The Brief

As word of the damning sexual abuse accusations against César Chávez spread this week, California’s farmworking communities struggled to process and reconcile the disturbing details with the image of a labor icon and civil rights fighter many considered a hero.

Reached by phone, people described feeling stunned and disjointed after learning the news from a neighbor’s call, conversations with relatives, work meetings or social media.

“It’s almost too difficult to believe what is happening,” Maria García Hernández, a farmworker for more than 30 years, said in Spanish on Wednesday afternoon. The 52-year-old, who lives in Tulare County, said she and her parents benefited from Chávez's advocacy to include undocumented farmworkers in the last major comprehensive immigration reform in the 1980s.

“I still can’t quite believe it — that such a courageous person who fought for all of us to ensure we had shade, water, clean restrooms, better working conditions, that such a person, so dedicated to the people … could do that,” said García, who seeds and harvests plants in a job represented by the United Farm Workers, the union that Chávez and Dolores Huerta co-founded.

Huerta, now 95, revealed for the first time publicly that Chávez manipulated her into sex and raped her in the 1960s, telling The New York Times that the two encounters each left her pregnant. The Times’ multi-year investigation, published Wednesday, also detailed accusations by two women, daughters of union organizers, who said Chávez sexually abused them when they were children in the 1970s.

A farmworker picks grapes at a field in Fresno on Sept. 3, 2025.

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Gina Castro

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When Rolando Hernandez first heard about the allegations from coworkers during a job training meeting, the former agricultural worker was confused. He thought the discussion must be about someone else.

“Excuse me, but which César Chávez are you talking about?” Hernandez, 33, asked at the gathering. “Because I only know of one César Chávez who fought for farmworkers’ rights so that there’d be better wages and not so much injustice in the fields.”

“That’s the one,” came the response, leaving Hernandez speechless.

“It landed really heavy,” said Hernandez, an outreach educator for a Fresno-based farmworker nonprofit who began harvesting chile fields as a 14-year-old in Arizona before working with grapes and oranges in California.

The fallout from the revelations was almost immediate. California lawmakers announced they plan to rename the state holiday named after Chavez as Farmworkers Day. Cities, states and organizations, including the UFW, moved to postpone or cancel celebrations planned for March 31 in honor of the Mexican American labor leader’s birthday. Officials are considering renaming streets, parks, libraries, schools and other buildings named after Chávez.

For decades, Chávez and Huerta’s collaboration to advance farmworker rights has been celebrated in children’s textbooks, biographies, movies and parades. Now, mothers like García are troubled that more was not done sooner to prevent and respond to the alleged attacks.

“I feel for them; it really pains me in the bottom of my soul what happened to them,” García said. “But if what happened is true, why wasn’t it spoken of a long time ago? Why now?”

Chávez died in 1993. Huerta said she stayed silent for 60 years because she feared hurting the reputation of a man who became the face of the Mexican American civil rights movement, known for national boycotts, marches and strikes that achieved significant gains for thousands of farmworkers.

“I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work,” Huerta said in a statement after the Times investigation was published. “I have never identified myself as a victim, but I now understand that I am a survivor — of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”

Luz Gallegos, whose childhood experiences accompanying her parents to UFW pickets and marches inspired her to become a farmworker advocate, said she felt shattered by the revelations. Now the director of TODEC Legal Center, an immigrant and farmworker nonprofit in the Inland Empire and Coachella Valley, Gallegos praised the courage of Huerta and the other victims who carried their pain before choosing to speak up.

“We stand with our compañera Dolores Huerta and the survivors. What has been revealed is very painful and deeply disturbing,” said Gallegos, her voice cracking. “We know firsthand that silence has never protected our farmworker communities, and no movement or justice can ask people to stay silent about abuse — not then and not now.”

She, like others who spoke with KQED hours after hearing the news, said they want this moment of reckoning to help prevent similar abuses in the future. They hope the allegations against Chávez don’t undercut gains by the farmworker movement as a whole, built by many laborers and their families over decades.

“Right now, we are holding grief. I am holding so much pain in my chest, in my mind, in my heart,” Gallegos said. “At the same time, it’s a reflection that we cannot stay silent, we cannot let our movement end … reassuring our community that their voice matters and that no one should endure any type of abuse.”

