The Brief

Community college students in California could gain access to medication abortion through campus health centers under a proposal that would extend reproductive health services already required at the state’s public universities.

Assembly Bill 2540 would require community colleges with student health centers to offer access to medication abortion beginning in 2029, if the Legislature provides funding. The bill builds on Senate Bill 24, a 2019 law that requires University of California and California State University student health centers to provide medication abortion beginning in 2023.

Supporters say the bill would close an access gap for community college students who may face transportation, cost, privacy or insurance barriers when care is only available off campus. But campus health center directors warn that many community colleges may not have the funding, staffing or clinical capacity to provide the service.

Authored by Assemblymember Catherine Stefani, a Democrat from San Francisco, the bill would apply to community colleges with student health centers — estimated at roughly 92 campuses statewide. If the Legislature provides funding, those campuses would have to offer access to abortion by medication techniques beginning in 2029.

“We are closing a critical gap by ensuring that community college students, one of the most diverse and economically vulnerable populations in our state, have the same access to care as their peers at four-year institutions,” Stefani told lawmakers during an Assembly Health Committee hearing in April.

The bill would also require all campuses to promote awareness of the service, provide information to students and post availability online. The awareness requirement would extend to universities, which were not compelled to publicize medication abortion services under the previous law.

Community colleges fill healthcare gap for students

“Healthcare is a basic need for any human,” said Stephanie Goldman, executive director of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges, a statewide advocacy organization that represents community college faculty and supports AB 2540. “And of course, abortion access and abortion is a healthcare issue.”

Goldman said community colleges increasingly operate under a “whole student” model that goes beyond academics to include food access, housing support, childcare, mental health and healthcare services. Reproductive healthcare access can directly affect whether students are able to remain focused on school, she said.

“It’s helpful that they understand that they have this kind of healthcare on campus and available to them, should they need it,” Goldman said.

Mifepristone and misoprostol at a Wyoming abortion clinic in Casper on March 10, 2025.

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Natalie Behring

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Student leaders backing the bill say community college students often face challenges accessing reproductive healthcare outside campus systems, particularly in rural areas.

“Where you go to school should not determine what access you get just because you went to a community college system versus a four-year system,” said Alisha Nagpal, a student at Folsom Lake College who serves as vice president of legislative affairs for the Student Senate for California Community Colleges.

Nagpal said some community college students live hours away from providers, lack transportation or may not know what health services already exist on campus. She pointed to online-only students, low-income students and undocumented students as groups that may face additional barriers obtaining reproductive healthcare off campus.

Community college health centers vary in size and services

But while supporters frame the bill as a matter of equal access, health center directors say implementing the proposal statewide may be far more complicated than applying the UC and Cal State models.

According to the Assembly Appropriations Committee analysis, the community college health centers “vary widely in structure and capacity, with many operating under limited staffing models or contracting services out to community providers and hospitals.”

The Health Services Association of California Community Colleges, which represents student health programs across the system, opposes the bill. In an April 15 letter to lawmakers, the organization said many community college health centers do not prescribe medication, nor do they have sufficient staffing or the infrastructure needed to provide medication abortion onsite.

Michelle Barkley, president of the association and a nurse at Cosumnes River College, said many community college health centers function more as public health entry points than full-service clinics.

“Some of our campuses have 5,000 students,” Barkley said. “Their health center is run by a single registered nurse.”

Barkley said many campuses currently rely on referrals to outside providers rather than onsite reproductive healthcare services.

Funding may be a challenge

The bill’s projected cost has become a key point of disagreement between supporters and community college health center directors.

The California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office estimates implementing the bill could cost between $7 million and $27.9 million in one-time startup costs across all 93 community college health centers, plus between $5.6 million and $9.3 million annually to maintain services. Those estimates are not limited to the cost of medication. The appropriations analysis says the expenses could include staffing, training, equipment, telehealth services, billing support and other infrastructure needed for campuses to provide or coordinate care.

Community college health centers may be partially funded through student health fees, though not all campuses charge them. The analysis said most campuses charge an average health fee of about $23 per academic term. The California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office lists the 2025-26 maximum health services fee at $27 per semester and $22 for summer, intersession or quarter terms.

Supporters of the bill argue the projected costs may overstate the financial burden. According to the committee analysis, Stefani’s office argues medication abortion services could become financially sustainable through Medi-Cal reimbursement, private insurance billing, third-party vendors and telehealth partnerships.

Nagpal pointed to language making the bill contingent on legislative funding, saying community colleges would not be expected to implement the requirement without state support.

