to at least four additional UC campuses, also in limited majors, by 2028-29.
The bill doesn’t, however, guarantee students admission to their chosen campus. If a student is not admitted to their preferred campus, the student will be redirected and admitted to another campus.
Supporters of the legislation say it would help to streamline the state’s complex transfer system since students can already earn an associate degree to get a guaranteed spot in the California State University system.
“By working together, California’s three world-leading higher education systems are ensuring more students have the freedom to thrive, learn, and succeed,” Newsom said in a statement. “With this new law, the Golden State is streamlining the transfer process, making a four-year degree more affordable for transfer students, and helping students obtain high-paying and fulfilling careers.”
Newsom signed the bill despite opposition from the statewide student associations representing UC and community college students. In a statement last month urging Newsom to veto the legislation, they said they were dissatisfied because it doesn’t give students a guaranteed spot at the campus of their choice.
The bill’s author, Assemblymember Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, said in a statement that it will help to “tackle a long-standing goal in California: to simplify and streamline the transfer paths” for community college students. “This bill gets UC into the game with universal transfer pathways and will increase economic opportunity and prosperity for all Californians to help our state economy thrive,” he added.
Currently, UC lacks a systemwide transfer guarantee for community college students. There are separate transfer admission guarantees at six of the system’s nine undergraduate campuses — each of them except UCLA, Berkeley and San Diego. But those separate guarantees each have different requirements for admission. And students who are also interested in transferring to Cal State have to simultaneously deal with that system’s own distinct requirements.
Earlier this year, McCarty authored another bill, Assembly Bill 1749, that would have gone further than the more recent legislation by requiring UC to admit all eligible students who complete any associate degree for transfer, like the California State University system already does.
UC opposed that bill, arguing that it would be a disservice to students in certain STEM majors because they would enter UC underprepared for some upper-division courses. UC officials then negotiated the details of AB 1291 with the governor’s office, McCarty and other key lawmakers.
“I am proud that 27 percent of University of California undergraduates begin their educational journey at a California Community College and go on to thrive on our campuses,” Michael Drake, UC’s systemwide president, said in a statement. “The University is committed to attracting and supporting transfer students, and we look forward to continuing to partner with transfer advocates such as Governor Newsom, Assemblymember Kevin McCarty, and others in the state legislature on streamlining the transfer process.”
Children visit a gallery to learn about bugs by making art projects in Merryl Goldberg’s class at Cal State San Marcos.
credit: Merryl Goldberg
Eric Engdahl once ran away to join the circus. Always one with a flair for the dramatic, he became a ringmaster at Circus Flora, a one-ring boutique circus with a Civil War theme. He says the experience, learning to communicate with gymnasts and clowns, elephants and horses, prepared him well for the challenge of being a teacher.
“There was no one common language,” said Engdahl, now professor emeritus in the department of teacher education at Cal State East Bay. “So I learned how to build communication, how to tell stories, and that a common goal is essential.”
Helping students find their creative voice is a key reason Engdahl spearheaded an online credential program in theater and dance at Cal State East Bay in 2021, making it the first CSU to offer those credentials just as Proposition 28 promises to create thousands of new arts teaching jobs at California schools. Similarly, Cal State San Marcos will soon become the first CSU to create a pathway specifically for undergraduate art majors who wish to teach. Cal State Northridge is poised to launch a dance credential program next spring. Given the anticipated demand for newly minted arts educators in the wake of Proposition 28, the state’s 2022 groundbreaking initiative to bring arts education back into schools, many expect other campuses to follow their lead.
“I would like to claim that I was prescient about Prop. 28, and while I did a lot of groundwork to get the credentials going, there is always the unexpected, e.g. Covid,” said Engdahl, who wrote his dissertation on the antebellum circus movement in America. “It turned out to be great timing.”
Merryl Goldberg, a longtime music professor, has long seen arts education as an equity issue. She believes that all students should have access to the arts, not just the privileged ones, particularly because of the well-established links between arts education, academic achievement and social-emotional learning. That’s what inspired her to launch the state’s first undergraduate pathway to arts education at Cal State San Marcos.
credit: Albert Rascon
Musicians jam during Merryl Goldberg’s arts education class at Cal State San Marcos.