A farmworker picks grapes at a field in Fresno on Sept. 3, 2025.

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Gina Castro

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KQED

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García, who started accompanying her parents to work in agriculture at the age of 10, said sexual harassment by farm labor contractors and supervisors was rampant. She was fired from jobs, she said, as retaliation for not agreeing to men’s advances. But joining the UFW helped improve her job conditions and feel supported to complain if there were problems, she said.

García said that if union insiders or others knew of the allegations against Chávez but failed to investigate or willingly ignored the underage victims, there should be consequences.

“If those people are still around — if they are still alive — then they must be held accountable,” she said.

Outside a courtroom in Fresno, where the UFW is fighting a Trump administration plan to make it cheaper to hire temporary farm labor, union president Teresa Romero asked the public to respect the privacy of victims who came forward, according to CalMatters.

“We do not condone the actions of César Chávez,” Romero said. “It’s wrong.”

The El Monte Union High School District agreed to sweeping reforms Friday in settling a state attorney general investigation into how it handled allegations staff sexually abused students.

The wide-ranging stipulated judgment with the school district draws to a close an 18-month investigation, which found “systemic shortfalls in the district’s response to allegations and complaints of sexual harassment, assault, and abuse of students.” The investigation was spurred by a 2023 article in Business Insider, The Predators’ Playground, which documented decades of sexual misconduct by teachers, coaches and other staff at one of the district’s schools, Rosemead High, ranging from sexual harassment and groping to statutory rape.

“Every child deserves to learn and grow in a safe and supportive school environment. Unfortunately, our investigation found that this has not always been the case for students enrolled in El Monte Union High School District,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said. District administrators, he added, “consistently mishandled students’ complaints of sexual harassment, assault, and abuse by District employees and others. In doing so, it jeopardized the safety and well-being of its students and violated the community’s trust. Today’s settlement marks a beginning, not an end. I am hopeful that the District will move swiftly to implement the reforms required by this settlement, and my office will be monitoring closely to ensure its compliance.”

In an emailed statement, El Monte Superintendent Edward Zuniga said that “student safety and well-being remain our highest priorities. This agreement reflects our continued commitment to strengthening systems that support safe, inclusive, and respectful learning environments.”

Reforms mandated after investigation

Among other changes, the stipulated judgment requires the district to designate a compliance coordinator to investigate complaints of sexual harassment or abuse and creates a centralized system to store documents related to investigations. It also requires the district to maintain a list of substitute teachers found to have violated the district’s employee policy on appropriate boundaries with students. The agreement requires the district to establish an advisory committee to study its compliance with the reforms and make additional recommendations, and to provide students and parents with training for how to recognize the signs of grooming — curriculum that Rosemead students have fought to have implemented for the past four years.

The agreement is a rare instance of state law enforcement taking an active role in a K-12 school district’s compliance with California education code and mandated reporting laws. The only other agreement like it was reached in 2024 with the Redlands Unified School District, following sexual abuse and misconduct allegations that cost the district more than $50 million in legal settlements. In El Monte’s case, announced Friday by Bonta at a press conference in Los Angeles, the judgment requires four years of court-supervised oversight, and includes sweeping reforms in how the district handles serious misconduct allegations.

In an interview with CalMatters, Bonta said that his office was focused on trying to establish best practices for school districts across the state in how to address sexual misconduct allegations when they surface. “I don’t think this will be the last case of this type, unfortunately,” Bonta said, adding that his staff would conduct unannounced site visits of the district in the months ahead to ensure compliance with the settlement. “We think we’ve arrived at a model that can really help districts that have failed systemically, transform.”

Attorneys in the justice department’s Bureau of Children's Justice conducted the investigation, which focused on the district’s handling of sexual misconduct allegations against school staff since 2018. It included a review of more than 100 complaints, thousands of pages of documents, and interviews with more than two dozen employees, former students and others. The investigation found that district officials had failed to properly respond to complaints, provide adequate reporting procedures and adequately maintain records of misconduct allegations.

