California has invested heavily in career technical education, earmarking $300 million annually since 2021 to help schools prepare students for jobs in fields such as healthcare, public safety and engineering. 

Yet, over the past five years, more than $115 million of that funding — an average of $23 million per year — never reached schools.

District leaders, advocates and legislators say the shortfall stems from the state’s allocation formula that does not fully distribute the career technical education, or CTE, funds.  

Lawmakers are advancing Assembly Bill 1590 to ensure all available CTE funding makes it to districts going forward. Some relief may come even sooner; districts that applied for funding for the 2026-27 school year will see all of the money distributed.

The bill’s author, Assemblymember Rhodesia Ransom, D-Stockton, said the current formula for allocating CTE money has left many schools unable to support career education programs. 

“It makes everybody scale back; that makes them have fewer certification programs, fewer learning opportunities and, then, fewer pathways,” Ransom said. “To me, that’s something that needed to be corrected.”

Why millions of dollars don’t make it to districts 

The CTE funding program requires school districts to provide a 2-to-1 match, meaning for every dollar they receive from the state, they must contribute $2. A district seeking $1 million in state funding, for example, must provide a $2 million local match. 

But if districts are unable to meet the match, the money reverts to the state’s General Fund rather than back into the pool of CTE funding where it can be redistributed to districts that could use it. 

That is problematic, some educators and advocates say, because it leaves money on the table even as many other districts have available matching funds for career education programs.

For example, in 2025, Merced Union High School District in the San Joaquin Valley applied for $6.7 million in CTE funding but received $1.7 million — $5 million less despite having the matching funds.

California Department of Education officials said districts often receive less than they request because demand exceeds available funding, the number of applicants changes each year, and the allocation formula, itself. 

It’s a formula that’s been debated many times since CTE money became an ongoing funding source in 2018. The department told EdSource it was determined to be the “most equitable and efficient mechanism” for maximizing CTE funds. 

Educators and advocates, however, say the formula disadvantages smaller districts. The formula recognizes very small districts through its first two funding categories, but once a district exceeds an Average Daily Attendance of 550 students, it is grouped into the largest category, said Nicole Newman, president of the Small School Districts Association. 

Districts with an ADA of 550 to 2,500 face the same challenges as smaller school systems and must compete with a broader range of districts. These districts often have limited administrative staff, a lack of grant-writing resources, difficulty recruiting CTE teachers, minimal access to industry partners and postsecondary institutions, and smaller local tax bases, Newman said. 

“A district with 600, 1,200 or 2,000 students competes within the same funding category as some of the largest school systems in the nation,” Newman said. 

The allocation formula, established by the state superintendent and State Board of Education, distributes 70% of funding based on district size, measured by ADA of students in grades 7-12. The remaining 30% is distributed using factors such as the number of vulnerable student populations, higher than average dropout rates and an area’s high unemployment rate, among others. 

Limited opportunities when funding is left on the table

With CTE grant funding, not only do funds remain unallocated, the money going to districts is not consistent each year. 

In Contra Costa County, located in the East Bay, a consortium of 10 school districts has built a robust CTE network offering about 300 classes and early childhood education apprenticeships, said Hilary Dito, director for college and career readiness at the county education office. In 2025, the consortium received $6.2 million, about $500,000 less than the year before. 

As a result of the drop, the county education office imposed a 17% reduction across the board. The county won’t be able to offer 300 classes next school year. At the district level, some school systems will not hire for positions vacated by retiring CTE teachers. There will be cuts to robotics, culinary arts and digital photography programs.

Dito worries those cuts will limit opportunities for students to figure out what they want to pursue. 

“One of our students from last year, senior year, got into a digital recording arts class,” she said. “Before that, (they) had no clue what they wanted to do. Now they’re at the community college with the same teacher. Without that class, I don’t know if that student would’ve found that path. These are the programs that can change someone’s life.” 

When funding is uncertain or inconsistent, districts struggle to sustain program offerings and create and scale industry partnerships, dual enrollment, internships and job shadowing opportunities, educators said. 

“Stability matters just as much,” said Newman, who is also superintendent of Wheatland Union High School District in Yuba City. “High-quality CTE programs take years to develop.”

Newman said her 1,200-student district would like to expand its agriculture pathway with updated facilities, new equipment and more livestock, but roughly $300,000 in state funding is barely enough to sustain existing programs.  

Immediate, but temporary, relief in sight

Ransom’s bill would require the state to revise the allocation formula so that all CTE money is distributed to eligible districts.  

Districts may see some immediate relief. For the 2026-27 funding cycle, all $450 million available, a one-time increase of $150 million for CTE grants this year, will be distributed to districts. State officials have not explained how that will happen. In previous years, the state has done two rounds of award allocations that still left money untouched. The $450 million is expected to be allocated in a single round. 

“If the dollars are available,” Ransom said, “we want them to reach the programs.” 

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

The nation’s largest public four-year university may soon be barred from replacing faculty with generative AI as a bill backed by a union of professors comes nearer to reaching the governor’s desk.

Few examples exist of the California State University’s attempting to replace faculty labor with generative AI tools, but the faculty union wants to prevent such efforts from ever getting off the ground. The bill so far has garnered no opposition from lawmakers and may clear the Legislature as soon as Monday.

“We do have some cases of the potential replacement of faculty work by AI, and so I personally am very concerned about closing the barn door after the horse has already gotten out,” said Kevin Wehr, a professor of sociology at Sacramento State, which is part of the Cal State system. Wehr leads the bargaining team for the faculty union, the California Faculty Association.

“We’re trying to keep ahead of a rapidly changing set of technologies,” he said in an interview.

Wehr and other faculty and union representatives Calmatters spoke with are especially alarmed about Cal State because of the system’s growing embrace of generative AI tools. Cal State signed a $17 million contract with ChatGPT last year to provide all students and faculty access to the company’s suite of education offerings.

A survey released by Cal State in the spring found that just over half of faculty reported AI affecting their teaching negatively. Just one-third of students indicated that their professors teach them how to use AI effectively, CalMatters reported. Cal State has since renewed its contract with ChatGPT, paying the company $13 million annually for the next three years, according to LAist. 

Cal State is one of several state agencies flagged in a government report that uses “high risk” AI tools, CalMatters reported. Those include cheating detection software for students taking exams remotely. 

Already, the system’s use of AI is creating tension between faculty and administrators. 

Next month, the state labor relations board will hold a meeting over the system’s purchasing of AI tools such as ChatGPT. The union filed an unfair labor practice charge last year when the system rolled out its new pivot toward AI.

In 2025 the faculty union filed a separate complaint with the labor board that Sacramento State was considering deploying AI chatbots that fed off the course material professors voluntarily submitted, a claim Cal State refuted. The union also contested an administrator’s proposed written recommendation that students seek out mental health support through AI tools in the event campus counselors weren’t available.

Cal State and the union settled the matter in March and the union withdrew its complaint. Sacramento State agreed that it wouldn’t “implement autonomous programs or bots with the primary purpose of performing bargaining unit work or evaluating faculty” without meeting and conferring with the union first.

“Many institutions of higher education are exploring options to integrate AI into their courses and curriculum,” said the bill’s author Sen. Sabrina Cervantes, a Democrat from Riverside, at a bill hearing in June. “In many instances, this has been done without any boundaries or guardrails.”

California Faculty Association represents coaches and mental health counselors in addition to professors. It has donated at least $3.4 million to state legislators and other candidates for state office since 2020. Cervantes has gotten at least $64,650 from the union since 2016, according to Digital Democracy, a CalMatters government disclosure tool.

Cal State has no position on the bill, but the role of AI broadly is a sticking point in ongoing labor contract negotiations between the union and the university system. 