“If funding is not provided at community college campuses, there’s no legal expectation for (community colleges) to provide the service,” Nagpal said.

The bill was put on hold in the Assembly Appropriations Committee on May 6 because of its potential cost. On May 14, the committee advanced the bill on an 11-4 vote after making amendments.

The amendments changed how the bill would apply to community colleges. Earlier language would have required community colleges with student health centers to offer medication abortion onsite, but the amended bill now says campuses must “offer access” to the service beginning in 2029. The bill still allows care to be provided by campus staff, through telehealth or through contracted external agencies, but it now also includes partnerships with community health providers “as appropriate.”

The amendments also broadened what colleges would report to the state, allowing campuses to count services provided through outside healthcare providers instead of only those performed at campus health centers.

AB 2540 was referred to the Senate Health and Education committees on June 10. After additional amendments, the bill was re-referred July 2 to the Senate Appropriations Committee, where lawmakers will review its fiscal impact.

The latest amendments further define how community colleges could comply, including through referrals, “warm handoffs,” written partnerships with licensed providers or a statewide provider agreement through the Chancellor’s Office. They also clarify that state funding could support costs such as telehealth, staffing, training, billing support, outreach and reporting.

Andrea Baltodano is a contributor with the College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. CalMatters higher education coverage is supported by a grant from the College Futures Foundation.

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

The Los Angeles Unified School District shortened the application window for specialized academic programs this year, and will no longer accept paper forms.

Applications for the district’s magnet, dual language and affiliated charter schools for the next academic year opened Oct. 1 and are due Nov. 6, 2026.

How does it work?

If you want your child to attend their neighborhood school, enrollment is fairly straightforward. There’s a separate process for the district’s specialized programs called Choices.

There are two windows to apply — on-time and late. The latter consists of all the spaces left after families who applied on time accept their offers.

Here’s the timeline for the 2027-28 school year:

• Sept. 2026: School fairs start.
• Oct. 1, 2026: Choices application opens.
• Nov. 6, 2026:  Deadline to apply online.
• Dec. 1, 2026:  Late applications begin. 
• February 2027: On-time applicant results sent. 
• March 5, 2027: Deadline to accept or decline school offers for on-time applicants. School assignments for late applications follow the processing of on-time applications. Students may be offered a spot through the start of the spring semester. 
• Aug. 12, 2027: The school year begins.

LAUSD will no longer accept paper Choices applications. If families do not have a computer, they can use a smartphone to complete an application. LAUSD will also allow families to use computers at school parent centers.

How to prepare

Every child within LAUSD boundaries is assigned a school — find yours through the district’s “resident school identifier.”

But there are also hundreds of other programs available through the Choices process.

Those include:

• Magnets: Programs on a specific theme, such as science, math, language, advanced studies or art. These programs were originally established to integrate segregated schools and have a unique “points” system to prioritize applications. 
• Dual language or immersion: Students learn in English and in a second language such as Spanish, Mandarin, Korean or Armenian. 
• Affiliated charter schools: District-run schools with more freedom to try different types of teaching or other programs. 

No one type of school is inherently better than another, and no one metric defines a great school — there are many factors beyond test scores to consider, and we go over some of those here.

By far the most frequent piece of advice we’ve heard is to go on an in-person school tour if possible.

“The very best thing that people can do is go to the school and try to watch the way that educators interact with students, the way that students interact with each other, and the way that families are included or not in the life of a school,” said Jack Schneider, a University of Massachusetts, Amherst, education researcher and parent. “Once you do that, you really get a sense of what kind of place kids are going to school.”

Some schools post tour information online, but you may need to call for details.

LAUSD also hosts fairs, organized by geographic region, where multiple schools table and share information about their programs, through mid-October.

The Justice Department found Thursday that the law school at the University of California, Los Angeles, illegally considered race in admissions.

The announcement follows a similar finding against the university’s medical school and comes as President Donald Trump’s administration ramps up scrutiny of colleges’ processes for selecting students. The administration also has accused the UC Berkeley Law School and the medical school at the University of California, San Diego, of illegally discriminating against white and Asian applicants.

The UCLA School of Law said in a statement that it was committed to making admissions decisions in compliance with all applicable laws.

“Students are admitted through a comprehensive, merit-based review process that considers each applicant’s achievements and experiences,” the statement said. “We are confident in our process.”