The findings mirror those first identified by Business Insider, which sued the school district for not releasing records under the California Public Records Act. That case settled out of court, with district administrators agreeing to conduct new searches for records and pay $125,000 in legal fees. The district's head of human resources, Robin Torres, said in a deposition that her office had discarded disciplinary records it was legally obligated to keep. She acknowledged that her predecessors had failed to properly investigate allegations that staff had sexually harassed students or had sex with former students soon after they graduated.

Years of sex abuse allegations

The stipulated judgment is the latest fallout from generations of Rosemead High students coming forward to share their stories of being preyed upon and groomed for sexual relationships at school. The LA Sheriff’s Department opened criminal probes into at least three former staffers, while students walked out of class in protest and several teachers resigned following district investigations. At least five civil lawsuits have been filed on behalf of former students. Many were represented by attorneys Dominique Boubion and Michael Carrillo, who previously brought a case against the district that resulted in a $5 million verdict in favor of a former student who said she was abused by a teacher the district allowed to continue teaching after he was accused of fondling children.

“The attorney general’s intervention confirms what survivors have been saying for years: EMUHSD failed its students,” Boubion told CalMatters. “This was not an isolated breakdown. It was a longstanding failure to protect children, and it stretches back decades. The district should stop resisting and start complying. Students have the right to be safe at school.”

A new state law, the Safe Learning Environments Act, took effect earlier this year and gives school officials more tools to identify suspected misconduct. State Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, a Democrat from Alhambra whose district includes Rosemead High, authored the law.

Among other reforms, the law establishes the creation of a non-public database of alleged staff misconduct that administrators are required to consult before hiring new employees. Similar databases already exist in other states as part of a growing nationwide effort to prohibit instances of “pass the trash,” where educators accused of sexual misconduct leave a school district only to return to the classroom elsewhere. This happened numerous times in the El Monte district.

Matt Drange is a journalist with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Projectand an alumnus of Rosemead High School. He can be reached at matt.drange@occrp.org.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

You know that moment.

You tell your child it’s time for bed or they can’t have that candy, and they suddenly start crying, maybe even throwing themselves on the floor.

That’s called dysregulation, which parents may know all too well as tantrums and meltdowns, such as crying, kicking, screaming or shutting down. But it can also show up in other ways.

Sometimes it looks like avoiding eye contact or interaction, high energy and trouble focusing.

"Dysregulation can be thought of as a mismatch between the child's energy level and the energy level that is required to participate in the activity that they need to do, or to exist in the environment that they need to exist in that moment,” said Kira Bender, a pediatric occupational therapist at the Center for Connection and founder of Here We Grow, an occupational therapy and disability consultative service.

It’s hard — and often ineffective — to reason with young children when they’re like this. They're not in a state to learn new skills because they can’t access the logical part of their brain, which helps them think.

When LAist asked readers of our early childhood newsletter and HeyBB text group what resources they wished they had more of, many parents said they wanted to know how to help their children (and themselves) get through these big feelings. We talked to child development experts to get their tips.

How to support your child during dysregulation

Regulate yourself first

It’s OK to take a deep breath and pause if needed to regulate your own feelings.

Make sure your heart rate and breathing are steady, and that you're able to calmly speak to your child.

These moments matter because children’s mirror neurons — brain cells that activate when we observe others’ actions and perform them ourselves — are engaged, helping explain why children may mimic their parents' behaviors, according to Meryl Opsal, founder of Romp and Rollick, which offers process art and sensory classes along with consulting services for families, schools, and businesses.

Being calm yourself will help them to do the same.

Bender said reframing the situation is a powerful tool when you need to keep your cool: “My child is not giving me a hard time. My child is having a hard time.”

Connection during dysregulation

Once you’re in a steady state, meet your child where they are, especially by using your body, breath, and energy to stay connected with your child and help them calm down.

You might go down to their level, speak in a calm voice or acknowledge what they’re feeling — “I see you’re really upset.”

This is known as co-regulation — one of the most important ways to help your young child learn to self-regulate, which is when one is able to appropriately manage one's emotions and behaviors.

There’s a misconception that this approach is coddling or preventing a child from self-soothing on their own. However, research suggests that co-regulation is actually a crucial part of regulation, said occupational therapist Kira Bender, referencing Mona Delahooke's book, Brain-Body Parenting.