A dispute over bots at Sacramento State

The California Faculty Association filed unfair labor practice charges against Sacramento State with the California Public Employment Relations Board last winter over what it said were campus efforts to replace some of the work of faculty, which the union maintained violated state labor law.

CalMatters obtained these records through a California Public Records Act request.

The union alleged that Alexander “Sasha” Sidorkin, the campus’s then chief AI officer, created a mental health chatbot for students and included a link to it in a resources webpage for students. The complaint indicates that the link was accompanied by the statement, “AI is better than nothing, when a counselor isn’t available.”

In a response, Cal State’s chancellor’s office wrote to the labor board that the union’s claims of unfair labor practices were bogus. Sidorkin didn’t develop any such bots and “there was no implementation of any AI bots to do any counseling work.” 

CalMatters spoke with Sidorkin by phone this week. Prior to the call, he had no knowledge that he was named in the complaint. Sidorkin called the union’s allegation “a misstatement of the fact.” He never created a bot, he said, but merely recommended that students use ChatGPT if they cannot find a counselor.  

Sidorkin, who has a new book out on using AI to teach in universities, said Sacramento State terminated the position of chief AI officer last April during a wave of systemwide layoffs and the campus took down the website affiliated with that role. 

He remains at the university as a professor of education and is a union member. Sidorkin shared a copy of the proposed syllabus language that he archived. He still stands by his recommendation that students be informed in their course syllabus that an AI tool during a mental health episode is better than nothing.

Patrick Oberle, an associate professor of geography at Sacramento State and a union member, said the faculty association took up the issue because it represents counselors who the university could attempt to outsource. CalMatters spoke with him before speaking with Sidorkin.

The union filing also alleges that Sidorkin created an AI-powered tool to interpret the faculty union’s contract with the university system. The union argued this too violated state labor relations law and that the tool itself produced incorrect information. “When the union objected, the CSU ceased use of the contract interpretation bot,” the complaint read.

And Sidorkin solicited faculty for their course syllabi and materials “to receive a customized AI tutoring bot for their classes.” The complaint included an email from Sidorkin to faculty that Sac State leaders told him to retract the request, though he seemingly opposed the move.

“This technology is available on the open market through multiple platforms; however, you will not be able to build them through my office at this time,” he wrote then. He told CalMatters that some 18 professors sent their course material to him the first day he invited submissions.

A human resources director at Sacramento State wrote to a faculty member reassuring her that any bots by administrators need to be bargained over between the union and Cal State “before being used, posted, published, shared, or distributed,” according to a copy of the email.

Sidorkin told CalMatters that the union’s filing the charges was a mistake.

“It’s not a good PR move also on the union’s side because they look like they’re Luddites, and this is not true,” he said, adding that dozens of faculty at Sacramento State alone have developed AI chatbots in support of their courses for students after Cal State purchased ChatGPT accounts for faculty and students last year.

“I am disappointed in my union,” he added.

Faculty fears of AI mission creep

Oberle, the professor, fears that without guardrails, a university could chip away the work of instructors in ways that hurt student learning and diminish the joy of teaching.

One concern? That a campus may encourage professors to shift more of their grading to AI to then grow the number of students per class. That hasn’t happened in a formal way, yet.

That would mean less human engagement with instructors for students. And it could reduce the need to hire additional professors as others retire, which would limit the power of the faculty union.

“We’re trying to accommodate the folks who are deeply opposed to AI’s very existence, and also accommodate the folks that are very excited about all of its possibilities,” Oberle said. 

The point of the unfair labor practice charge, he said, wasn’t to tie the hands of Cal State administrators, but to underscore that using AI to potentially replace labor requires a conversation with faculty. 

More battles over AI in the workplace

Cervantes’ bill is one of several in California aimed at curbing the role of artificial intelligence in the workplace, but others are far more divisive.  Senate Bill 947, would prevent employers from relying solely on AI tools to discipline or dismiss employees. That legislation has the support of labor unions and some nonprofits skeptical of generative AI. Business groups oppose it, including the California Chamber of Commerce as well as ride-hail company Lyft. Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a similar bill last year.

Another, Senate Bill 903, would ban psychotherapists from offering therapy through chatbots and place other limits on the use of AI tools in transcribing patient sessions or communicating with patients. It would also ban bots from making independent therapeutic decisions. The California Chamber of Commerce and California Medical Association oppose it.

“We know technology can augment humans, but it should never replace humans,” said Assemblymember Mike Fong, a Democrat from Alhambra and chair of the Assembly’s committee on higher education, when speaking about Cervantes’ Cal State faculty bill. 

Moments later, the committee voted 10-0 to pass the measure. 

On a recent Friday morning, Fresno Unified high school students learned about the rise and fall of major companies in the stock market — from Walmart’s longevity to Apple’s surge past oil companies and Amazon’s emergence as a $1 trillion company.

Earlier that week, students at the Farber Educational Center, an alternative learning campus, had finished a competitive project for their personal finance class. Using $100,000 in pretend money, they invested in the stock market and tracked their strategy’s success.

The state’s third-largest school district, a pioneer in developing these personal finance courses, offers a preview of how educators will meet California’s new high school graduation requirement, teaching students life skills such as banking, managing debt and building wealth. 

California will require all high schools to offer a personal finance course starting in 2027-28, and all students must take the class beginning with the graduating class of 2031. By adding the course at most of its high schools before the legislation, Fresno Unified emerged as an early adopter — so much so that the state tapped one of the district’s educators to help guide the statewide rollout. 

Since the 2023-24 school year, Jeff Allen has led the creation and implementation of personal finance courses across Fresno Unified, helping turn them into some of the district’s most sought-after electives. 

The California Department of Education selected Allen to lead the statewide rollout because of his hands-on approach in implementing Fresno Unified’s program. Already, Allen has authored a curriculum guide for the state’s educators.

“He demonstrated a combination of subject-matter expertise and direct, district-level implementation experience, along with a strong understanding of scheduling, credentialing and classroom realities,” said Scott Roark, a spokesperson for the state department of education.   

‘I wish I had that’

In 2024, the state Legislature added personal finance to what every California high school graduate must learn. Assembly Bill 2927 made California the 26th state to require a stand-alone personal finance course for all public high school students.

Making personal finance a graduation requirement has received little resistance because adults recognize its value, Allen said.  

“You say personal finance, and it’s like a universal, ‘Oh, I wish I had that,’” he said. “You do not see that physical reaction (to other subjects) from parents and community members the same way that you see it with personal finance because, as an adult, you understand what you didn’t know and how you paid the consequences for it.”

That sentiment resonates with students, too, including 18-year-old Daniel Tecomulapa at the Farber Educational Center.

“I wanted to be better with my finances,” Daniel said. 

The practical benefits students receive from learning personal finance has motivated many educators to teach the course. KongMia Her, who teaches the class at Farber, said he wants students entering adulthood to avoid the financial mistakes he made. 

“I didn’t have any education,” Her said. “No one taught me at school or at home.”

Fresno Unified personal finance classes

Following a class project, teacher KongMia Her reviewed the different strategies that students used to invest in stocks on May 22, 2026.Lasherica Thornton/EdSource

Her is among 17 Fresno Unified teachers this year who are instructing 730 students in the course.

Most Fresno Unified high schools offer personal finance as a yearlong course, though state law will only require one semester. Regardless of length, the district’s personal finance classes already cover the 13 topics mandated under AB 2927. 

The lessons on retirement plans, savings, investments and credit scores have been some of the most meaningful for students in Her’s class at Farber. 

The teens learned why they didn’t yet have credit scores, for example. During a call to Experian, Daniel discovered he had not owned his credit card long enough to develop a credit profile. 

