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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.

With his headphones on and his face inches away from an iPad, Kate Brody’s first grade son was so engrossed that he didn’t realize he had to go to the bathroom. 

He didn’t used to have accidents. But when screen time started to ramp up in his Los Angeles Unified School District classroom, that started to change. Now, Brody said, “he literally cannot tell that he has to go to the bathroom because he’s so overstimulated.” 

“It’s addictive. It’s colorful. It’s meant to appeal to kids like candy,” she said. And while her son can’t connect the dots, he does feel embarrassed when his mom picks him up, a change of clothes in hand.

While a district spokesperson said that LAUSD “prioritizes screen value” — meaning technology “supports learning rather than how long it is used” — some parents like Brody aren’t convinced. 

Brody joined Schools Beyond Screens, a coalition of LAUSD parents advocating for limits on classroom screen time, an issue expected to come before the school board in April, reflecting growing concerns about how heavy device use affects students’ learning, behavior and mental health. 

If the resolution passes, it would require officials to set daily and weekly caps, to be approved by June and implemented the following school year. 

The coalition is trying to “lobby the district to rethink some of this stuff,” Brody said, “and maybe put a tech policy in place for the first time that would outline healthy, safe, responsible use of technology so that we’re using tech in a way that’s effective — and not in a way that’s harmful and detrimental to kids’ cognitive and mental health.” 

Many teachers and parents say that the district’s cellphone ban last year has been ineffective. 

Vincent Kirk, an 11th grade English teacher at Belmont High School, asked his students, “Just for my own curiosity, how many of you have access to your phones right now?” 

“And every single student will raise their hand.” 

Students are often required to store their phones in magnetically sealed pouches, such as Yondr pouches. Kirk said students would place dummy phones inside or force the pouch open to access their devices. 

Some students also take extended bathroom breaks to use their phones, and others bypass school Wi-Fi restrictions by connecting to personal hotspots. 

Challenges in the classroom 

Katie Pace, mother of three LAUSD students, doesn’t see herself as an anti-tech parent. Her children had weathered online learning during the pandemic, but six years later, her eldest is now in the eighth grade and completes all of her assignments on a Chromebook. 

Math problems and science group projects are completed online; essays are in Google Docs and world language is on Duolingo. 

Los Angeles Unified said that while it provides Chromebooks and tablets to students, “decisions about technology use are made at the school level, allowing principals and educators to implement technology in ways that best support their students and instructional goals.” 

LAUSD says screen time is “structured and aligned with instruction,” with elementary students spending roughly 31 to 50 minutes and secondary students between 86 and 128 minutes on a screen during the school day. 

“The District provides guidance and resources to ensure technology is used intentionally, supports effective teaching, and helps students engage with digital tools safely, critically, and responsibly,” a district spokesperson said in a statement to EdSource.  

But Pace said her daughter’s in-class screen use tells another story. Her daughter streams music on Spotify and spends hours watching cat videos and makeup tutorials during class.  

For these reasons, some teachers are changing things. 

Kirk started requiring students to go 100% screen-free during class after he learned most students relied on AI for last year’s midterm papers. He said the first few months of this school year were marked by panic — and relearning basic skills, like how to write on lined paper correctly.  But over time, students’ writing grew deeper and more intentional. Class participation skyrocketed, and students seemed generally calmer. 

What Kirk has observed is consistent with research showing that writing and learning by hand lead to a student’s stronger understanding of material. 

“Teens are at such a high risk of depression and anxiety and addiction, and this is such a crucial special period for them,” Pace said. “This is when they should be talking to each other and looking at their teachers and figuring out who they are.”

Screens at home 

Los Angeles Unified claims screen time using district devices outside the school day is relatively low, averaging between nine and 15 minutes for elementary students and 24 and 44 minutes for those in middle and high school. 

But Julie Edwards, a parent of a kindergartner and fourth grader, disagrees. Her eldest became immediately hooked on screens when she brought home a Chromebook from school. 

“I just thought, ‘I can’t believe they’ve just handed me this massive problem,’ Edwards said.

She tried to hide the device, but that was short-lived because the school was mandating time on iReady. Her daughter would complete her math and then play Minecraft. 