Bender also said punishment is not an effective strategy for helping young children emotionally regulate, pointing to research discussed in the books The Explosive Child and Beyond Behaviors by Ross Greene. Instead, co-regulation involves validating how your child feels.

Support will look different for each child. Some children like hugs while others need space. Observe what works for your child and provide what they need to feel better.

While it’s important to let children feel their emotions, staying stuck in that state can feel overwhelming.

Once they start calming down, it’s okay to redirect them — using play is a helpful tool to help them move forward. Make sure it’s an activity they connect with.

Timing is very important here.

“Engaging them in the next thing can be really helpful in order to help their brain shift from this state of dysregulation to this state of attention,” said Bender.

Build emotional awareness

Parents can also help their children by teaching them emotional awareness. For toddlers and preschoolers, helping them tune into their bodies is especially helpful.

This can help them understand what they’re feeling and communicate what they need to do to become more regulated.

You can ask them what they’re physically feeling in their body. For example: Is their heart beating fast? Do their hands feel clammy? Does their face feel hot?

Then teach them what they can do to help themselves. Parents can also model these skills for their children.

For example: “I'm noticing that I'm really having trouble focusing and keeping my patience right now. I think I need to check in with my body. I think I need to get a snack.”

Incorporate these skills daily so that when dysregulation happens, children will have the tools to soothe strong emotions.

According to Bender, this is often the first step in teaching them how to identify and express their emotions.

This doesn’t need to be a big discussion, especially since younger children have limited understanding of concepts and short attention spans.

Focus on senses

Children are attuned to their senses as early as the womb.

As a parent, understanding your child’s sensory system can help support your child’s emotional regulation, especially to promote a sense of safety and relaxation.

Traditionally, people know of the five human senses: touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste.

When your child’s upset, giving them their favorite stuffed animal (touch) or putting on music they like (hearing) can be helpful.

There are also three lesser-known senses, including interoception (internal body signals like hunger, thirst, pain or emotions), vestibular system (balance, movement and spatial orientation) and proprioception (body position and movement).

Children can utilize proprioception through activities like climbing and jumping or being tucked under their parent’s arm while reading their favorite book, using a weighted blanket, or receiving a deep hug.

Helping your child engage with these hidden senses can be a grounding experience.

Activities to do at home

Play is important, especially through open-ended activities, which help children process their emotions. You can incorporate these activities when you see your children on the verge of being dysregulated, but it can also serve as redirection after they’ve calmed down.

Provide a calm sensory space

It’s helpful to have a space at home where your child feels safe, cozy, calm, and relaxed, whether it’s their bedroom, a playroom or your living room — as long as they have a space they can retreat to when they need some support.

Think about a child’s senses: what can they touch, see, hear and more. That could be a stuffed animal, a weighted blanket, their favorite books or audiobooks and music.

“One of the most underrated sensory tools, in my opinion, for many young children is a tent,” said occupational therapist Kira Bender. “They love the feeling that this is a space all for themselves. So that is a very easy place to start.”

Use bubbles and balloons

Bubbles and balloons are effective tools for redirecting a child's focus after intense emotions, said Olivia Martinez-Hauge, occupational therapist and co-owner of Sensory Space Design, which helps create spaces specifically designed for families' needs.

Plus, they help bring attention back to their breath, since during dysregulation they often feel detached from their bodies and minds.

Make it a game by asking them to take a deep breath and blow bubbles in different ways — one at a time or a bunch all at once. Get creative!

The same idea works with balloons: take a deep breath in, then blow up the balloon. Kids can have fun playing hot potato with it, trying to keep it from falling, or letting it fly around after inflating it.

Incorporate sensory play

Toys or items that stimulate the senses are great tools to help calm your child’s nervous system.

“It's like a little lab that creates a safe space where we can get over these small frustrations and regulations and co-regulate together,” said Opsal of Romp and Rollick. There are simple ways to incorporate sensory play:

• Bath time: Opsal said water is a “magic power” because of its soothing effect, from the wave-like movement to the sound of a bath. You can also add bubbles, water toys and color.
• Mealtime: Let infants eat by themselves with their hands.
• Sensory bins: Lay a king-sized bedsheet on the floor, ideally outside, grabbing any container like a big bowl or box, then filling it with a “taste-safe, but not delicious” food source like rice and a small cup. (She strongly warns against dried beans—they’re a possible choking hazard.)