Students also learned how to build and maintain strong credit, including by making payments on time.  

“(The class) teaches you to manage money correctly,” 16-year-old Autumn Walker said. 

Over the past three years, Allen has supported and coached teachers, reviewed lessons and organized professional development.

Because the classes are already aligned with state standards, and most educators are in their second year of teaching the course, Allen is now helping teachers enrich the personal finance classes through community partnerships and programs.

So, teachers are going beyond the classroom, bringing in speakers from local credit unions, Rotary clubs and businesses. 

During a financial literacy event at Farber, community organizations presented students with real-life scenarios about how food, housing and transportation costs affect budgets. At McLane High, students use the on-campus bank as part of the course. At Edison High, students pitched business ideas in a “Shark Tank”-style project that required them to calculate startup costs, needed investments and profit margins. 

The qualifications required to teach personal finance in Fresno Unified will change under the state mandate. Right now, any teacher with a single-subject credential can teach the course in the district. Beginning 2027-28, however, only teachers credentialed in four subject areas will be eligible to teach the class.

Other school districts aren’t waiting for the state mandate to begin teaching personal finance. Pasadena Unified, Yosemite Unified in Oakhurst and San Luis Coastal Unified have launched courses at multiple high schools. 

Elk Grove Unified in Sacramento County has offered a course since 2021, with enrollment growing each year.  

Supporting teachers and schools

Staffing is often a challenge when schools must add new graduation requirements, but the state’s personal finance law gives districts several years to train teachers before the requirement takes effect.

Allen, who led the rollout in Fresno Unified, wrote the state’s personal finance curriculum guide to help districts create their own courses. He said he authored the guide to make the implementation of the new mandate less daunting for rank-and-file teachers.

He intentionally organized the curriculum guide around three questions: why personal finance education matters, what students should learn and how schools can put the course into practice. 

And Allen continues to support districts as the state rolls out the requirement. Nearly 700 educators registered for a late May webinar he led on legislative requirements, implementation challenges and professional learning opportunities. 

Allen highlighted ready-made resources districts can use, including the Next Gen Personal Finance platform, so teachers don’t have to build courses from scratch. Teachers statewide can access hours of professional development on topics ranging from car buying to “buy now, pay later” plans — lessons to pass down to their students. 

Allen said personal finance classes generate some of the highest student engagement he has seen. Students enter class eager to pick up where the conversation left off the day before, he said. 

“This is clearly seen by families, by students as one of the most, if not the most, relevant topics that they can be exposed to right now.”

A statewide initiative to help university dropouts reenroll and complete their degrees has cultivated a promising playbook that could raise California’s postsecondary attainment rates, according to a new study.

The California Reconnect program has outperformed state and national benchmarks for reengaging students who “stopped out,” meaning they obtained some college credits but did not complete a degree, a study by nonprofit research firm Education Northwest found. The program has achieved an overall reenrollment rate of 8.15% across a pool of more than 25,000 learners — nearly three times California’s statewide average of 2.9% and the national average of 2.7%.

“California is showing a path forward for reaching the adults who started college and never finished,” said Leanne Davis, researcher and author of the study. “What’s striking is not just that coaching works, but how consistently it works — across different institutions, different demographics and different points of stop-out.”

In California, more than 5.9 million adults under age 65 have some college credit but no degree. Despite making progress in reengaging students, California will likely not reach its targeted 70% student attainment rate by 2030. Achieving that goal would yield about $4.4 trillion in net economic gains for the state over the next 50 years, according to the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce. 

Ruth Bauer, president of InsideTrack, an Oregon-based higher education nonprofit that oversees the California Reconnect initiative, attributed the program’s results to a multistep process. 

First, counselors and specialists make persistent efforts to reach and stay in contact with lapsed students, she said. Then, they work with public colleges and universities to create paths toward completion, connect students to financial aid and help them find ways to balance school with other life priorities. 

Adult learners most often leave college because of financial pressure, work obligations, family and caregiving responsibilities and poor mental health or stress. 

“Most of the students we work with are adults, so they have a lot of competing priorities,” Bauer said. “And higher education is often structured for the traditional student that is focused solely on school.”

For many students, going back to school marks the culmination of a deeply personal journey.  

Jaima Mavity (left) attends her student Nancy Palacios’ (right) graduation in May.Courtesy of Jaima Mavity

Jaima Mavity, a student success specialist at InsideTrack, said one student she first reached out to last spring, Nanci Palacios, graduated from CSU San Marcos last week and now plans to attend graduate school for social work. Palacios had dropped out of college for two years due to mental health struggles and her father’s cancer diagnosis.

During the reengagement process, Palacios’ self-doubt turned to resilience, Mavity said.

“She had this understanding that she had the power inside of her as a student to continue moving forward,” Mavity said. 

Getting students back in the door

Bauer said the first step to reengaging students is effective outreach. California Reconnect reached adult learners through email, phone calls and text messages. About 85% of students responded to a reenrollment pitch via text.

“Colleges are often designing their outreach around what is most convenient for them. Email is cheap, scalable, but most of the students we’re trying to reach had stopped checking their student email accounts,” said Davis. “A text message meets people where they actually are, and it’s a lot lower stakes.”

The study pointed to ongoing support as the next driver of both reenrollment and retention. Students who received one-on-one support returned to college at a rate of 19%, compared to 4.5% of those who did not receive support. 

Adult learners in the program were also more likely to stay enrolled and complete their degrees. More than one-third of learners who received coaching stayed for the subsequent academic term, compared to about one-fifth who reenrolled but did not meet with a coach. 

To keep students enrolled, Davis said colleges should provide ongoing and focused support to returning students, prioritize learners closest to degree completion and connect reenrolled students to more career services and workforce pathways.

Colleges that retained more reenrolled students, for example, had a dedicated reenrollment staff, active coordination with coaches and technical assistance for returning students, Davis said. At colleges with lower retention rates, students often run into “a series of bureaucratic frictions,” such as long holds or unclear advising pathways, she said. 

“Coaches could really help get people in the door, but they can’t substitute for the institutional readiness on the other side that has to meet the students and help keep them there,” Davis said. 

Beyond surface-level support

First-generation and Hispanic students, who are more likely to stop going to college than other populations, also showed the highest gains in reenrollment, according to the study. First-generation students comprised nearly two-thirds of all learners who persisted after reenrolling. Hispanic students, who represent the state’s largest undergraduate population, comprised 43% of reenrolled students and nearly half of those who stayed enrolled. 

But financial pressures remain one of the top barriers for all students who want to reenroll. The cost of attending college continues to rise in California, and rising expenses can make it harder for adult learners to afford to go back. 

“What has stayed the same is when you hear that cost is a barrier, maybe it’s about the fact that childcare is more expensive than it is about tuition, or it could be that they have to cut back on their hours at work in order to handle the workload,” Bauer said. 

In response to financial pressures, Mavity said she has seen more of her students reenroll in affordable programs at community colleges rather than four-year public universities. She also pointed to mental health and accessibility issues as more common reasons that students have stopped attending college in recent years. 

“What I’ve seen change is that colleges are offering more counseling and mental health support, things like student accessibility services,” Mavity said, adding that these resources are often key factors in a student’s decision to return. 

In an effort to boost enrollment, California has streamlined college entry with policies such as automatic admissions. Bauer said state leaders need to invest equally in maintaining that enrollment. 

“It’s a continual issue that schools face, and reenrolling students will help them financially, but they have to invest in the resources to do it first before they get that benefit,” Bauer said. 

A controversial adult charter school in Sacramento will remain open after the county Board of Education reversed a decision by Twin Rivers Unified School District to close the school.

