The Brief

Just days before the start of school, some California State University students were still waiting to find out how much they’re getting in grants and loans, and university officials are blaming the federal government for those delays. But despite a flurry of social media complaints about the delays, student leaders and university officials point to no major abnormalities

Every summer brings fresh confusion to some students whose financial aid is less than they anticipated or who didn’t notice an important email, but this summer added a new hardship: Not knowing how much actual aid they’d get.

The culprit is a change implemented in April by the U.S. Office of Federal Student Aid to update its fraud protections. The move was in response to the 2025 Republican-approved One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Some universities, including Cal State, received federal files on how much aid students would receive five to six weeks later than usual.

The delay meant that an unknown number of students got their precise financial aid amounts mere weeks before the start of the school year. Some students didn’t find out what their aid amounts were until after the deadline to pay tuition. Cal State campuses had provisions in place to keep students enrolled who didn’t pay if their financial aid awards were pending.

That this occurred in the middle of the financial aid cycle “is very unusual,” said April Grommo, an assistant vice chancellor for strategic enrollment management at the California State University Chancellor’s Office.

The delay in receiving information about aid amounts is separate from actually getting federal grants and loans. Federal rules prohibit students from receiving their actual financial aid until within 10 days of the start of the school year. Cal State classes begin this month.

The student experience

A handful of users of the social media tool Reddit posted about their FAFSA delays at Cal State. One user from Cal State Fullerton wrote on Aug. 1 that “I'm very concerned because the semester begins the 22nd of August … and I do not want to be dropped from any courses.” Other redditors at Fullerton echoed that worry. Similar posts were found at subreddits for San Jose State, Cal State Long Beach and Cal State Northridge.

The delay didn’t affect students who applied using the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, by the state’s priority deadline of March 2, Grommo said.

But the sheer volume of aid going to students at Cal State is immense — some $5.5 billion was   disbursed last year to more than 385,000 undergraduate and graduate students. Campus financial aid employees worked overtime to compensate for the federal delays, Grommo said. Several Cal State schools are shortstaffed, compounding the delay in getting information to students.

Another change in the 2025 federal law placed lower caps on how much students and their parents could borrow for college. Those caps went into effect this year, likely catching off guard some students who relied on loans. Still, some 65% of undergraduates who earn a bachelor’s degree at Cal State graduate without loan debt.

The system’s undergraduate student government, the California State Student Association, hasn’t detected a major uptick in student complications, despite the confusion, said Joe Nino, the association’s executive director. “At this time, CSSA is not aware of this being a widespread issue,” he wrote by email. “To our knowledge, there are protections in place to ensure students won't be dropped from their classes due to FAFSA delays.”

Sydney Yee is the vice president of Cal State Fullerton’s student government. The rising senior and finance major said the student government office hadn’t received any complaints from students about nonresponsive campus officials. She too had questions about her financial aid package and called the school’s financial aid office over the summer to receive guidance she found useful.

Redditors also advised frustrated students to call their campus financial aid office and be persistent.

“Something I think that the financial aid (staff) has done very well here has been staying very proactive with these delays,” Yee said in an interview, pointing to explanatory emails as well as Instagram posts that explained why some students received dropped course notifications on their accounts and why those holds were lifted.

Grommo explained that the notification was meant to give students peace of mind. If the drop hold was lifted and they’re still enrolled, that means the campus concluded the student is in good financial standing.

Jessicca Barco, associate vice president for strategic enrollment management at Cal State Fullerton, added that normally returning students would learn their financial aid amounts between May and June. The information is provided near the end of the academic year to ensure students meet federal grade requirements to continue receiving aid. The federal delay meant some 23,000 returning students received their aid information last Friday. The campus moved back the deadline to pay for tuition to Aug. 19, Barco added. For many students it’s typically in mid-July.

Reasons for getting financial aid late

As for why some students may get their federal financial aid late — some students in the past received theirs as late as October — Grommo cited several factors.