“She comes home, and all that time is spent on a screen,” Edwards said. “And that’s the time we get to be with her.” 

Research has linked excessive screen time to negative impacts on children’s mental health, cognitive development, attention spans and academic performance. Still, LAUSD’s reported usage — in and beyond the school day — is generally consistent with guidance from experts at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. 

Those experts recommend up to an hour of screen use per day for children age 2 to 5, ideally with an adult present to engage with. For older children and teens, parents should set limits while prioritizing sleep and at least an hour of daily physical activity. 

“Everyone should back up and really try to understand at the system level what the problem is,” said Stephen Aguilar, a professor of education at USC, who added that the challenges could be from the technology itself, or a need for additional training or the way everything is set up. 

“But without taking this exhaustive look of how things are working within a particular learning environment, I think a lot of policies fall short, because they’re not attacking the problem. They’re just attacking what they see as the visible issue.”

Over time, Edward’s daughter grew “really dysregulated,” and they eventually decided to call it quits — with both the device and with the school, transferring her to a tech-free charter school in time for fourth grade. She’s planning to transfer her youngest out of LAUSD, too. 

“Her mood is so much better. She is happy to use her imagination to figure out what to do with her time,” Edwards said, noting that she now will spend time on arts and crafts or go outside.

“She has such an awesome childhood. It’s so idyllic. It’s so much more idyllic than just sitting hunched over, scrolling.”

By John Fensterwald, EdSource

CORRECTION: The California State PTA has taken no position on Gov. Newsom's realignment plan. An earlier version, fixed on March 30, said that the PTA backed the proposal.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposal to shift the operation of the California Department of Education has received a key endorsement from the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

The nonpartisan LAO said last week that moving control of the department from the State Superintendent of Public Instruction to a new education commissioner under the governor’s authority would clarify confusion over who should manage the state’s TK-12 education system. The roles “are clear in theory but often murky in practice,” said the LAO, which evaluates state policies for the Legislature. 

This lack of clarity can mar the rollout of major programs like transitional kindergarten and leave districts unsure of where to turn to for guidance.  According to the LAO, overlapping roles among the Department of Education, the State Board of Education and other agencies create confusion about who is in charge. The change that Newsom is proposing “could result in clearer direction and support for school districts,” the LAO said.

Under Newsom’s plan, the state superintendent would continue to be elected every four years, as required by the California Constitution, but with diminished power and a small staff with a minimum budget. While the state superintendent would have limited authority under the governor’s proposal, the LAO suggests that the state superintendent could become an independent evaluator of public schools as well as the chief advocate for K-12 education.

Newsom proposed the major restructuring of the TK-12 bureaucracy in January as part of his 2026-27 budget. The plan would take effect in January 2027, coinciding with the start of the next governor’s and next state superintendent’s term of office.  Newsom disclosed his plan one month after the university-based research organization Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) revived the idea in an in-depth report.  

Associations representing school boards, school administrators, and county superintendents, as well as a number of student advocacy organizations, including Children Now and Education Trust-West, announced their support. Tony Thurmond, the current state superintendent, opposed the proposal, stating it is unclear how the changes would improve student performance. The California Teachers Association, which has succeeded in electing state superintendents aligned with labor, has been silent on the proposal.

The reorganization is not a new idea. As the LAO noted, the challenges of a “two-headed” system of school oversight have been debated for a century. PACE’s report was the sixth extensive study by a research organization or government commission in 30 years that recommended placing the Department of Education under the governor, and the LAO’s is now the seventh.

California is one of only nine states that elect a state superintendent. In 14 states, the governor appoints both a state board of education and the chief education officer. In 10 states, the governor appoints a state board of education, and the board appoints the state school officer; in seven states, an elected state board of education appoints the chief education officer.  

Each of the half-dozen California studies differed on key aspects of what a new governance system should look like. The LAO offered its own take, too.  

Newsom’s plan recommends that the next superintendent be named a voting member of additional state education boards and commissions, including the community college system’s Board of Governors, but doesn’t add other responsibilities.  