“We have the most wonderful diverse students at CSUSM, who I know will make incredible arts teachers,” said Goldberg, a saxophonist who spent 13 years on the road with the Klezmer Conservatory Band. “It kills me that so many students in California have had a limited arts background, and I’m thrilled this will finally change. The arts truly matter.”
Engdahl’s students are now reaping the benefits of his fortuitous planning efforts. They are sitting in the catbird seat as many school districts are clamoring to hire arts educators to teach classes funded by the state’s historic mandate to restore arts and music education to California schools. Last year, an LAUSD official visiting his theater credential class offered jobs to all his students.
“I regularly get phone calls and emails from people all over the state wanting to recruit my students,” said Engdahl. “Los Angeles, San Francisco, and to some extent, San Diego, the big districts are all aggressively implementing Prop. 28 and hiring people to fill those jobs.”
Goldberg is also hearing from school districts eager to hire arts educators. Some are having to recruit out-of-state teachers to fill the slots, she says.
“This opens up the world to so many students who want to be an art teacher, a music teacher, a dance or theater teacher,” said Goldberg. “It’s especially important for first-generation college students. The majority of our students are first-generation, and many are low-income. They have to work so hard to go to college, and they are beaming with potential to make a difference. They have so much passion.”
credit: Albert Rascon
A student in one of Merryl Godberg’s music education classes at Cal State San Marcos.
One major concern is how best to widen the arts credential pipeline, which has shriveled amid decades of cutbacks, for the next generation of arts ed teachers. While there are 64 programs in the state that offer a music credential and 57 that offer a visual arts credential, only a few focus on theater and dance. That’s not enough to feed a field that has gone from famine to feast, experts say.
“We know we’re short about 15,000 arts teachers in the state,” said Goldberg. “Most of the CSUs or UCs or even private colleges haven’t been churning out a lot of art and music and dance and theater teachers because there haven’t been a whole lot of jobs. Now, all of a sudden, there’s so many jobs.”
Despite this arts teacher crunch, there are various workarounds. For instance, physical education teachers who were credentialed before 2022 already have dance embedded in their credential, experts say. The same goes for some English teachers automatically having a theater credential. Prospective arts educators with sufficient college credits in their discipline can also apply for a supplemental authorization to teach instead of getting a credential.
It should be noted, however, that not all districts are anxious to raise the curtain on new arts programs. The myriad complexities of the Proposition 28 rollout may have contributed to many smaller and rural districts proceeding cautiously as they expand their arts offerings.
“The rural districts are not as well-resourced due to fewer students,” said Letty Kraus, director of the California County Superintendents’ statewide arts initiative, “and it is harder to staff rural schools with credentialed arts teachers due to shortages.”
In the wake of the Covid pandemic, many school administrators are also overwhelmed by pressing matters, experts say, from the dearth of teachers to deep learning loss, marked by falling rates of literacy and numeracy.
“Elementary principals don’t have time to deal with this,” said Engdahl. “You’re already struggling to hire teachers. You’re looking to fill classrooms, you’re doing a lot of jobs and there’s not enough administrative support.”
Some districts, having eliminated their arts classes long ago due to budget cuts, are now starting from scratch with no expertise in the arts. They need help to build out a plan for arts education, and some arts advocates note the California Department of Education, which is administering the program, has not been sufficiently responsive regarding the rules of implementation.
“Many school districts are taking a go-slow approach,” said Engdahl, who is consulting with several districts on how to flesh out their programs. “They want to wait and see how the money flows. They don’t know quite what to do with it because they don’t have enough administrative staff to figure it out.”
A slow-and-steady approach might make sense, some say, because schools have three years to use the funds. A little extra time also means that more colleges can get in on the act and develop their own arts credential programs to help fill the burgeoning pipeline.
“You have to take the long view,” Goldberg said. “It’s not a bad idea to hold off and not rush into things. That gives you time to really look at the language of the law. It also gives colleges time to launch new programs to widen the pipeline. My team feels confident our work is 100% replicable among any of the CSUs, private colleges and UCs.”