One may be that those students applied for financial aid well into summer rather than in late winter. Another may be that they were selected to undergo an audit of their family finances to ensure they’re eligible for financial aid. Or their grades are too low to continue receiving aid and they must appeal to the school to restore their eligibility. Other students may experience a sudden loss of personal or family finances that isn’t captured in the income data they filed in their aid applications.

“The majority of students go through the process just fine, but of course, the small group that does not go through the process fine, those are the really major issues,” Grommo said.

Her advice to students: Make sure their school email account is set up in case the campus is only emailing them there rather than their personal account and to keep calling their school’s financial aid office.

Cal State Fullerton students got their financial aid disbursements Wednesday.

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

This story first appeared on Long Beach Post.

After 70 years as the epicenter of Long Beach football, the iconic Veterans Memorial Stadium will be demolished later this month to make way for a modern replacement, slated for completion in 2029.

The $250 million transformation will have an 18-acre footprint and include a new stadium that pays homage to the original as well as a massive sports complex featuring a 2,500-seat arena, fields for football, soccer and track, basketball and volleyball courts, athletic training and rehab facilities, offices, kinesiology classrooms and a hall of champions. The project is funded by Measure LB, an $850 million bond measure that finances LBCC construction.

The leveling of Vets Stadium closes a celebrated chapter of Long Beach history. The stadium hosted high-profile local and national sporting events, served as a movie set for Evel Knievel and became woven into the fabric of the city. It has accommodated countless graduations, and Long Beach City College and numerous area high schools will have to relocate their commencement ceremonies during construction.

Graduation caps fly in the air after the completion of the Wilson High School commencement ceremony at Veterans Stadium in Long Beach Monday, June 14, 2022.

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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From its inception, Vets Stadium was intended to be a monument for the people of Long Beach, living and dead. During World War II, seventeen homesick soldiers stationed in the South Pacific wrote a letter home to Long Beach, which appeared on the front page of a 1945 edition of the Press-Telegram. As alums of Poly and Wilson high schools, the soldiers implored the city to build a stadium and dedicate it to those who “went beyond the final yard marker” — including their own classmates who had died.

They enclosed $75 as their contribution to the proposed stadium, and the city took it from there, passing a $550,000 bond measure to fund construction. By 1950, the city had erected a colossal arena (significantly over budget, forcing the city to dip into its special projects fund) with 12,500 east-facing seats, the Press-Telegram reported. It boasted a double-decker press box, equipped with a snack bar and its own toilets — a state-of-the-art facility meant to attract visitors to Long Beach, according to a 1951 publication in the public library’s archives.

“The sheer capacity of it was such a big deal,” and it became a significant regional stage, said Mike Guardabascio, sports reporter and editor at The 562 and author of the book “Football in Long Beach.”

The stadium’s size meant it could accommodate state track and field championships, college and pro football, motorcycle racing, roller derby and rugby. It became the site of holiday food drives, large-scale swap meets, Covid-19 vaccinations and the distribution of emergency sandbags.

Yet its defining identity has been the heartbeat of high school football. Even after Long Beach City College acquired the venue from the city for $1 in 1987, Vets was the home stadium for Poly High School’s powerhouse program.

Few events in Long Beach draw tens of thousands of fans, Guardabascio said. But high school football games had a magnetic pull, and spectators consistently sold out the stadium, he said.

In 2001, the country’s top-ranked high school football teams matched up in Long Beach: Poly vs. De La Salle in what was billed as the Game of the Century. Over 17,000 people poured into Veterans Stadium for standing room only, and many more tuned into the first nationally televised high school game.

Veterans Memorial Stadium at Long Beach City College on Thursday, July 7, 2022.

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Brandon Richardson

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Long Beach Post

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The noise coming from the stands was deafening — “like nothing else that you would ever hear,” Guardabascio said. He was a senior in high school at the time and remembered how much attention was dialed into the game. “You just had that feeling of Long Beach being the center of the world,” he said.