Redefine the state superintendent’s roles

The LAO envisions a more influential role for the state superintendent. It also said the Legislature should play a stronger role in monitoring and controlling the restructuring, recommending that the Legislature:

• Vet and confirm the new education commissioner. An assumption behind the realignment is that the appointee would be an experienced manager with knowledge of California’s education system. The last four state superintendents had been legislators without a management background.
• Require the governor to present a spending plan that ensures the total funding for the Department of Education, the state superintendent and the state board doesn’t exceed what the state spends now. The plan should identify savings by eliminating redundancy in the current system.
• Write into law the roles of future state superintendents. The LAO recommends that they should advocate for the main issues they campaigned on, evaluate the effectiveness of state education programs and identify areas of improvement.

To date, none of the commissions’ and researchers’ reports have gained traction in the Legislature, and three times voters have rejected initiatives to eliminate the state superintendent’s position. Whether Newsom’s call for action and the inclusion of the proposal in his budget will make a difference may become clearer when the Assembly Education Committee holds an extensive informational hearing on March 25 at 2 p.m. Thurmond will be on one of four panels of presenters. Here is the agenda.  

Nearly a dozen California county education offices were either overpaid or underpaid millions of dollars in school funding due to a state clerical error, according to the State Controller’s Office. 

The State Controller’s Office said in a statement that a “misalignment of payment amounts” resulted in 11 counties receiving incorrect allocations. 

Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, San Mateo, Sierra, Shasta, Siskiyou, Solano, Sonoma, Stanislaus and Sutter — counties that happen to start with an S — mistakenly received or were missing millions.

Sutter County, which supports 20,000 students across multiple districts, was expecting $25 million but received $105 million in funds, according to the Siskiyou Daily News. Of the $80 million misallocated to Sutter County, $60 million was intended for the Central Valley’s Stanislaus County, which serves over 105,000 students across its districts. Stanislaus County received funds meant for Sonoma County, KCRA reported. 

Based on news reports and information provided to EdSource, the mistake was corrected sometime between January and March. 

The funding issue was identified on Jan. 28, and the underpaid counties received their correct payments by Jan. 30, according to the controller’s office. 

The additional affected county education offices were notified, the controller’s office said. County offices, such as Shasta, reported that none of the $6.2 million in misallocated money had been spent, the Siskiyou Daily News reported. The controller’s office ordered the return of the funds by March 5. 

Based on communication in February with the controller’s office, the San Mateo County education office in the Bay Area was overpaid $1.6 million. The county office has since repaid the funds to the state, officials told EdSource. 

Sutter County agreed to return the $80 million last week but is keeping more than $200,000 in accrued interest, KCRA reported. 

“I just wonder how many mistakes like this the state is making across the board,” Sutter County Supervisor Dan Flores said during a meeting, KCRA reported.

The controller’s office said it took immediate steps to “strengthen safeguards around payment processing,” including an enhanced review and approval process. 

California’s 58 county education offices operate special education, migrant youth and juvenile programs. However, many offer programs and initiatives to serve all the county’s students across multiple school districts, much more than the number of students they directly support.

California teachers have slightly better morale on average than their peers in other states, but more are planning to leave the profession in the next decade, according to Education Week’s annual The State of Teaching report.

Teacher morale dipped slightly across the country this year, after some improvement last year, according to the survey of 5,802 U.S. teachers.

 “There’s a lot of evidence that indicates that teacher morale has been declining nationwide and is at, by some measures, the lowest point in recent memory,” said Holly Kurtz, director of the EdWeek Research Center. 

California teachers scored 16 on the Teacher Morale Index, which is based on three questions from the Education Week survey. The morale score for U.S. teachers overall was 13. The scale measures teacher morale from -100 to +100.

Nearly half of California teachers who were surveyed plan to retire or quit in the next 10 years. Nationwide, an estimated 35% of teachers plan to leave the profession in the next decade, Kurtz said.

The findings are similar to a survey released in January by the California Teachers Association. It found that while a majority of teachers are satisfied with their job, 40% are considering leaving education within the next few years — nearly half for financial reasons.

Teacher morale is increasingly important as states continue to struggle with teacher shortages, especially in hard-to-fill jobs like special education, science, technology, math, engineering and bilingual education. 

Low teacher morale directly affects students, said Alex Robins, a social science teacher at Terra Linda High School in San Rafael. Teachers with high morale create a positive environment that helps students to enjoy learning, he said. 