Cal State San Marcos plans to welcome its first arts education cohort next fall. Goldberg says there’s been a lot of demand thus far from both arts-focused undergraduates who want to teach their craft and from seasoned teachers interested in transitioning into arts education.
“We are reaching out to teaching artists who may wish to come back to get a credential, and to in-service teachers who have already or might soon transition to becoming an arts teacher,” she said. “We want to ensure they have the support and training they need. There is an extreme need for new arts teachers and support for transitioning teachers.”
She also argues that California offers many career opportunities for graduates with arts expertise, from arts education and the entertainment industry to the exploding cybersecurity sector, which has been known to recruit music majors for their ability to construct complex elements into intricate patterns.
“The amount of jobs relating directly to the arts is crazy,” said Goldberg. “Arts ain’t fluff, they really are a career opportunity. The importance of arts in preparation for careers is giant.”
For his part, Engdahl is hopeful that as the new arts mandate rolls out, more districts will see that arts education could also be a powerful tool for healing children traumatized by the pandemic.
“The arts and arts education, because of the way it’s taught, could really be a wonderful resource for helping students heal from the pandemic and catch up with the developmental and the social skills that they lost,” he said. “I think probably many administrators know that, but it’s just they’re so overwhelmed with what’s going on in the trenches right now.”
The lobby at UC Riverside’s new Student Health Center.
Credit: Stan Lim / UC Riverside
A newly built $36 million student health clinic at UC Riverside aims to provide a wide array of medical and mental health services in an attractive building that showcases views of nearby mountains. The two-story Student Health and Counseling Center includes a food pantry, a pharmacy, an outdoor balcony for meditation and waiting rooms that look like hip hotel lobbies.
And beyond serving Riverside students, it may become a national model of how campuses are investing more resources to keep their students physically and emotionally well in the post-pandemic era, experts say.
The 40,000-square-foot clinic will provide “one-stop shopping for wellness” that integrates physical and mental health services, said Denise Woods, UC Riverside’s associate vice chancellor of health, well-being and safety. During a recent tour, she said she expects that the building will make it easier for a student to tap into multiple types of services.
The new UC facility replaces a 60-year-old building that is half its size and was built when the student population, now about 27,000, was much smaller. Paid for by UC bonds and other funds, the clinic centralizes services that had been scattered around campus and moves them closer to dormitories for students’ convenience.
Credit: Stan Lim / UC Riverside
The new Student Health Center at UC Riverside.
Nadia Colón, a fourth-year psychology and law and society double major who is a student senator, said many students have been looking forward to the new building, which opened last month. “I think it will be perfect for students who need medical or counseling help,” she said. The old, smaller building has some good services, but “the new building, from what I have seen, is updated and has more resources.”
The medical health clinic and pharmacy are on the first floor along with a satellite food pantry for students who need food or household supplies to get through the week. Mental health counseling rooms are on the second floor, with extra soundproofing so passersby cannot hear therapy sessions.
Helps with recruiting
Experts say the new health center is an example of how colleges and universities are emphasizing students’ medical and psychological wellness much more than in the past, particularly after the challenges posed by the pandemic and the emergence from it. In the long run, they say, such attention pays off for the schools, helping to recruit new students and improving graduation rates and alumni relations.
“For a long time, we’ve known that physical and mental health and well-being are an important part of academic success, retention and graduation. It’s been shown that when students are physically and emotionally well, they perform better,” said physician Michael Huey, former interim chief executive officer of the American College Health Association and former executive director of Emory University’s health and counseling services.
More universities are renovating or replacing old health facilities and grouping services under one roof, he said. For students seeking medical or counseling assistance for the first time without their parents’ guidance, encountering a “modern, spacious, clean and professional-appearing center” helps them get past initial fears, Huey added. And ensuring privacy in counseling rooms helps to ease the stigma some young people might feel about reaching out for emotional help, he said.
New health centers can also bolster new enrollment, according to Richard Shadick, who is a board member of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors and director of the counseling center at Pace University in New York City. “I think having a new building that addresses the needs of students, the physical and psychological needs of students, is a great idea. More and more families are looking at the wellness services provided by schools when making a decision about where the students go to college. It’s become rather common for that being a selling point for a college or university,” he said.