The decision marked the end of a long journey for students and staff of Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools, who had already endured school site closures and staff layoffs after a state audit found the school had improperly collected $180 million in public funding and violated multiple education rules.

Twin Rivers Unified staff cited many of the same problems revealed in the audit for the decision to revoke the school’s charters.

The hundreds of students, staff and community activists, many who arrived via bus to pack Tuesday night’s Sacramento County Board of Education meeting, cheered with jubilation following the board’s decision. 

Nearly 300 supporters, some wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “It’s never too late,” filled multiple rooms at the venue. About 40 of them shared stories of hardship improved by instruction from caring teachers, many explaining that the school helped them to learn to speak English and earn a high school diploma. Some expressed fear that the school’s closure would mean the end of their education.

“I want to get my diploma so I can put it on the wall,” said Sonya Bonnett, a Sacramento mother of four as she shook with emotion. “I’m 68 years old. It’s time for me.”

The charter school network, which serves adult students in its two schools — California Innovative Career Academy and Horizon Community Charter — has become both a lifeline for vulnerable students and a symbol of California’s charter oversight failures.

A difficult decision

The county school board’s decision wasn’t an easy one. 

Lawyers explained that the board was only to consider whether the evidence in the record supported the district’s decision to revoke the schools’ charters. Board members struggled with conflicting testimony from the district and the charter. In the end, they could not agree.

The motion to reverse the revocation of each of the charters passed on a 4-3 vote after a four-hour hearing.

“This vote gives our students and staff the opportunity to continue the important work of rebuilding this institution and delivering on our mission,” Executive Director Jonathan Raymond said in a statement. “Our students deserve stability, support and the opportunity to complete their education. We remain fully committed to transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement.”

The charter school opened in 2014 with the aim of helping adult students, many formerly incarcerated or new immigrants, to earn a diploma, improve English language skills or learn a trade. Within a decade, it was serving 13,700 students at 50 sites statewide.

Twin Rivers weighing its options

The adult charter school will now return to the oversight of Twin Rivers Unified. The district can appeal the county board’s decision to the California State Board of Education.

“At this time, no decision has been made about whether to pursue an appeal,” said Zenobia Gerald, district spokeswoman, via email. “We’ll be discussing next steps with our Board of Trustees.”

The district did not make a school administrator or board member available for an interview with EdSource.

Twin Rivers Unified, which earned $12.9 million in oversight and facility fees from the charter school between 2019-20 and 2023-24, was criticized in the audit — along with the County Office of Education and the California Department of Education — for not providing adequate oversight to the charter school. 

Even before the audit, Highlands Community Charter had been the subject of investigations and media scrutiny. County school board trustee Heather Davis questioned why the district took so long to take action. 

“Why is Twin Rivers so passionate now, when it was going on for a long time,” she said Tuesday night. “Where were they?”

Raymond takes the helm

Raymond, Sacramento City Unified’s former superintendent, has spent the last 10 months trying to rebuild trust in the charter school. He took its reins in July after the audit became public. He immediately asked the charter school’s board members to step down.

Raymond told EdSource Wednesday that he took the job because the mission of the charter school inspired him. He also saw an opportunity to return to Sacramento and to reestablish old relationships to help the public regain trust in the charter.

Since then, Highlands leaders have revised academic, operational and fiscal policies to bring them into compliance with state law and their charter, according to Raymond. They have hired new school leaders and impaneled three new board members.

Raymond acknowledges that the charter’s former leadership were not good stewards of public funding.

“Look, that was on someone else’s watch,” Raymond said. “It’s not going to be on my watch.”

Moving to Yuba City?

Despite the victory, the work isn’t over. Raymond is looking for a new authorizer — setting his sights on Yuba City Unified in Sutter County.

Raymond has filed a petition with the district, spoken with its leadership and is hopeful that an agreement will be in place by September. The school would operate in both Sutter and Sacramento counties, he said.

“It’s a tight timeline, but it’s doable, and we’re excited about that,” he said.

Sutter County officials approached the charter about bringing their career, technical and adult education programs to their county.

“We’ve realized that a lot of the population we serve — immigrants and refugees — are now moving up to Sutter County because it’s more affordable than Sacramento County,” Raymond said. “And there are also jobs up in Sutter County.”

The school, which was forced to close most of its sites and put students on waiting lists after the audit, will expand again, Raymond said, noting that enrollment has grown by 800 students since January.

No matter where the school lands, Raymond says he has three goals for the near term — build trust and restore integrity; raise operational, professional and academic standards; and make decisions in the best interest of the students.

“As I said to the board,” Raymond said, “my promise was we would become a school that this community and county and our state could be really proud of.” 

By Ricardo Cano, EdSource

Higher education leaders were cautiously optimistic in January when Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled a proposed budget that included a combined $716.3 million in new base funding for the University of California and California State University. Their sentiment remained largely unchanged Thursday, as Newsom’s revised budget maintained the proposed funding for universities. 

UC and CSU officials breathed a sigh of relief because it wasn’t a given that the funding earmarked in the governor’s January budget would remain intact in his May revision. The state’s university systems do not receive the minimum funding guarantees that TK-12 schools and community colleges get under California’s Proposition 98, and must compete with other dueling priorities covered in the rest of the state budget.

Newsom’s updated budget appropriates $350.6 million in new base funds for UC and $365.7 million for CSU, meaning UC would receive $5.3 billion from the state’s general fund and CSU would get $5.6 billion.

Those funds represent a 5% annual budget increase that had been promised by the state to UC and CSU under a five-year compact agreement. In exchange for the state funding boost, the two university systems must work to raise graduation rates and enroll more in-state residents. 

Newsom’s May proposal would still defer paying out $129.7 million for UC and $143.8 million for CSU until next year. The deferred funds represent a 3% base increase for both systems.

Still, the investments in the state budget would aid California’s public universities as they face intense scrutiny from the Trump administration, which has sought to investigate the institutions and withhold millions of dollars in public research grants.

“The UC funding included in the May revision will help ensure that the university remains affordable and accessible to California students,” UC President James B. Milliken said in a statement. “As the University of California faces ongoing federal funding uncertainty and increasing operational and labor costs, state funding for UC is more important than ever.”

California’s community college system, meanwhile, would receive a $197.7 million increase from the state’s Prop. 98 general fund, reflecting a 4.31% cost-of-living adjustment for TK-12 schools and community colleges.

“Gov. Newsom’s May Revise reflects strong confidence in the California Community Colleges and the critical role we play in California’s economic future,” Chancellor Sonya Christian said in a statement.

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Until last month, California was poised to join nearly a dozen other states that ban cell phones in K-12 schools. But under pressure from school boards and administrators, lawmakers scaled back a bill that would have required such a blanket ban.

“I was disappointed, but I take the long view on this,” said Torrance Democratic Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, an author of the bill. “There’s still a growing global concern that too much cell phone use has detrimental effects on students.”

The bill, AB 1644, builds on an existing law in California that requires schools to limit, if not outright ban, students’ cell phone use during the school day. A slew of studies have shown that cell phone use is a serious distraction for students that affects their mental health, social-emotional development and ability to concentrate in class.

Confusing and unnecessary legislation?

Muratsuchi’s bill would have required all schools to draw up policies banning students from using cell phones while they’re on campus or on a school-related trip. School board and school administrator groups opposed the bill because they said a “one-size-fits-all” policy undermines districts’ ability to enact their own rules suited to their own specific students’ needs. 

They also argued that the bill conflicts with the existing law that requires schools to come up with policies limiting cell phones on campus. Those policies are supposed to go into effect in July. Having two laws on the issue would be confusing for school staff and may invalidate the policies they’d already been working on, they said.

“AB 1644 creates a ‘do-over’ just one year (after the previous law passed), creating unnecessary frustration and confusion,” the Association of California School Administrators wrote to the Assembly Education Committee. 