Educator morale began to decline during the pandemic when teachers struggled with distance teaching, Kurtz said. The additional difficulties they faced when they returned to the classroom also contributed to the loss of morale. 

Teachers who took part in the 30-question survey said that the ability to take mental health days, smaller class sizes, more planning time, four-day work weeks and improved student behavior would make them feel better about their jobs.

More planning time tops wish list

Additional planning time would most improve teacher morale, according to the survey results. This was particularly important for younger teachers.

“Getting more planning time and being paid for it, and being supported in it — that’s only going to help teachers feel more prepared, and I imagine feel more comfortable and confident in the classroom,” Robins said.

Teachers listed improved student behavior as the second most important factor for improving teacher morale. Three-quarters of elementary school teachers, 61% of middle school teachers and 54% of high school teachers surveyed said student behavior is getting worse.

Discipline problems were the result of a perfect storm of factors that worsened when students lost socialization during the pandemic and when schools shifted to restorative justice models of discipline that weren’t always communicated well to teachers or implemented with the necessary resources, Kurtz said.

More than half of the teachers who took the survey said improving student behavior would boost their morale. They called for restrictions on students’ use of cellphones and other personal devices, tougher consequences for students who misbehave, limits on parents’ ability to undermine those consequences and instruction for parents on teaching their children to behave in school. 

“Perhaps because they report larger class sizes, California teachers are somewhat more likely than colleagues in other states to say that smaller class sizes would have a major positive impact on their students’ behavior and ability to manage their classroom,” Kurtz said. 

California class sizes are some of the largest in the nation, averaging about 29 students, while the national average is 25, according to the survey. Overall, the teachers surveyed agreed that 19 is the ideal number of students in a classroom. California teachers said class sizes should be between 20 and 24 students. 

Schedule more important than pay

Work schedules seemed to be even more important to teacher morale than pay, with a 36-point gap in the morale score between teachers who felt they had a better work schedule than their family and friends, and those who did not.

Teacher pay has been a central issue in contract negotiations in California this year, where teachers have the highest average pay in the nation, according to the National Education Association. In 2025, the average starting salary for a California teacher was $58,409, and the average salary was $101,084, according to the NEA. 

More than a third of California teachers surveyed by Education Week said their salaries were better or about the same as those of their family members and friends.

Researchers did not find a correlation between salary and morale, Kurtz said.

“One thing we did find a correlation with is whether or not you think your salary is better or worse than the salary of the people you’re close to,” Kurtz said. “People who felt like their salary was better or the same as their family or friends tended to have higher morale.”

By LINDSAY WHITEHURST, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court cleared the way Monday for California schools to tell parents if their children identify as transgender without getting the student's approval, granting an emergency appeal from a conservative legal group.

The order blocks for now a state law that bans automatic parental notification requirements if students change their pronouns or gender expression at school.

The split decision comes after religious parents and educators challenged California school policies aimed at preventing schools from outing students to their families. Two sets of Catholic parents represented by the Thomas More Society say it caused schools to mislead them and secretly facilitate the children's social transition despite their objections.

California, on the other hand, argued that students have the right to privacy about their gender expression, especially if they fear rejection from their families. The state said that school policies and state law are aimed at striking a balance with parents’ rights.

The high court majority, though, sided with the parents and reinstated a lower-court order blocking the law and school policies while the case continues to play out.

“The parents who assert a free exercise claim have sincere religious beliefs about sex and gender, and they feel a religious obligation to raise their children in accordance with those beliefs. California’s policies violate those beliefs,” and burden the free exercise of religion, the majority wrote in an unsigned order.

The court's three liberal justices publicly dissented, saying the case is still working its way through lower courts and there was no need to step in now. “If nothing else, this Court owes it to a sovereign State to avoid throwing over its policies in a slapdash way, if the Court can provide normal procedures. And throwing over a State’s policy is what the Court does today,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote.

Conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, meanwhile, noted they would have gone further and granted teachers' appeal to lift restrictions for them.

The Thomas More Society called the decision “the most significant parental rights ruling in a generation.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom's office defended the law, saying teachers should be focused on instruction, not required “to be gender cops.”