The best part: there are no instructions.

It’s OK if they get messy or play with rice in unconventional ways.

Let your child put it in their shirt, pour it over parts of their body, or make snow angels out of it. That’s part of the fun!

While younger children often have shorter attention spans, Opsal says that’s not true in her sensory bin classes.

“It's because that rhythmic nature just calms the nervous system and helps them lock in,” said Opsal. “Ah, it's amazing to watch.”

Try preventative play through mirroring

Georgie Wisen-Vincent, a nationally recognized play therapy expert and the director of the Play Strong Institute, said playing with your child using mirroring techniques creates a calm, connected experience — one that you can return to when your child is dysregulated.

Basically, that means you reflect back what your child is feeling during play, whether through facial expressions, body language, or tone.

For example, if your child is playing with toys and there’s a battle between superheroes and villains, joining in shows them you understand what they’re feeling.

When you play along — following their lead and reflecting their emotions — you’re building trust, Wisen-Vincent said.

So, when a meltdown happens, they know you’re there to support them, just like you are when you’re playing together.

Think of it as "preventative play.”

Here’s one way parents can think about their role here: “I'm there to be the superhero of their emotional experience right now,” said Wisen-Vincent. “We can weather this together.”

Use music and movement

Music is a wonderful way to connect with the wide range of emotions we all feel.

Whether through singing or dancing, it helps us connect to our bodies and breath — tools that can assist us in self-regulation.

Veronika Luu, a music speech educator at PLAY, an art school serving young children, says that singing together or having small dance parties at home are simple ways to include music in your family's daily life.

Do it together! It encourages playfulness.

Helpful Resources

Here are a few books, guides and organizations recommended by the experts interviewed in this piece that can give some additional tips.

• Beyond Behaviors, by Mona Delahooke 
• The Way of Play, by Georgie Wisen-Vincent and Tina Payne Bryson 
• The Whole-Brain Child, by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson 
• No Bad Kids, by Janet Lansbury 
• Play Strong Institute: Resources on play-based therapy.  
• Association for Play Therapy: Provides a directory to help families find a play therapist.  
• Autism Level Up: A space created for the neurodivergent community by the community. It has resources, supportive discussion spaces, meetups and more! 
• Sensory Space Design: Occupational therapists help create spaces specifically designed to meet families' needs, including those of families with autism and ADHD. 
• Romp and Rollick: Offers process art and sensory classes along with consulting services for families, schools, and businesses 
• Here We Grow: An occupational therapy and disability consultative service. 
• Center for Connection: Has an array of therapy services, including psychotherapy, assessments, educational therapy, play therapy, occupational therapy, and speech & language therapy. 

L.A. County CEO Fesia Davenport, who has been on medical leave for the last five months, has announced she’ll be stepping down in mid-April, citing health concerns. While on leave, she has faced scrutiny from the public and county employees — as well as a lawsuit — over a secretive $2 million payout she received last August.

Davenport gave notice on Wednesday to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors — her bosses — that she plans to step down effective April 16, according to a spokesperson for her office.

Davenport remains on medical leave and her second-in-command, Joseph Nicchitta, continues to serve as acting CEO, according to a statement from the CEO’s office.

“We appreciate Fesia's nearly three decades of service to Los Angeles County and all that she has accomplished on behalf of its residents and communities,” the statement added.

Davenport said in a LinkedIn post she was stepping down “to focus on my health and wellness.” She also emailed CEO office staff to say she’s learned she has a predisposition for the same type of health problem that killed her brother Raymond in 2018 and that two of her sisters experienced last year. One of her sisters will require 24-hour care for the rest of her life, Davenport wrote.

“The County CEO role requires an extraordinary amount of time and energy to meet the demands of the job, and although I originally assumed that I would be able to return in early 2026, I now know that I would be unable to continue to do the job as it deserves to be done while also prioritizing my health,” she added.