In the years since, as other large sports arenas became options, Vets Stadium became less of a go-to choice in the region, Guardabascio said. And the structure is now crumbling — pieces of concrete are falling off the back; a hole in the floor of the press box bathroom offers a window to the ground several stories below, he said.

The rebuild could reassert the city as a central player in the wider sports scene, Guardabascio said. He pointed to the exceptional sports facility upgrades Long Beach City College has already executed, including its pool and beach volleyball courts.

Still, the demolition of a symbol for the city weighs heavily on some. “Our whole football history runs through that place,” Guardabascio said. “Everyone who grew up caring about sports and football in Long Beach has memories of being there.”

Football fans can watch the Poly football team’s final game at Vets Stadium on Friday, Aug. 28, and the LBCC Vikings’ last stadium game on Saturday, Aug. 29. LBCC also invites community members to attend a celebration and groundbreaking ceremony on Wednesday, Sept. 9.

Parents could soon be headed for an even bigger child care crunch in California, experts say.

That’s because the rollout of a new grade for 4-year-olds in the state’s public schools is having unintended consequences for child care businesses, according to a new report by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at UC Berkeley.

Child cares have historically cared for children 5 and under, but the report found they’re losing more 4- and 5-year-olds to transitional kindergarten, a universal option that was fully implemented last school year.

Sue Carrera, who runs a home daycare in Inglewood, said that before the pandemic, she had an average of 12 kids enrolled in her program. Now, she has only four — the lowest since she opened up her business in 2008 — as she’s seen children move to the public school system earlier.

“ I don't really see myself staying in this business for any lengthy period of time,” she said.

The way that part of the child care business model worked was that older-age preschool children have helped subsidize the cost of caring for infants and toddlers, who are more expensive to care for, said Anna Powell, the report’s lead author.

“ When we're tinkering with a model where there's — ‘it already kind of barely makes ends meet’ — it absolutely can cause big ripple effects and potentially lead to system-level closures,” Powell said.

Between 2019 and 2025, about 1,100 preschools have closed across California.

The report, which used a survey of thousands of child care providers, found that at child cares based at facilities, average enrollment of 4- to 5-year-olds fell by five children from 2023 to 2025. It also found that at the same time, providers haven’t been able to make an easy shift to caring for more babies. The teacher to child ratio is higher for infants (1 to 4) than for older preschoolers (1 to 12).

“ There's no resources to help them buy cribs that they didn't need before, and now suddenly they must have on site. There's no resources for educators who are used to, after decades, working with 4- and 5-year-olds, learning, 'How do I need to adapt my craft to work with these younger children?’” Powell said.

The study recommends California invest in the early education system in the same way it has invested in transitional kindergarten.

If more preschools close down the line, it could mean families may struggle more to find child care in an already scarce environment, said Debra Coleman,  director of the L.A. County Office for the Advancement of Early Care and Education.

In 2022, there were licensed spaces in L.A. County to be able to serve only 4% of children under 2 years old.

“If you have less options, you will have less choices of where to go. It might impact the capacity,” Coleman said. “ It might take us from a very fragile system to a fractured system.”

Southern California is getting a dose of unseasonably cool weather — a welcome break after a series of hot, humid heat waves over the last few months.

Lower than normal temperatures are expected to stick around through the weekend.

Highs along the coast will be in the 70s over the next few days. Inland areas of L.A. and Orange counties will get up to the 80s. Even the Inland Empire is expected to peak at about 90 degrees on Friday.

The cooler temperatures are also expected to come with cloudy skies across the region.

The cloud cover will likely be widespread on Friday and much of Saturday, but concentrated mostly in the morning hours and along the coast, where skies could stay cloudy through the afternoon.

The cool, mild conditions won’t last long, though.