The order “undermines student privacy and the ability to learn in a safe and supportive classroom, free from discrimination based on gender identity,” said Marissa Saldivar, a spokesperson for the Democratic governor.

The Supreme Court has ruled for religious plaintiffs in other recent cases, including allowing parents to pull their children from public-school lessons if they object to storybooks with LGBTQ+ characters.

The California order comes months after the court upheld state bans on gender-identity-related healthcare for minors. The justices also seem to be leaning toward allowing states to ban transgender athletes from playing on girls sports teams.

School policies for transgender students, meanwhile, have also been on the court’s radar in other cases.

The court rebuffed another similar case out of Wisconsin in December, but three conservative justices indicated they would have heard the case. Justice Samuel Alito called the school policies “an issue of great and growing national importance.”

The justices have been weighing whether to hear arguments in cases out of states like Massachusetts and Florida filed by other parents who say schools facilitated social transition without informing them.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, found in January that California's policies violated parents' right to access their children's education records. The Justice Department also sued after determining the states' transgender athlete policies violate federal civil rights law.

By Diana Lambert, EdSource

Twin Rivers Unified School District teachers in Sacramento County will go on strike Thursday for the first time in the district’s history.

Schools will remain open, and students will be required to attend, according to the district website. Administrators, support staff and substitutes will supervise students and provide educational activities. Meals and transportation will continue to be provided.

Twin Rivers teachers are striking to improve their pay and benefits. The teachers have asked for a 12% salary increase over two years. The district offered 2.5% the first year and no guarantee for the next year, according to Brittoni Ward, president of Twin Rivers United Educators (TRUE). 

For several years, the district has asked for waivers to allow it to use less than the state required 55% of its budget on salaries and benefits for classroom teachers, according to the union.

“Every single day, more than 2,000 of our students are left without a permanent, credentialed teacher in their classroom,” Ward said in a statement. “Teachers are standing up to stop resources from being diverted from our students for far too long.” 

The strike announcement came after a fact-finding report from a state panel found that Twin Rivers Unified salaries were comparable to those in similar districts and recommended a cost-of-living increase of 2.3% retroactive to July 1, 2025, and an ongoing 2.4% increase effective in July. 

The report also found that health benefits were lagging behind other districts and recommended that Twin Rivers pay a contribution, based on the cost of a Kaiser HMO premium, for each union member and their family until June 20, 2027, unless both parties negotiate an extension.

Fact-finding reports are non-binding, and if either party disagrees with them, negotiations can continue, or a strike can be called.

This story was originally published on Feb. 27 by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

If your child’s teacher hasn’t threatened to go on strike recently, they probably will soon.

Thousands of California K-12 teachers have walked off their jobs or voted to strike in the past few months, as part of a strategic, statewide effort by the California Teachers Association to boost salaries and benefits — and get the public’s attention.

“All these districts going out on strike — it’s not a coincidence at all,” said David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers union. “Everywhere in the state there are people with unmet needs. The conditions have been ripe for a long time.”

San Francisco teachers went on strike for four days last month. West Contra Costa teachers went on strike in December. San Diego, Woodland, Apple Valley, Duarte and Madera teachers planned to strike in the past few months but reached a settlement at the last minute. Teachers in Los Angeles, Oakland, Dublin, West Sacramento, Twin Rivers and Natomas have voted overwhelmingly to strike. In Berkeley, Soquel and other districts, teachers are holding rallies and appear headed for strike votes.

Ten local teachers unions under the umbrella of the California Teachers Association worked for years to align their contracts so they’d expire at the same time: June 30, 2025. The idea, Goldberg said, was to trigger a wave of negotiations and potential strikes to garner public attention and flex political muscle. Teachers unions from at least a dozen other districts have also joined the effort, even though they weren’t part of the original cohort.

“We’re a strong union with a lot of resources, and we’re taking advantage of that,” Goldberg said, whose union represents about 310,000 teachers. “Teachers are learning from each other, and getting some clarity on how to win resources for public schools.”

Public and political priorities

Teacher contracts vary by district, but the demands are similar: higher salaries, better benefits and amenities that affect student well-being, such as sanctuary protection for immigrants. 