The $2 million taxpayer payout from the county was in response to her claiming she was harmed by a voter-approved measure that will change her job almost two years after her employment contract expires. The settlement was marked “confidential” and not made public until it was brought to light by LAist.

A lawsuit filed last month claims the payout is illegal because Davenport did not have a valid legal dispute with the county. Under the state Constitution, local government settlement payouts are illegal gifts of public funds if they’re in response to allegations that completely lack legal merit or exceed the agency’s “maximum exposure,” according to court rulings.

On Tuesday, county supervisors ordered new transparency measures in response to LAist revealing the secretive payout to Davenport. The county will now create a public dashboard of settlements between the county and its executives, and make sure all such settlements are reported to the public on meeting agendas after they’re finalized.

In her message to staff, Davenport said she was proud of their work together. She pointed to balancing the county’s budget, developing a plan to compensate victims in the largest sexual assault settlement in U.S. history and protecting the county's credit rating when other agencies were being downgraded.

Three candidates for Long Beach City Council have joined forces in their bid to unseat the incumbents they’re challenging in the primary election this June.

Deb Kahookele, running for District 1; Tara Riggi, running for District 5; and Sequoia Neff, running for District 9, announced their combined ticket in a video published on social media earlier this month.

At a joint campaign event in front of around 100 people in Bixby Knolls on Wednesday, they reiterated their goal of “breaking up the 9-0 votes” they say are all too common on the mostly closely aligned Long Beach City Council, where it’s rare to see a narrowly-split vote.

All three are political newcomers, coming from careers in real estate.

They’ve claimed the grassroots lane this election, winning backing from resident groups like the Long Beach Reform Coalition that views itself as a check on City Hall power, occasionally suing — and winning — on tax issues.

Kahookele, Riggi and Neff say they feel disenfranchised from the current city government, something they emphasize in their slogan: people over politics.

They’re taking on three well-established incumbents: Mary Zendejas in the downtown area’s District 1, Joni Ricks-Oddie in North Long Beach’s District 9 and Megan Kerr in District 5 that extends east and west from Long Beach Airport. The three have already raised tens of thousands of dollars each for their reelection races and won endorsements from the mayor, other local politicians, labor and business groups.

Tara Riggi, center, and Sequoia Neff, left, talk with voters before a campaign event in Long Beach on March 19, 2026. Riggi is running for the District 5 seat.

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Riggi said she decided to run for office after moving to the Cal Heights neighborhood and becoming president of the neighborhood association.

“My allegiance is to my community,” Riggi said at the event. “We are a truly grassroots campaign.”

Kahookele, who moved around a lot at an early age because her father was in the Army, said she found Long Beach home after moving to the city in 2010 and has since risen to prominent roles in several local organizations, including the Promenade Area Residents Association, Long Beach Pride and Long Beach Rotary.

“My votes aren’t going to be bought,” she said.

Deb Kahookele speaks with voters at a campaign event in Long Beach on Wednesday, March 19, 2026. She is running for the District 1 City Council seat.

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Neff, a Poly High School grad and mother of six who founded a local youth basketball league and track club, owns a brokerage firm that operates in multiple states. Early this year, she held a walk to raise awareness about human trafficking in her district.

“North Long Beach has been unheard and overlooked for too long,” Neff said. “And it’s time we’re a part of the conversation, and I just want to step up and do that.”

At Wednesday’s campaign event, they repeatedly hit on the theme that current representatives aren’t doing enough to represent their constituents, and they vowed to dig into the city’s spending to remedy a looming $80 million deficit. They pledged to vote against the possibility of any new tax measures.

Sequoia Neff speaks with voters before a campaign event in Long Beach on Wednesday, March 19, 2026. Neff is a candidate for the District 9 seat.

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Long Beach Post

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North Long Beach resident James Murray said he showed up Wednesday to hear more from Neff after she attended a recent Starr King Neighborhood Association meeting, and he came away convinced.

“I think it’s time for a change,” he said.

Dan Pressburg, a longtime neighborhood organizer in the DeForest Park neighborhood, said the three candidates joining together was the right move: He wants people outside the current political structure to have a chance to rise to power.

You can see a full list of candidates who will appear on the June ballot here. The Long Beach Post will have continuing coverage, including a full voter guide to be published in the coming months.