Credit: Stan Lim / UC Riverside
The pharmacy at the Student Health and Counseling Center.
National surveys by the American College Health Association show a significant drop this past spring in the rate of undergraduates who rated their health as very good or excellent compared with 2020: 47% compared with 55%. However, it shows that the most common health ailments are not life-threatening at their age, such as allergies, back pain, sinus infections and colds.
On the psychological side, more students are coming to college already having experience with mental health counseling or medication. Research by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health, which is located at Penn State, showed that about 60% of students who use college counseling services had been in prior mental health treatment, compared with 48% about a decade ago. Social anxiety among students is on the rise, fueled by social media and concerns about coming back to in-person classes after isolation during the pandemic, according to the center.
Credit: Larry Gordon / EdSource
Dr. Kenneth Han, UC Riverside’s chief medical officer in the new clinic.
At UC Riverside, the new center’s layout placing counseling on a separate floor provides privacy, but the easy proximity to the medical floor also can help physicians and counselors to work closely together and with patients if need be, said Kenneth Han, UC Riverside’s chief medical officer.
“It’s not just about a specific ailment. It’s so much more than that for (a student) to be successful. How are things going in with your classes? With your friends? With your professors? I can see you for your diabetes, your cough, your cold. And we will talk about all those things,” he said.
Last year, about 1,840 students a month came for medical visits and about 590 for counseling and psychological care, the campus reports.
The center handles mainly routine illnesses and injuries like flu, urinary tract infections, stomach pain and sprains and offers vaccinations and birth control. It sends students to local hospitals for emergencies and surgeries.
Credit: Stan Lim / UC Riverside
The Student Health and Counseling Center has 25 exam rooms, more than twice that of the old building.
For example, the center’s doctors will not reset bones and will stitch wounds only if away from the face or hands, officials said. It is open weekday daytime hours, although a nursing phone line is available around the clock, seven days a week, and students may be referred to off-campus urgent care centers on nights and weekends.
Fourth-year student Allison Escobar, a psychology major from Redwood City, said she thinks the new building will attract more students. Recently she worked there as part of a team preparing the center for its opening. It is a big improvement over the old one, which she said “had a lot of things wrong with it.” Here, she said, students especially appreciate the improved and soundproofed counseling rooms. “Students care about their privacy during what they are going through. A lot of consideration for privacy is a huge thing,” she said.
Counselors respond to mental health emergencies
Set to launch within months, a new emergency response team of mental health professionals — rather than campus police — will be first responders to most mental health emergencies such as a suicide threat or depression. In response to systemwide UC policies enacted two years ago, all UC campuses have formed or are starting similar teams.
Credit: Larry Gordon/EdSource
The van of the new crisis response team at UC Riverside.
That is now the preferred alternative to dispatching uniformed police in patrol cars whose presence sometimes escalates a situation, although police are available to counter any violence, officials say. The Riverside campus experiences about four such emergency episodes a month on average.
The new emergency intervention team will have offices in the health center, and its blue van is parked just outside, painted with a rainbow logo declaring “UCR Health, Well-Being & Safety, Supporting Student Success Holistically.”
“We want the right people to address the right issues,” Han said. “If there is an underlying mental health issue, we don’t necessarily need to have security get involved.”
Bringing in the outdoors
The clinic was designed by the HGA architectural firm, which has several offices around California, and was built by Turner Construction. Kevin Day, the project’s design principal architect at HGA, said it was important to provide views of the Box Springs Mountain Reserve, a large park next to campus, through the lobby’s glass walls and big windows as well as to have an outdoor courtyard and balcony with shade. Appointment windows on both floors look like contemporary theater box offices, and the interiors are painted in cool pastel shades.
Connecting the clinic to the natural landscape “becomes a part of the healing process. It is really about creating a welcoming environment,” Day said. Knowing that coming to a medical appointment can be stressful, his team’s goal was to design a building that would help “lower the blood pressure.”
The building takes into account the recent pandemic. The 28 counseling rooms are much larger than usual to provide safe distances between therapist and patient. Several of the 25 urgent care and primary care exam rooms have special ventilation systems to limit the spread of air-borne illnesses.