Considering the ever-escalating cost of living in California, the demands are not a surprise, said Julia Koppich, an education consultant who specializes in labor-management relations.

Teachers in expensive cities like San Francisco often can’t afford to live near their jobs, she said, noting that starting teachers in San Francisco Unified earn about $80,000. San Francisco’s starting police officers, by comparison, make about $120,000.

It’s been a frustration for the teaching profession for decades, she said. But districts don’t have much control over their revenues and substantial increases in spending would have to come from the state, she said.

“To be sure, the issue of marshaling sufficient resources is a district conversation about teacher worth,” Koppich said. “But, ultimately, it’s a state discussion about public and political priorities.”

District financial hardships

At the same time that teachers are demanding more money, school districts are facing financial hardships. Declining enrollment, especially in urban districts, has meant half-empty classrooms and less money from the state, which funds schools based on how many students show up every day. Closing schools is the obvious answer, but that’s proven to be deeply unpopular and few school boards appear willing to take that step.

Another financial challenge has been the end of pandemic relief money. California schools received more than $23.4 billion in one-time grants intended to help students recover from pandemic-related learning loss. State and federal authorities advised schools to spend the money on temporary tutors, after-school and summer programs and other short-term expenses. But some districts, including Los Angeles Unified, San Diego Unified and San Francisco Unified, used some of their funds to increase teacher pay or hire permanent staff, which they’re now struggling to pay for after the grant money ended.

So even though the state has increased K-12 school funding the past few years, some districts are financially strapped. It’s unclear whether they can afford teachers’ demands for higher salaries or more generous benefits, said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

Los Angeles Unified, for example, gave its teachers 5% raises plus a $2,000 one-time stipend and a $500 bonus. The district’s nurses, who are also represented by the union, got $5,000 stipends.

“The unions are saying, ‘We know you have an ATM back there. If you were nice, you’d push the buttons,’” Roza said. But districts’ money is tight, she said, “so we’re at a stand off.”

If districts agree to teachers’ demands, cuts will have to come from somewhere — most likely from programs considered non-essential, such as sports, electives, advanced placement classes and other offerings, she said. 

It could also mean staff layoffs. Tutors, classroom aides and newer teachers would be the most vulnerable. 

Those cuts would harm low-income students the most, Roza said, because they’re more likely to rely on special school programs and attend schools with newer teachers. Low-income students are also more likely to be affected by a strike, she said, because families typically have fewer options for child care and those students are more likely to suffer from academic disruptions.

School boards need to stand up for those students, she said, and do a better job negotiating with teachers unions. That entails more transparency about finances and a willingness to close under-used schools.

“It’s so irresponsible to erode services for vulnerable students because you don’t have a spine,” Roza said. 

‘Kids as leverage’

Lance Christensen, vice president of education policy at the California Policy Center, said California should get rid of teachers unions altogether. Teachers deserve higher salaries, he said, but the teachers union does not always act in the interests of students. 

The union devotes too much time to defending incompetent teachers, he said, and strikes are harmful to students and families. He also said the California Teachers Association has a political stranglehold on Sacramento that “overshadows every conversation in the Legislature, even if it’s not about education.”

He noted that charter schools and private schools are rarely unionized, and sometimes have better outcomes than traditional public schools. A handful of other states don’t allow teachers to collectively bargain, and at least 35 don’t allow teachers unions to strike.

“The union uses kids as leverage,” said Christensen, who ran for state superintendent of public instruction in 2022. “Right now, CTA is the biggest evil in California education.”

Next steps in San Francisco

In San Francisco, parent Meredith Dodson said she’s relieved the strike is over. Although most parents support teachers and believe they deserve better compensation, the strike was stressful  for families and disrupted learning for thousands of students.

The $183 million settlement includes raises and improved benefits for teachers, which the district plans to pay for by draining its reserve funds.

Parents now are bracing for the inevitable cuts. The district’s finances remain shaky, and aren’t likely to improve any time soon. 

“What comes next? Layoffs? Increased class sizes? State intervention?” said Dodson, who is executive director of the San Francisco Parents Coalition, a parent advocacy group. “There’s going to be some hard questions for the board, and they’re going to have to ask themselves, what’s best for kids?”