Affirmative action in college admissions has been illegal since a 2023 Supreme Court ruling forbade it. The same ruling said colleges could continue to assess how applicants’ backgrounds might speak to broader characteristics, but Trump has accused colleges of using applicants’ personal statements and other proxies to consider race in admissions — which conservatives view as illegal discrimination.

The Justice Department’s investigation found UCLA’s law school discriminated against white and Asian American students by favoring Black and Hispanic applicants in its 2023, 2024 and 2025 incoming classes. Its analysis found the mean LSAT score was lower for admitted Black applicants than for admitted white applicants.

The department also said admissions staff at the law school instructed applicants during recruitment efforts, including one called the “Diversity Admissions Open House,” how to reveal their race in essays.

“Like many of its peer institutions, UCLA Law School runs a two-tiered admissions system whose academic bar for acceptance shifts up or down depending on the color of your skin,” said Harmeet Dhillon, head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, in a news release.

California voters ended affirmative action in college admissions in a 1997 ballot measure. In a brief filed in the Supreme Court case, the UC system said the change led to a precipitous drop in underrepresented minorities, especially at the system’s most selective campuses. The brief said UC went on to implement a range of race-neutral measures to increase diversity.

The Trump administration also has sued over the main UCLA campus’s response to allegations of antisemitic harassment. The administration’s latest finding sets the stage for a voluntary resolution to bring UCLA into compliance with the Justice Department’s legal interpretation or, if none can be reached, potential legal action.

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Artist Hedy Torres asked a 20-something student from Cal State Northridge to sit for a portrait nearly a decade ago. Using charcoal on paper, she drew the dark-haired young man in black and white — but she deliberately kept the portrait unfinished.

The idea was that she would complete the piece if her subject, a DACA recipient named Lino de Jesús Pérez Cuevas, ever attained lawful permanent residency.

And now he has.

DACA, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is a program that provides two-year work permits and deportation relief for people who were brought to the U.S. as children. The permits can be renewed, but the program does not grant a pathway to citizenship. 

In late September, Pérez Cuevas — who is now married, a father, a green card holder and an adjunct instructor at his alma mater — sat with Torres once again.

Torres’ project involves interviewing subjects as she sketches them. This year, she invited the public to watch her complete the portrait as she spoke to Pérez Cuevas about what it took for him to get a green card and what that means for his life.

About two dozen people gathered at a community center in West Hollywood’s Plummer Park to see her add details to the piece that speak to the passing of time.

“I just wanted to make people empathetic to what [immigrants] go through during this process,” she said. “You have to be very patient. There is a lot of uncertainty.”

Responding to the potential loss of relief

Pérez Cuevas, who was born in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, was brought to the U.S. by his parents when he was 2.

When Torres drew him in 2017, he was pursuing a master’s degree in kinesiology at Cal State Northridge. That year, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced intentions to rescind DACA, which had enabled him to set goals without the fear of being deported. A 2020 Supreme Court decision allowed the program to continue.

Torres was once undocumented herself, so she understood the 2017 announcement was earth-shattering for the approximately 800,000 people who were then in the program, she said.

The original, unfinished portrait of Lino de Jesús Pérez Cuevas.

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That year, Torres was also a student at CSUN, working toward a master’s in fine art.

She recalled recently that she wanted people to see DACA recipients as people, not numbers. And so, for her master's project, she proposed creating portraits of DACA beneficiaries.

The portraits would be rooted in interviews conducted as she drew her subjects. Leaving them unfinished, she said, would symbolize the precarity of the moment.

The pieces would have enough detail for viewers to see the subjects’ faces clearly, particularly their eyes and expressions. Other elements, including their bodies and clothing, would be more of an initial sketch.

The university greenlit her project and gave her a grant to pursue it. There was just one problem: Torres had to convince reticent DACA recipients to share their stories.

Building trust 

When Torres first messaged Pérez Cuevas about the project, he ignored her for two weeks, he said. But because they had a mutual friend, he eventually agreed to meet with her.

“I was trying to see whether this person was just an academic trying to complete a project for her own benefit, or whether she really cared about the community,” he told LAist.

They met at a coffee shop. Pérez Cuevas learned about the artist’s journey from the Mexican state of Colima and everything she’d lived through since.

Before 2015, for example, an undocumented person in California could not get a driver’s license. When she was undocumented, Torres was stopped by police and had her car impounded. She said she had to cobble together thousands of dollars to get her car back from a tow yard.

Pérez Cuevas could relate. He had experienced the same thing.

He decided to trust her.