Credit: Stan Lim / UC Riverside
A Student Health and Counseling Center exam room.
The soundproofing for counseling rooms is a switch from the old building, where therapists sometimes had to use noise machines to block conversations from the public. All those rooms have windows, for a brighter atmosphere. Plus, the center is developing a mobile check-in system so students who do not want to wait in a public lobby can go directly to their appointments when notified via text.
Online counseling became more popular during the pandemic, and that will still be offered as an option. However, many colleges and universities across the nation reported overall declines in demand for all counseling services during the pandemic even as mental health problems increased. Numbers have rebounded at many schools but not to the pre-pandemic level. UC Riverside hopes to build up those visit numbers as students get familiar with the new building.
Unless they opt out and use family or other coverage, UC Riverside students pay about $2,100 a year for campus health insurance as part of their registration fees and receive most medical services without any additional costs. All students, regardless of insurance status, can get free, unlimited counseling sessions, although most usually need only four to six visits; that is funded through the mandatory $410 annual student services fee.
Since 1977, EdSource has delivered nonpartisan reliable insights about California education, no easy feat in a state that’s home to the largest public education systems in the nation.
We have evolved and reimagined the ways in which we provide our in-depth analysis on critical issues, such as early literacy, learning amid a pandemic and college graduation rates. Unwavering, though, is our commitment to our audience: We explain education policy and facilitate conversations so that all who care about educating future generations are informed and prepared to make a meaningful impact, no matter how big or small.
As we march toward our 50th anniversary, EdSource now stands as the state’s largest newsroom of education reporters. Today, we’re proud to unveil the latest update to EdSource’s brand – a new look and feel that we hope reflects boldness, urgency and dedication. Over the coming months, we will continue to roll out additional changes to our website with the explicit purpose of making our journalism more accessible.
This December marks my 5th anniversary with EdSource, the last 2.5 years as its CEO. Nothing has made me more proud than to lead an organization of journalists and nonprofit leaders devoted to championing the belief that all students deserve access to a quality and equitable education regardless of where they live or their personal circumstances.
Over these past two years, EdSource embarked on a number of initiatives designed to usher in a new chapter of the organization’s storied history:
STRATEGY: Last year, we completed the organization’s first strategic plan, laying the foundation for the next three years. We set ambitious external and internal goals with the aim of thoughtfully expanding EdSource’s reach and positioning the organization for sustainable growth.
PARTNERSHIPS & COLLABORATIONS: This summer, EdSource partnered with Distributed Media Lab (DML) to launch the California Education News Network with funding from the Google News Initiative. The network amplifies important education stories by EdSource and other notable sources, empowering communities with trusted information and analysis. We also continue to team up with other news organizations to publish collaborative projects, such as this summer’s multi-part special report on the post-pandemic jump in chronic absenteeism, in partnership with the Associated Press and Stanford University.
STELLAR JOURNALISM: In a comprehensive audience survey with over 1,400 respondents, nearly all described EdSource’s journalism as “excellent” (56%) or “good” (35%). This summer, EdSource won more than a dozen state and national awards, including 1st Place for its investigation into poor working conditions for adjunct professors teaching in community colleges, as well as another for chronicling one town’s fight to save its library.
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT: EdSource hosts monthly Roundtable conversations that bring together educators, parents, students and policymakers to talk about pressing topics, such as teacher preparation, grading policies and the college transfer process. We also encourage the sharing of varying perspectives by publishing a pipeline of commentaries from many in the education community.
INCLUSIVITY: EdSource believes a staff that reflects the diverse communities in which we live are better positioned to tell stories with nuance and accuracy. For the first time in the organization’s history, EdSource is more than 50% composed of people of color.
EdSource’s new brand and design came together thanks to those who work behind the scenes to help deliver our journalism to readers like you. In collaborating with the web design firm Extra Small Design, we considered accessibility when choosing our new colors, ease of navigation when deciding how to organize our content, and additional opportunities for discovery when reading our stories.
We hope you’ll let us know what you think in the coming weeks and months.
Fencing blocks the Kennedy Library at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, which is closed for renovations until 2025.