In response to those complaints, lawmakers removed high schools from the ban.

Student Keiran George uses her cellphone as she steps outside the Ramon C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts High School in downtown Los Angeles on Aug. 13, 2024.Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo

Outcomes in Contra Costa and Los Angeles

Many school districts in California, including Los Angeles Unified, have already banned cell phones. A recent study cast doubt on whether cell phone bans have any impact on test scores, attendance or other measures of student success, but individual districts say the policies have made a difference.

Mount Diablo Unified, in the San Francisco Bay Area’s Contra Costa County, has seen improvements since banning cell phones. In a presentation to the school board, teachers said students are more focused in the classroom, have livelier discussions and conversations, fight less and don’t get “riled up” about social media posts.

At Northgate High School in Walnut Creek, reports of harassment fell 33% and bullying dropped 50% since the district banned cell phones.

The only complaints, according to the presentation, were that students didn’t have access to their phone cameras to take pictures of assignments and that locking up students’ phones cut into classroom time. The authors of the report also said some students found ways around the ban.

‘All these zombies’

Rishaan Marwaha, a high school freshman from Newport Beach, was so fed up with cell phones he testified at the Assembly Education Committee hearing last month to urge lawmakers to pass AB 1644.

“Tech companies are making all this money off students’ phone addiction,” he said. “It’s not a fair fight because students are a vulnerable population. … School should be a place for learning.

Marwaha said he was a phone addict himself. He would spend hours scrolling through Instagram reels, “when I could have been doing things I actually like, like playing basketball or going to the gym.”

He eventually removed Instagram from his phone, but saw his classmates suffering from the same addiction. 

“I’d walk through school and it felt like all these zombies,” he said. “Some people were so addicted, they’d make up excuses to go to the bathroom just so they could look at their phones.”

He was disappointed the bill got scaled back, but he’s hopeful the state will enact a high school cell phone ban at some point. After all, he said, “in the past people managed without cell phones  OK. I think we’ll be fine.”

This is Muratsuchi’s third bill related to schools and cell phones, each inching closer to a total ban. The previous two cell-phone-related bills were enacted into law, and he believes this one will pass, as well, now that it’s been amended.

“I hope this is part of an ongoing movement to recognize that technology can provide benefits as well as harms,” said Muratsuchi, a candidate for California schools superintendent. “We need to have responsible regulations to make sure we’re helping students navigate technology successfully.”

For decades, a facility in the North State has been working to help bring closure to loved ones by analyzing unidentified human remains. 

Chico State’s Human Identification Lab (HIL) was established in the 1970s and its work has taken the lab’s small team of experts into the heart of natural disasters, including the 2018 Camp Fire, as well as to the battlefields of World War II.

Recently, the HIL’s researchers worked with the U.S. Department of Defense to uncover the remains of 19-year-old U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Stephen J. Fatur, a tail gunner aboard a B-17G Flying Fortress that crashed in Poland in March 1945. Fatur’s remains were eventually accounted for by Defense Department personnel in July 2025.

Dr. Ashley Kendell is the director of the HIL, and Dr. Colleen Milligan is one of its forensic anthropologists. They spoke with Insight Host Vicki Gonzalez about the lab’s work, and traveling abroad to help solve long-lasting mysteries.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview highlights

Why was the Human Identification Lab started?

KENDELL: The Chico identification lab has been around for a little over 50 years. The program itself [was] started by Dr. Turhon Murad in the 1970s.  We had a really, really small caseload; we would receive maybe one to 10 cases per year. And over the last 50 years, our casework has grown exponentially. We now receive around 120 to 150 cases per year that cover about 90% of the counties in California. 

A lot of that is attributed to the fact that of the forensic anthropologists that are in the lab. Four of us are POST-certified [Peace Officers Standards and Training], and we teach all of the new detectives throughout the state of California in a homicide investigation course how to utilize forensic anthropological services, and what we can do as far as forensic archaeological excavation in homicide investigations. 

Is this lab unique to California or the West Coast?

MILLIGAN: This is a lab that is largely unique to the West Coast. There are labs like ours across the country. You have ones that are large at the University of Tennessee; they're well known for what we say is the “body farm.” You also have labs in the Midwest as well as Texas. Chico State’s Human Identification Lab is the largest forensic anthropology lab at a university west of the Rockies. Part of the reason we serve as much of the state as we do is because of the number of professionals that we have associated with our lab. 

What kind of large-scale responses have you been involved in?

MILLIGAN: Personally, on my end, most of our last two decades of work have been related to California's wildfires. We respond to wildfires across the state, as well as responding in 2023 in Maui for the wildfire there. What we do with these responses is assist the recovery and the identification of human remains and victims from these large-scale events.

Dr. Colleen Milligan is one of the forensic anthropologists at Chico State's Human Identification Lab.Courtesy of Chico State

 

In my background — all of us have previous experience with sort of mass fatality events mindset — mine started in graduate school as I was on a fellowship with the Department of Homeland Security working on mass fatality policy development. That included looking at some of the later stages of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana at that time. 

KENDELL: My first response was the 2018 California Camp Fire. I had just started at Chico State in 2017 so prior to that, I hadn't had any mass fatality response in my past. I've learned a lot over the last 10 years, and unfortunately on an almost annual basis now our lab is employed to do mass fatality response for fires. 

What goes into processing a case?

KENDELL: So depending on the types of cases we get, we focus on cases [where] we can get information from the human skeleton. We often interface with sheriff corner's offices, medical examiners' offices, and [the] main focus in our lab predominantly comes from helping to make identifications on remains that are not visually identifiable. 

We also get a lot of requests for trauma analysis, so helping the forensic pathologist or the sheriff corner make determinations as to cause and manner of death based on interpretations in the bone of things like sharp force trauma, projectile trauma or blunt force injuries.

I would imagine the time frame to identify remains can vary greatly depending on the circumstances.

KENDELL: It does. Our timeframe [really depends] on the type of case. We sometimes look at a single skeletal element and we are tasked with, what is it? Is it human, is it non-human? We can do those types of cases very quickly. However, if we do get more complicated cases that are fragmentary, or are burned as are the case with the wildfire decedents, those cases can oftentimes span a couple of weeks in order to process and then do a full analysis for that case.

Some recent work involved identifying servicemembers killed in World War II alongside the Department of Defense. How did you get connected with the federal government?

MILLIGAN: One of the major employers for our field in the U.S. is actually the Department of Defense. If there are 200 or so forensic anthropologists across the U.S. about half of those are employed by the Department of Defense. They run two very large labs — one in Honolulu, Hawaii and one in Omaha, Nebraska — for identification of servicemembers killed in foreign wars in particular.

There are so many service personnel that are still unaccounted for, that even with having that many of us employed by a single entity, that workload requires a much larger cooperation with agencies and universities to help locate and ultimately [hopefully] recover those that are unaccounted for. That's where we came in.

One of those operations involved recovering an airman’s remains from Poland. How does working on a case like this, from decades ago, complicate your work?

U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Stephen J. Fatur died in March 1945 after his bomber went down over Poland. His remains were eventually recovered with the assistance of experts from the Chico State Human Identification Lab.Courtesy of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency

MILLIGAN: Something that is from World War II, because of how much time has passed between the event itself and when recovery operations are able to be initiated for various reasons, that really complicates the recovery picture that you're looking at. Not only do you have an event like a plane crash which may fragment [the] remains, make it more difficult to recover in the first place, but then you have time that passes. Areas develop, they change, you have different activities that occur in the same location, all of which makes it not only more difficult to find, but also recover. 

Who ultimately does the identification?

