February 2018

Starcania Ford’s first call came not too long after she had completed two months of background checks and trainings. Could she come and pick up a young man waiting at the juvenile delinquency court near downtown Los Angeles? Ford, 38, who lives with her adult daughter, is the only licensed foster parent for probation youth in L.A. County. She’s part of a state initiative that has seen probation departments across the state jump headlong into the business of finding foster parents. The goal...

California will continue to lag behind other states in providing enough child care slots and diverse preschool options for all its nearly 2.5 million children under the age of 5 until it develops a more unified system that provides affordable care and makes it easier for families to enroll. That is a key recommendation in a recent report published by the Learning Policy Institute . Researchers say California needs to have one state-level agency that will help coordinate the state’s...

The Partnership for Los Angeles Schools is a unique school model that focuses on turning around the lowest-scoring schools with the highest dropout rates in the toughest neighborhoods of Los Angeles — Boyle Heights, Watts, and South Los Angeles. LA Unified invites the Partnership into struggling schools, which then benefit from more freedoms, community resources, and organizational support. Teachers and principals receive intensive professional development, and principals are sometimes...

For the first time in three years, homicides fell across the county. Police leaders and experts hesitated to credit the drop to any one factor or tactic, but a dramatic decrease in killings in southeastern San Diego might offer clues. That decrease matched a fall in nearly every other major crime category in 2017 as well, from assaults and rapes, to burglary and vehicle theft. There’s the Community Assistance Support Team made up of pastors and community members who reach out to victims and...

Wilms, professor of education emeritus in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, has spent his career dedicated to finding ways to apply his scholarship and some of UCLA’s institutional influence to advance social justice and equality. After taking a conflict mediation class in 1998 taught by Avis Ridley-Thomas, then-director of the dispute resolution program in the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office, Wilms had the idea to bring that to UCLA. So he invited...

A new study of race and school discipline in California counties has revealed that the black male student suspension rate decreased 5 percent between the 2011-2012 and 2016-2017 school years—from 17.8 percent of all black boys to 12.8 percent. Racial disparities remain intact, however. Black boys’ 12.8 percent suspension rate during the last school year was more than 3.5 times the rate of the CA public school population as a whole (3.6 percent), according to the report, which was created in...

Black male students in rural counties and those in foster care are suspended at some of the highest rates in California, a new report has found. The report also found that the disparity in suspension rates among black male students compared to all students is greatest in kindergarten through the 3rd grade. The report, titled " Get Out! Black Male Suspensions in California Public Schools ," looked at suspensions through the 2016-17 school year. It was authored by J. Luke Wood and Frank Harris...

For the past week, the East County Chamber of Commerce has been giving out wristbands to local homeless shelters and first responders. Their goal is to better connect homeless people to services and resources. People can text "ConnectEC" to 77453, which then gives them options for help covering basic needs such as health and shelter. The idea is to refer them to local resources, like the Crisis House in El Cajon. The East County Chamber of Commerce said they worked with people who are...

Carter's uncommon approach to his cases has been on display recently. The 73-year-old U.S. District Court judge is presiding over a clash pitting homeless advocates against officials from Orange County and the cities of Anaheim, Costa Mesa and Orange who are seeking to clear out homeless encampments along a three-mile stretch of the Santa Ana River trail. Officials began clearing the river encampments last month, but the judge insisted it be done "humanely and with dignity," and issued a...

That collateral damage is courtesy of myopic local politicians focused more on trending social media topics rather than on pragmatic leadership. (For the purpose of this article, let’s differentiate between undocumented immigrants with notable criminal activity such as prior deportations, DUI, identity theft, domestic violence and other blatantly dangerous misconduct, and undocumented immigrants whose only illegal activity is their presence or employment in the U.S. That is a topic for...

As the number of homeless people has risen dramatically in Los Angeles, so has the tension between those living in squalor on the sidewalks and the residents who have to walk past their encampments, the smell of urine in the air. City officials struggle to balance the rights of homeless people with the rights of everyone else. The region clearly needs to create more housing, but that has been a maddeningly slow process in a city with 34,000 homeless people. In the meantime, homeless people...

Los Angeles County's homeless population is increasing faster than the supply of new housing, even with the addition of thousands of beds in the last two years and millions of dollars beginning to flow in from two ballot measures targeting the crisis, according to a long-awaited report by the region's homelessness agency. The report showed that officials two years ago far underestimated how much new housing would be needed when they asked city and county voters to approve the tax measures.