Credit: Arabel Meyer / EdSource
Until 2025, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo will be the only public university in California without access to a library space for students. With the university’s Robert E. Kennedy Library in the midst of a large renovation project, questions arise: In a digital age, are libraries still relevant to college students? How will the lack of a library impact campus culture?
“Libraries are definitely still relevant,” said Nina Florrick, a fourth-year math major at Cal Poly. “I know a lot of people struggle to study at their houses. Having a quiet space to go outside your house is really useful for a college student.”
Penny Alioshin, a fourth-year electrical engineering major, agreed. “The Cal Poly library was never just about books, which is kind of a weird thing to say, but it was about the environment. It was about the study space. It was about the safe place that it provided for people to just go to do their own thing or work collaboratively. It was such a great resource beyond just being a library where you can check out books.”
The Kennedy Library is a highly trafficked place on campus and receives 1.5 million visits from students a year, according to Cal Poly Library Services, and students have voted it the “best study spot” in multiple campus surveys. The library offers more than 2,000 seats for working students, along with 40 private study spaces, a 24-hour section, printing services, a cafe and on-campus employment opportunities.
Despite the inconvenience of closing the library, university leaders say that the renovation of this space is necessary for Cal Poly’s future.
Signs guide students to find alternative study spots while the library at Cal Poly undergoes major renovations.
“The Kennedy Library transformation project is part of the university’s master plan, which defines the university’s plans for growth and innovation through 2035,” said Keegan Kolbert, a university communications representative. “The library building is over 40 years old and in need of upgrades.”
The school has opened temporary study spaces around campus, such as classrooms and lounges to accommodate students’ needs, but many students don’t feel that this makes up for the loss of their library.
With the building closed until the summer of 2025, this will impact student’s campus experience. Florrick said she has experienced a big change in her study habits since the closure of the Kennedy Library.
“It’s a lot harder to find places on campus that aren’t as crowded to study at,” she said. “I think a lot more people are inclined to stay at home to study than go to campus and study.”
In an interview, Karen Schneider, library dean at Sonoma State University, called libraries “the living room of the university” because students use California universities as both places to find community and to fulfill educational needs.
Data from 2014-15 shows that California State University libraries are visited by 800,000 students every week, a number likely to have increased as universities like Cal Poly expand student enrollment.
For students of many majors, especially students in science, tech, engineering and math, the loss of the library is particularly felt. Alioshin talked about the difficulty of not having an open library on campus.
“For STEM majors specifically, we spend a lot of time on campus, and during those in-between times, it’s really nice to have somewhere to go and hang out,” she said. “It was a great, collaborative environment because I would always find other electrical engineers there.”
She finds campus a “little lonelier” without the library and is disappointed by the “less collaborative” study environments that are available.
Continued Alioshin, “I think libraries are a huge part of college culture. … It’s a big meeting place for people to go and do work by themselves or together, so it’s sorely missed. I want our library back.”
Arabel Meyer is a fourth-year journalism major at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. She is a member of EdSource’s California Student Journalism Corps.
A would-be intruder would have a difficult time trying to sneak into the new Del Sol High School in Oxnard, which opened in August with its first group of 475 first-year students.
That’s because the $189 million campus was planned and built with security at the top of the list of concerns, officials say. And that puts it at the forefront of a trend throughout California and the nation as school districts respond to school shootings and try to prevent any more violence.
At Del Sol, two perimeters of 8-foot-high black fencing — designed to deny a foothold to potential climbers — surround the campus and fill in openings between the buildings’ edges. After incoming students file through Del Sol’s two gates under the watchful eyes of campus employees, the only entry is through a glass cube-like lobby. There, visitors are screened carefully from behind a bulletproof glass window and, if approved, admitted through a locked metal interior door. Cameras survey the courtyards and exterior walkways. Coming soon is a new schoolwide door-locking system for emergencies.
Students walk through the quad area of Del Sol High School during the passing period in Oxnard on Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2023.