MILLIGAN: In a case like this, different from what we would do with our normal casework, our role is simply to assist on the field recovery side of this particular operation. Forensic anthropologists at the Department of Defense's labs will be the ones that are responsible for the actual identification of recovered service personnel. 

What does this fieldwork look like?

MILLIGAN: We traveled to Poland in August 2019 and in an operation like this, what you're looking at for our purposes is really a large area where it's been identified that this is the last known location for a downed plane during World War II.

For us it is about excavating this using archaeological techniques to look at what is really going to be evidence of both the plane and potentially missing service personnel in subsurface contexts — things that would be buried through time. 

This is intense, emotional work. How do you process or compartmentalize it? 

KENDELL: I think for a lot of us that compartmentalization is just such an important facet of what we do. A lot of what we see are homicide cases, but they're always decedents that have families and loved ones. For me it's really important to keep the focus on what we're doing and the skill set that we have, and what we can offer to the loved ones that remain. It helps me compartmentalize and just keep my mind on what I'm trying to do and what the end goal is, rather than what potentially happened to a decedent. 

MILLIGAN: Most of the time when we're in the field or when we're operating on a case, you're focused on the task at hand. You have a very real way to assist both victims and their families through what your investigation can find. In that moment, your focus is your job.

I think for most professionals that work in any kind of context like this, especially in death investigation, what you think of how you connect to your community, about victims and their families, maybe comes later after your work is complete.

Sacramento City Unified School District’s Board of Education voted Thursday night to finalize laying off  503 positions to address their ongoing financial crisis. These positions would be vacated May 15.

The Board’s First Vice President Taylor Kayatta said that it wasn’t an easy decision to make.

“I didn’t sleep much at all last night because I knew what this meeting was,” Kayatta said. “Every single one of those positions, not only is it a person, but it’s a job that is being performed for this district. They are doing real work.”

The crisis came to a turning point in December when California’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Team, or CFCMAT, brought the board's attention to the $127 million budget shortfall.

Another round of layoffs is set to be approved following administrative hearings by the end of the month. Following these hearings and subsequent layoffs, the district projects savings of $23 million. Tara Jeane, the board president, said that it’s a decision the board was forced to make to address the ongoing crisis.

“I’m also grappling with the sobering numbers, the sobering reality of our cash flow,” Jeane said.

In her United Public Employees report to the school board, Secretary Treasurer Marla van Laningham delivered her report for the local labor union of school administrators. She raised concerns for the future of the district following these layoffs. 

“The loss of these employees and leaders will have an immediate and lasting impact on students, staff and school communities,” van Laningham said. “The responsibilities they carry cannot simply be absorbed by site administrators or remaining staff members whose workloads are already stretched beyond capacity.”

The majority of the workers laid off are classified employees, essentially hourly workers like custodians, food service workers and maintenance workers.

Even with the money saved by layoffs, the board may need to decide on whether or not to enter a receivership or risk 5,000 employees not being paid come next school year. 

‘Time is of the essence’ for the district to enter receivership

Board president Tara Jeane (right) and the district superintendent Cancy McArn (left) sit in chambers at the Sacramento City Unified School District’s education board meeting on May 7, 2026.Ruth Finch/CapRadio

State receivership of a school district can be initiated when that district reaches insolvency, essentially running out of cash to meet payroll obligations. According to CFCMAT CEO Michael Fine, with the current projections they have access to, the best-case scenario is that they run out of cash by February 2027. If this happens, 5,000 employees will go without pay. Those projections include the layoff notices that were finalized Thursday night.

Fine said to avoid this fate, they would need to begin taking steps to undergo the receivership process as soon as possible. The receivership process has to be initiated by the state legislature. According to Fine, if the district was to go down the receivership route, legislation would have to be approved by session end on August 30.

“We have to capture them, if you will, and their attention and their vote to assist you while they’re in session,” Fine said. “Time is of the essence. I can’t emphasize that enough.”

Board members expressed resistance to the idea that a receivership was inevitable. Jeane said that they’ve made changes that are not represented in the budget projections used by CFCMAT.

“The current cash flow projections are based on the idea that we would do nothing else at this time,” Jeane said. “We’re asking for more recommendations. We’re asking for a plan. We’re asking for a way forward.”

If SCUSD entered a state receivership, the board would be relegated to an advisory position, and an appointed state administrator would make the decisions the board would normally make in order to get the school district back on track.

Board member Jasjit Singh said that the cuts a state administrator would make in a receivership are something the board can do on its own.

“What I see here is what I hope I continue to see our board doing already instead of waiting for someone from the outside to come in for us,” Singh said. “What this person would be doing is what I think a unified board can accomplish anyways. Or at least, that’s the hope.”

The next SCUSD board meeting will be held on May 28.

Administrators at an affluent Marin County high school district appear to have twice recently violated a state law that protects the First Amendment and free press rights of student journalists at an award-winning newspaper, the Redwood Bark. 

It began with revelations pulled from the Epstein files and was followed by accusations of antisemitism over a news photo. 

In both instances, student journalists’ rights under a 1977 California landmark law giving them the autonomy to publish news without interference from principals and other school leaders appear to have been ignored, First Amendment lawyers said.

The first incident involved censoring a news item after it was published online. It involved local references that student journalists at Redwood High School culled from the so-called “Epstein files,” the massive trove of investigative records released in late December by the U.S. Department of Justice related to the sex trafficking investigation of the late financier, Jeffrey Epstein. 

That news item was posted in February on Instagram, a platform the Bark often uses to report news, and then removed from public view. It was later restored.  

In the other instance, administrators ordered an investigation of the paper’s editorial processes after receiving complaints about a photo taken at a protest in San Francisco. 

Student journalists clashing with school officials is nothing new — administrators often want to put schools in the best light, while students want to practice journalism. In 1977, California passed the landmark, first-in-the-nation Student Free Expression Law, which gives student journalists and their advisers the right to report and publish news without interference or retaliation from school leaders.

In February, the Bark’s then-adviser, Erin Schneider, told the principal of Redwood High School in Larkspur and the superintendent of the Tamalpais Union High School District that their actions raised “concerns about press censorship and unethical oversight from the district out of alignment” with state law, emails EdSource obtained show. 

Schneider, a former newspaper reporter, has since taken an unpaid leave of absence in protest through June 2027. She told parents and students in a letter that she’d encountered “significant resistance” to doing her job. She said she’s unsure if she will return to the position she’s held for 13 years.

In recent years, there have been multiple instances of California school leaders interfering with student journalism, including a lawsuit that recently concluded in which a newspaper adviser won his job back after a judge found he had been removed for his students’ pointed reporting. A similar case is headed for trial in San Jose. 

Tensions between school leaders and student reporters can escalate when administrators who try to influence publications “don’t know anything about journalism,” said Eric Gustafson, the San Francisco adviser who won his job back after a judge ruled he had been improperly transferred.  

Such attempts to censor student journalists’ rights have been rising, according to the Student Press Law Center, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that supports university and high school student journalists.  

Both instances at Redwood High School occurred at a time when news organizations and journalists face increasing pressures, and trust in journalism is low.

It’s that climate that concerned Susan Harris, the mother of a Bark editor, as she gathered more than 300 signatures on a petition asking the district school board to create a policy endorsing student reporters’ rights granted by state law.

“What’s going on in the world with journalists, how they’re being silenced, I just wanted the young journalists to know that that’s not right,” she said. 

It started with the Epstein files

What’s going on at the Bark is “at a whole other level,” Tracy Anne Sena, president of the Journalism Education Association of Northern California, said in an interview. 

“Administrators don’t like complaints, they don’t want to deal with complaints,” Sena said, adding, “I think it’s a wrongly placed mindset if you squelch the kids.”