After she drew him, Pérez Cuevas helped Torres connect with more DACA recipients at the university. She drew four other portraits, which were also left unfinished.

These works were acquired by the university, with the agreement that Torres would be able to borrow and complete them when — and if — her subjects attained lawful permanent residency.

Community members watch Artist Hedy Torres update the portrait at Plummer Park in West Hollywood.

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LAist

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‘A sense of freedom’  

As she worked on the portrait, Torres added soft lines rendered in charcoal to the image of Pérez Cuevas’ face, along with a robust mustache. And she continued the interview.

“What did you imagine your life would be like when you were young?” Torres asked.

Thinking back to high school, Pérez Cuevas said he realized then that not having a social security number barred him from decent-paying work.

“I didn't really understand what I was doing with my life,” he said, adding that he used to not think higher education was for him even while he was at CSUN. “My state of mind was really dark back then.”

He credited a college counselor with helping him navigate school. He earned his degree in 2017.

Pérez Cuevas said he has intimate knowledge of what it’s like to live with constant uncertainty: not knowing how he would pay for college because he did not qualify for federal financial aid; not being able to travel outside the country; and waiting anxiously for federal officials to make decisions on immigration laws that could transform his life.

“I can't stress enough how difficult it is psychologically to wait because it's something that can revolutionize your life,” he said. “You're betting your whole life on this approval and just that suspense of waiting, waiting, waiting, living with that anxiety.”

Torres completed her portrait of Pérez Cuevas in September 2026. Four other portraits remain unfinished.

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Julia Barajas

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LAist

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U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services continues to process renewal requests for existing DACA recipients, but the agency is no longer approving first-time applications.

Under the second Trump administration, DACA recipients are also experiencing significant delays with renewals. Some have lost their jobs. Recipients have been deported. According to the agency, the median processing time for DACA renewals was one month in 2023. Currently, it’s taking seven months to process most cases.

Pérez Cuevas said he was able to adjust his immigration status after marrying a U.S. citizen and consulting with an attorney. His lawyer helped him secure a document that allowed noncitizens to travel abroad and seek legal re-entry.

“Did getting permanent residency give you a sense of freedom, a freedom you probably didn't have when you were under DACA?” Torres asked him.

“Absolutely,” Pérez Cuevas said. “The biggest freedom was psychological freedom. You have this weight that you've been carrying all these years that finally just gets thrown off your shoulders.”

One of the things he feared most was long-term separation from his parents, he said.

When his mother and father migrated to the U.S., they did not see their own parents — his grandparents — for 40 years, Pérez Cuevas added. After his parents moved back to Mexico during the pandemic, he feared they would also go decades without seeing each other.

But having a green card enables him to travel and see his family.

Pérez Cuevas told Torres that, paradoxically, the threat of losing DACA made him “weirdly ambitious."

He said he doubled down on his studies and took on every internship he could. He figured that if the U.S. decided to deport him, he’d still have his education and work experience.

“Even on the days where I didn't necessarily have the greatest energy or the greatest state of mind, I showed up for myself,” Pérez Cuevas said.

Southern California is expected to see the longest heat wave of the season.

The National Weather Service has issued an extreme heat warning for the greater Los Angeles area from Friday through at least next Thursday, and forecasters say it’ll likely extend beyond that.

Temperatures are expected to be in the mid-90s to mid-100s, even in coastal areas.

“Unfortunately, we don't really see an end to it as far as we can tell, and that's probably the biggest thing we wanna highlight, is that while we have had hotter events this season already, this one might be the longest-lasting,” said Ryan Kittell, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

Kittell said they expect to see a few daily records to be broken.

Southern California saw a record-breaking 10-day heat wave in the summer of 2022.

What does the hot weather mean for fire risk? 

Forecasters say conditions likely won’t meet the threshold for issuing red flag warnings (extremely dry air and windy conditions), but the risk of fire is still going to be high during the heat wave.

“It’s still concerning, and if a fire were to get started in the wrong area, it could grow pretty fast,” Kittell said. “ We do have a history of large fires in similar environments with similar heat, similar time of the year.”

As of Thursday afternoon, Southern California Edison said nearly 10,000 customers in parts of Riverside County were under consideration for power shutoffs, which are used to reduce the risk of electrical equipment starting a fire.

How do we manage through the heat? 

Kittell said people should make plans to stay cool during the long heat wave, and check in on neighbors who are elderly, or on families with young children.

Officials say residents should limit outdoor activities to the early morning hours, stay in air-conditioned places in the afternoon and evening hours, and stay hydrated.