“Nowadays safety and security are the first priority. The rest follows that,” explained Oxnard Union High School District Superintendent Tom McCoy on a recent tour of the school, which opened this fall. Many of the same safety features built into the new 47-acre campus are being added as retrofits where possible to the district’s 11 other high schools and one adult school. That includes Hueneme High School, where 22 years ago, a teenage gunman took a student hostage but was soon killed by a police sniper while the hostage was saved.
Throughout the nation, new schools are being designed — and older schools retrofitted — to make them as safe as possible for students and staff and as difficult as possible for a potential assailant to gain entrance and cause deadly trouble. Those features often include a single point of entry, new fencing, limited visibility into classrooms, bulletproof glass in vulnerable spots and new alert and locking systems.
McCoy and educators and architects throughout the state and country say the challenge is to make a school safe without making it look like a bunker or penitentiary. They say Del Sol and other campuses succeed in showing that a pleasant and secure learning environment can be created.
Oxnard Union High School District Superintendent Thomas McCoy walks through Del School High School on Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2023.
“It’s a fine line,” Del Sol principal Terri Leon said. “We want our kids to feel safe, but we don’t want them to feel imprisoned. I think (the design) does a good job of balancing that. Our kids seem to like the design and the spaces and how everything is set up. But then we are pretty secure.”
The campus was designed by the PBK architecture firm, which has nine offices throughout California. So far, the school consists of eight buildings, mainly two stories and connected by walkways. All share plenty of outdoor space and plazas. Corridors and classrooms have large windows, providing much light and views of mountains. Students can present projects or hold meetings in big, flexible interior spaces. While a sense of openness exists inside the campus, there is no mistake that the exterior’s decorative black metal mesh fence presents a strong impression of do-not-enter to an uninvited visitor — even without old-fashioned barbed wire or chain link.
In California, many older schools were built when openness and a sense of freedom were important, taking advantage of the climate with unprotected breezeways, unfenced lawns and multiple easy entries. School officials and architects and parents say they don’t want to entirely lose that, at least inside secure perimeters.
“Security is on everyone’s minds,” said Michael Pinto, design director at NAC Architecture firm’s Los Angeles office, which has worked on many school projects with anti-crime features. “It is really a concern of parents. And when someone is concerned about the safety of their children, there is nothing you can do but respect that and take those concerns seriously.”
That does not mean designing a dark, windowless bunker or having excessive fencing, said Pinto, whose projects include the current rebuilding of the century-old Belvedere Middle School in East Los Angeles. Belvedere’s new buildings were placed to form much of the campus’ exterior boundaries. As a result, the amount of fencing is actually reduced from the old arrangement, according to Pinto. Meanwhile, inside the campus, students get a lot of outdoor space and light.
“We don’t want hermetically sealed schools,” said Pinto, who served on the Los Angeles city attorney’s commission on school safety. That panel’s 2018 report called for improved security measures like single entries, along with better mental health services and more societal gun controls. The federal government has issued similar guidelines that emphasize clear sight lines and access control, along with clean and upbeat school environments.
The Saugus Union School District in northern Los Angeles County recently spent much of a $148 million bond issue for security measures at its 15 K-six schools. Those include new single-point-of-entry lobbies with secondary locked doors leading into the campuses, better fencing and lighting, new door-locking systems and window shades that can be closed in an emergency. Identification letters and numbers have been painted on roofs so police or fire crews can see them from the air and get to the right location quickly in an emergency, according to Nick Heinlein, the district’s assistant superintendent of business.
The goal is to make campuses “as safe as we can make them without them seeming unappealing,” Heinlein said.
The need was brought home by a tragic 2019 episode at Saugus High School, a hometown campus run by a separate district, Heinlein said. A student armed with a pistol shot five schoolmates, killing two, before killing himself. When something like that happens, “there is always something that can be learned,” Heinlein said. Among other things, changes were made to allow students to flee if necessary through campus exits with panic bars that can be opened from the inside or that can be easily unlocked by adults in an emergency, he said.
Responses to school violence go beyond architecture and window panes. Staffs are getting better trained on how to lead lockdowns, evacuations and student drills. Campus and municipal police are being better trained for a faster response to shootings, searching quickly for assailants and being well-armed enough to counter them. Schools look more closely for students’ behavioral and emotional problems that could escalate. Mental health resources have been boosted, as have methods of reporting threats.