The Bark, where staffers call themselves Barkies, has served Redwood High in Larkspur, a few miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, since 1958. It frequently wins national awards for its journalism.

The recent tumult began with an ambitious reporting proposal. Bark journalists would cull the Epstein files for any mentions of affluent Marin. They were doing something other journalists around the country were doing — localizing a story that was getting global attention.

The journalists found more than 5,000 such references, posting many of them on Instagram. In one referencing the city of Mill Valley, they noted that the government records identified a French national, Gisele Attias Bonnouvrier, as “providing models to Epstein.” She was associated with two companies that appeared to have connections to Mill Valley, but they could not be traced, students reported.

Although the Bark didn’t mention it, Justice Department records show Bonnouvrier may be associated with a European company called Mill Valley Connection.

On Feb. 23, Redwood High Principal Barnaby Payne received an email from a person identifying as Bonnouvrier demanding her name be removed from the report and threatening to sue if it wasn’t. Payne quickly alerted Schneider, the Bark’s adviser, and sent the demand to Tamalpais Union High School District Superintendent Courtney Goode.

Schneider soon heard back from the principal. “I have a directive from the cabinet and superintendent to redact the one name immediately from the post,” he wrote, according to a copy of his email that Schneider provided EdSource.

‘Absolutely protected by California law’

Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center, called Payne’s email “a smoking gun. It’s a direct order to the adviser to break the law.”

The center provides student journalists with legal advice, which the Bark reporters sought. Hiestand told them that publishing the woman’s name was legally sound.

“We looked at it and there was absolutely nothing unlawful,” he said. It was “absolutely protected by California law.”

The project’s lead reporter, junior Ben Mueller, said in an interview that he “was a little flummoxed by the initial communications from the district” because he knew that simply reporting what was included in government records — like the woman’s name and what the record said about her — didn’t constitute libel.

Schneider said the pressure of being told what to do by the school superintendent and the principal, whom they have to interact with daily, weighed on the students. They decided to archive the Instagram post, effectively complying with Goode’s directive to censor the woman’s name.

“They complied out of fear,” Schneider told district union leaders in a March 4 email. The students later restored the post. It remains published as of April 23.

In an email to EdSource, Bonnouvrier denied providing women to Epstein. Asked if she heard back from anyone at the school about her request to censor her name, she wrote: “They told me they will remove my name,” adding, “Nobody is allowed to mention my full name.”

‘District bears responsibility’

Given the students’ legal protections, any decision by school leaders to order published news content removed — an action known as prior restraint — could only be issued after “a very thorough legal analysis,” said David Loy, legal counsel for The First Amendment Coalition, a Marin County-based press rights group.

School administrators “can’t just issue a takedown order because someone was offended,” Loy said.

Goode said he believes “very strongly in student press and students controlling the editorial process. But when questions are raised about potential legal implications, it’s really important we pause to make sure that those interests and issues are fully understood.”

Goode said no legal analysis was done before issuing the directive to remove the woman’s name.

“The district bears responsibility to ensure we’re not exposing the district, our students, and really our taxpayers, to legal liability,” he told EdSource.

Loy said Goode’s concerns were “not a legitimate reason to censor. There’s no exception in the law that says you can censor something that might cost the district money.”

A few days after the take-down order, Goode met with the students and Schneider, the students’ then-adviser. He told them “he was trying to avoid a lawsuit,” Schneider said. She said the students told him that that was not a reason to censor their work.

A local newspaper, the Marin Independent Journal, published an April 1 story on Schneider going on leave and discussing pressures she said she faced in the role. In answer to a question, Goode is quoted by the paper as saying he didn’t know of any attempts to censor the Bark despite the takedown request issued on Feb 24.

Goode interpreted the reporter’s question about censorship “as a broad fishing expedition,” he told EdSource. “I asked for clarity as to what (the reporter) was referring to. I got no response.”

Protest photo called into question

In another incident, the Bark sent a photographer to a large Jan. 30 student protest in San Francisco’s Dolores Park as part of a national demonstration against the Trump administration’s deportation policies.

Among the photos submitted for publication was one showing young people holding a banner with “Students Fight Back” printed in large letters. Below those words, in smaller letters, were three subjects of their fight, each preceded by the word “Against”: “Zionism,” “Trump’s Billionaire Agenda” and “Mass Deportation.”

The Bark’s staff votes on what photos to publish, Schneider said. The photo of the banner received more than 50% of the tally and was published on the cover of the paper’s Feb. 4 print edition, on its website and on Instagram. The Bark publishes in print about every six weeks.

The reaction was swift.

Someone tagged the Instagram post, accusing the paper of being akin to the Ku Klux Klan.

In a Feb. 27 complaint to school leaders, a person named Lee Howard wrote in an email, “I am worried that Redwood’s student paper decided to publish an image of a protest slogan about Zionism that has increasingly been used as an antisemitic slur.” Howard did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In response, the Bark’s three editors-in-chief published what they called a reflection, writing, “our responsibility is to present reality as it occurred.”

“At the same time, we recognize that publishing choices, including which photo becomes a cover, carry weight and require thoughtful discussion and diverse perspectives. We are deeply sorry that the photo brought up historical hurt and made students, families and community members feel confused or unseen.” 

On March 4, Jeanine Evains-Robinson, the district’s senior director of student services, sent Schneider an email with the subject line, “Notification of Investigation Regarding ‘Bark Cover Story,’ writing that, “an independent investigator will be assigned to conduct a thorough and neutral review of the complaints filed.”

Superintendent Goode would not say how many complaints were received, and the district rejected an EdSource public records request for all complaints related to the photo. He told EdSource he had no choice but to order a formal investigation of how the photo was chosen for publication, assigning it to a national law firm specializing in education law, Fagem Friedman and Fulfrost. He described the investigation as “open and ongoing,” repeatedly declining to provide further details.

“By law, our kids are compelled to come to school. We are obligated and compelled to provide them with an environment free of harassment and discrimination,” he said.

Asked whether an investigation of the newspaper’s internal processes of selecting what to publish would trample on the students’ autonomy granted by law, Goode said it wouldn’t. He said the probe could be completed without “limiting their rights as student journalists.”

Loy, the legal counsel of the First Amendment Coalition, rejected that claim.

“A lawyer from the district interrogating (student journalists) about their editorial process, and discretion inherently exerts a chilling effect,” he said.

Students were conflicted

Schneider described the students as “conflicted, with some questioning if ‘they have a right to publish the news photo or not.’ ”
Loy reiterated that right is unequivocal.

“The mere publication of a single news photograph, even on a topic that may be potentially controversial, can’t ever amount to discrimination or harassment,” he said, “It’s simply, transparently, impossible as a matter of law.”

One of the Bark’s editors-in-chief, Morgan Sicklick, a senior, said the district sent a person to talk to staffers about antisemitism after the photo was published. “We didn’t think (what was) provided was really that necessary,” she said. 

Sicklick noted that she and several other students are Jewish, and the fallout from the criticism has “been pretty hard, especially being an editor-in-chief and to continue and keep everybody’s heads up.”

The paper’s web designer, Zander Hakimi, a junior, said in an interview that the protest photo “was relevant. I didn’t expect people to be talking about it like it was an endorsement. It’s a news picture. People think everything is about them.”

Both the response to the photo and the administration’s demand to censor the Epstein post have unified the Barkies, Hakimi said. “It’s pretty clear to the district that we can’t be pushed around. This has made journalism more appealing to me.”

Cases of student press censorship attempts on the rise in California schools

Marcus Queiroga Silva / Pexels

Student journalists at the Redwood Bark at Redwood High School in Marin County aren’t alone in facing recent attempts to control student journalism.

Despite protections in a 1977 landmark state law, the Student Free Expression Act, which prohibits administrators from interfering with the gathering and publication of news, student reporters and their journalism advisers have encountered censorship attempts in recent years, including efforts to punish advisers for students’ stories and to remove content. In one case, a principal told them that their job was to paint the high school in a good light.

Examples include: 

Sacramento City Unified School District

In 2024, the district placed Samantha Archuleta, the journalism adviser to The Prospector newspaper at C.K. McClatchy High School, named for the long-time editor of the Sacramento Bee, on administrative leave after a reporter quoted a fellow student saying that Adolph “Hitler had some good ideas.”  

The comment was reportedly made in a government class and printed in a column entitled “What did you say?” about remarks overheard at school.

Student journalists at The Prospector — where the writer Joan Didion was once on staff — wrote on Instagram that the quote had not reflected their beliefs but “was included to spark a conversation on how students here choose to use their words.” 

In a June 2024 guest piece in The Sacramento Bee, Archuleta wrote that “students have rights that give them the first and last say in what is written, how it is edited and what gets published without prior restraint, censorship or punishment from me or any other adult so long as it is protected speech.” 

Numerous free press and student press groups pushed for her reinstatement. However, she left her position at McClatchy High.

San Francisco Unified School District

A Superior Court judge in January ordered the district to reinstate the journalism adviser at Lowell High School, Eric Gustafson, to his job after he was removed last year. San Francisco Unified School District officials argued they transferred Gustafson because they wanted someone in his post with more experience and more education. 

Gustafson claimed it was because of his students’ aggressive reporting and stories on topics such as student drug use and teachers’ use of AI in grading, and because he refused to let school officials see stories before they were published, court records show.

Judge Christine Van Aken called the district’s claims “not credible.” The court concluded that the “motivation for the district’s reassignment decision was to impact the editorial content of The Lowell in a way that they could not accomplish directly,” she wrote in her decision.

Mountain View Los Altos High School District 

In Silicon Valley, a trial is scheduled for November over a lawsuit brought in 2024 by a journalism adviser and former students against the Mountain View Los Altos High School District. It alleges a principal, Kip Glazer, “improperly pressured and intimidated” student reporters working on a story about student-on-student sexual harassment.

Glazer sought to “avoid embarrassment rather than uphold the constitutional and statutory right of her students and faculty,” the suit charges. Glazer allegedly told student journalists on Mountain View High School’s Oracle newspaper staff that their purpose was to be “uplifting” for the school and to portray it “in a positive light,” records show. 

“The power dynamic was pretty clear,” one of the students’ lawyers, Jordyn Ostroff, told EdSource. “I think anyone would understand that a student, generally speaking, would probably feel obligated to do what a principal is demanding they do.”

The suit also alleges that Glazer illegally removed Oracle’s adviser, Carla Gomez, from her post, replacing her with the school’s drama teacher. Gomez is suing to get her job back.

The former students are seeking an order from a judge that would prevent future censorship of the paper. They also want to ensure journalism is still taught at Mountain View High, where the district has cut an introduction to journalism class.

The lawyer defending the district, Eric Bengston, declined to comment. 

Los Angeles Unified School District

In 2021, Los Angeles Unified brought a disciplinary case against Adriana Chavira, the journalism adviser at Daniel Pearl Magnet High School, after she refused to censor students reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic’s effect on the school. The school is named for the late Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was murdered by jihadist militants in Pakistan in 2002.  

The school newspaper, The Pearl Post, had reported that the school librarian had refused to receive the Covid vaccine, and the library had been closed as a result. The librarian, citing privacy, demanded that The Post remove her name from a story published online. Student journalists refused. The school principal gave Chavira a day to remove the name. It stayed up. The district then suspended her.

In an essay published on the website of her union, the United Teachers Los Angeles, Chavira wrote: “Removing the information would mean that I was censoring my journalism students. And that is something I would never do since that goes against everything I’ve taught my student journalists.” 

The disciplinary case was withdrawn in 2022. Chavira continues to advise the Pearl Post, and is on the board of the Student Press Law Center.

If you know of censorship or interference with a student-run news outlet in California, please contact EdSource investigative reporter Thomas Peele at tpeele@edsource.org.

By ANNIE MA, AP Education Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Education Department said Monday it has terminated agreements with five school districts and a college aimed at upholding protections for transgender students, backing away from requirements negotiated by previous administrations that took a different interpretation of civil rights.

The decision removes the federal obligations for the schools to keep up measures such as faculty training on abiding by a students' preferred name and pronouns and allowing students to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity.

One of the school systems, Delaware Valley School District in rural eastern Pennsylvania, received notice of the change from the Trump administration in February and has since voted to roll back its antidiscrimination protections for transgender students. Another district, Sacramento City Unified, said Monday it "remains committed to the support of our LGBTQ+ students and staff.”

The other affected districts are Cape Henlopen School District in Delaware, Fife School District in Washington, and La Mesa-Spring Valley School District and Taft College in California.

Under the Biden and Obama administrations, the department interpreted Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education, to include protections for transgender and gay students.

The Trump administration has penalized schools that have made efforts to accommodate students based on their gender identity. It has filed lawsuits in California and Minnesota over state policies permitting transgender students to participate in interscholastic sports, and opened civil rights investigations into schools and universities over their policies on transgender students.

Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey said the action reflects the administration’s efforts to keep transgender students from participating in girls’ and women’s sports teams and accessing shared locker rooms.

“Today, the Trump Administration is removing the unnecessary and unlawful burdens that prior Administrations imposed on schools in its relentless pursuit of a radical transgender agenda,” she said in a written statement.

Rescinding civil rights agreements is an unusual step, but one the Trump administration has taken before on education issues. Last year, the Education Department terminated one agreement involving books removed from a school library in Georgia, and another targeting harsh discipline and unequal education opportunities for Native students in the Rapid City Area School District in South Dakota.

The rescission of the agreements would mean a step back from protecting vulnerable students in schools, said Shiwali Patel, senior director of education justice at the National Women’s Law Center.

“This is part of the Trump administration’s assault on education and assault on those who are most vulnerable to experiencing discrimination and harassment, including trans students,” Patel said. “They’ve made their intention very clear in wanting to erase protections for trans people.”

Taft College, a community college in California’s Central Valley, settled a case in 2023 with the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights after a student accused faculty of discrimination that included refusing to use the student’s preferred pronouns. The college agreed to faculty training on Title IX and a revision of college policies to clarify that refusal to use a person’s preferred name and pronoun could constitute harassment.

The agreement with Sacramento City Unified School District stemmed from a complaint brought in 2022 by a student after a teacher refused to use preferred pronouns or to place the student, who identified as male, in a boys’ group for a class activity. The 2024 resolution agreement mandated training for employees on civil rights law, sexual harassment and how to handle formal complaints.

Under a settlement the Delaware Valley School District reached with the Obama administration, the district was required to permit students to use bathrooms that aligned with their gender identity.

In February, the Trump administration sent the district a letter saying it was rescinding the settlement. The administration went further, requiring the district to roll back antidiscrimination protections for transgender students.

The school board voted in late March to change its transgender student policies to abide by the Trump administration’s demands.

Since the day he returned to the White House more than a year ago, Trump and his administration have aimed at the rights of transgender people in several ways — and not just in schools.

He has tried to end participation of transgender women and girls in women’s and girls' sports competitions and has sued states that don’t comply. He’s also blocked transgender and nonbinary people from choosing the sex markers on passports. His administration has also tried to stop those under 19 from receiving gender-affirming medical care.

Associated Press writers Jocelyn Gecker in San Francisco, Moriah Balingit in Washington and Geoff Mulvihill in Haddonfield, New Jersey, contributed to this report.