Rebecca Gallardo, Del Sol High School receptionist, checks in visitors and buzzes them in through her desk on Oct. 3, 2023. Credit: Julie Leopo / EdSource
The reception desk of Del Sol High School contains bulletproof windows. Oct. 3, 2023. Credit: Julie Leopo / EdSource
Double fencing is in place around Oxnard’s Del Sol High School. Oct. 3, 2023. Credit: Julie Leopo / EdSource
Students walk through the quad area of Del Sol High School during the passing period in Oxnard on Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2023. Credit: Julie Leopo / EdSource
The brand new Oxnard school, Del Sol High School, on Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2023. Credit: Julie Leopo / EdSource
Del Sol High School students in Oxnard on Oct. 3, 2023.
Architecture and engineering help a lot, but they aren’t sufficient without other efforts, according to Scott Gaudineer, who is president of the California branch of the American Institute of Architects, a professional organization representing 11,000 architects in the state. “Human intelligence is just as important,” said Gaudineer, who also is president of the Flewelling & Moody firm, in the Los Angeles area, which has worked on school projects. “Schools must keep a watchful eye and offer counseling to a student “who is going through a divorce, who is stressed.”
“The challenge is you never know who is going to show up with an AK-47 and is mentally deranged. It is shocking how often this is happening,” he added.
Two of the most infamous school shooting sites have taken different approaches in the aftermath. In Connecticut, the Sandy Hook Elementary School was demolished in the wake of the 2012 rampage that left 20 children and six educators dead. A new school was built with a moat-like rain garden around it, bulletproof windows and an elevated first floor to make it harder to see in.
In contrast, Columbine High in Colorado remained pretty much the same after the 1999 assault, during which two students killed 12 classmates and one teacher before committing suicide. Some new security measures have been added such as more fencing.
McCoy, the Oxnard Union superintendent, has personal experience encountering violence. In 2001, a troubled teenage boy who was not a student there easily got into Hueneme High School. McCoy, a vice principal then, escorted him off the grounds. The intruder came back, holding a female student at gunpoint as he entered a campus quad through an unguarded gate. A police sniper shot and killed the gunman, and the girl was not wounded.
McCoy, who was nearby but did not witness the shooting, said its lessons are reflected in Del Sol’s design and in improved emergency sheltering and evacuation procedures. Adult staff, he said, must be prepared since “the kids look to the adults immediately and follow our directions.”
During the tour, McCoy pointed out what he said is one of the most important anti-violence features: a wellness center, a big sunny room with beanbag chairs where students under emotional stress can chill out and meet with a counselor. “If they are having a bad day, instead of acting out in the classroom, they can hang out here and spend the time they need and go back to class,” he said. About 60 students a day spend at least some time there, usually at lunch.
Credit: Julie Leopo / EdSource
Eight-foot wire gates surround Del Sol High School in Oxnard on Oct. 3, 2023.
Del Sol, built on a former strawberry and citrus farm in the eastern part of Oxnard, serves a predominately Latino and low-income population, including some whose parents work in the fields. As additional classes enter each of the next three years and the current freshmen become seniors, enrollment is expected to grow to about 2,100 students.
The land cost $25 million, and construction bills so far total $194 million, including $30 million to the city for street improvements, funded by bonds, certificates of participation and other sources, according to McCoy. Athletic fields are being finished to the rear of the site, and plans call for a performing arts center, swimming pool and football stadium to be added when more state or local funds can be found.
The contemporary-style buildings are clad in complementary panels of gray, cantaloupe and white. The black metal fencing has narrow vertical openings that make it nearly impossible to get a foothold, but there are no barbed wire or top stakes that could hurt a student who tries to climb out, according to Mark Graham, its principal architect, at the PBK firm. The company has installed similar security measures at the new $200 million Chino High, which opened last year, and at retrofits at three campuses in the Cucamonga School District in San Bernardino County.
The fence aims to look porous, Graham said. “We wanted to use something that didn’t look so penal. It is there, but it is not like you are being caged in.” Going fenceless is not an option on most school projects these days since security is “at the top of the list of concerns, especially for parents and school board members.”
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