Forecasters say temperatures will start to tick back up on Saturday. They will stay below normal seasonal levels for a few days, but the summer heat will be back by the middle of next week.

So this weekend might be a good time to go on a hike or host that barbecue.

Low pressure equals mild temperatures 

The cool weather is a pretty stark change.

Just a few weeks ago, the National Weather Service was issuing warnings across Southern California for extreme heat and predicting nearly record-breaking temperatures. Now, atmospheric conditions have shifted.

Much of that suffocating heat was driven by a massive system of high pressure air hovering over the Southwestern U.S.

High pressure systems trap warm air beneath them and compress it, further warming the air and preventing cooler air from displacing it.

This week, the high pressure system finally loosened its grip.

“That ridge of high pressure kind of broke down, and then a trough of low pressure developed off and along the coast of California,” said Devin Black, a National Weather Service meteorologist.

Low pressure systems force air to rise, and as air rises it cools. It also eventually condenses, often forming cloud cover.

That’s one reason behind the clouds in Southern California this week.

Meanwhile, a deep marine layer and onshore winds are helping push those clouds farther inland. Forecasters note that the low pressure system and onshore winds are also keeping humidity levels up.

Despite the cloud cover and moisture, it’s unlikely there will be much, if any, rain. Some minimal precipitation could be possible in Ventura and Santa Barbara county mountains.

The low pressure system and marine layer will start to shrink on Saturday, allowing heat-generating high pressure to move back into the region.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

The deadline set by Mayor Karen Bass for the removal of all rotting food from the Lineage Logistics cold storage facility in Boyle Heights is fast approaching.

“To no surprise to anyone, the work is not done,” Bass said at a virtual community meeting Thursday evening.

Bass earlier on Thursday told The LA Local that all of the approximately 88 million pounds of food that had been stored inside when the facility caught fire in June was expected to be removed by Friday. In the Zoom meeting Thursday evening, she said after her deputy mayor toured the warehouse, it was clear that wouldn’t happen.

“Lineage is a multibillion-dollar company with the resources to meet this deadline, but we know now they will not. … How far away from meeting the deadline, it’s anyone’s guess,” she said.

City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, who represents District 14 where Lineage is located, said in a press release Thursday afternoon that the cleanup efforts would not meet the deadline.

“I fully support the Mayor leveraging all the enforcement, cost-recovery, and accountability tools available to make clear that when the City establishes a public-health deadline, corporations are expected to meet it – and there are consequences when they do not,” Jurado said in the statement.

LA County Supervisor Hilda Solis echoed the need for accountability.

“I am disheartened and disappointed that Lineage’s cleanup remains incomplete, despite actions that the County of Los Angeles has taken at my direction to accelerate the process,” she said in a statement.

The company’s reports on the cleanup progress, similarly, have not appeared to be on pace with meeting Friday’s deadline. And some residents believe the putrid air they’ve had to live with for months will linger indefinitely despite the bureaucratic goal posts being met or moved.

Here’s what we know about the final phase of cleanup.

What is the deadline?

Soon after a fire broke out on the roof of the 500,000-square-foot cold storage facility on Los Palos Street on June 17, the managers cut the power to the two massive refrigerated rooms in the building. While firefighters took about a week to contain the blaze, the millions of pounds of food inside quickly began to rot in the summer’s heat.

Bass on June 29 issued an executive order requiring the removal of all remaining food in 45 days, or Friday, Aug. 14. Food cleanup began in early July.

Meanwhile, residents of Boyle Heights, East LA and several other neighboring communities who were left to deal with the putrid odors, have made more than 4,000 air quality complaints to regulators since early July.

It’s not the only deadline Lineage Logistics faces.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District, which regulates air pollution in the region, issued 19 notices of violation alleging the odors created a public nuisance. Last week, the agency ordered the company to meet dozens of cleanup and air quality control standards, including enforceable requirements for food removal and full facility cleaning.

That agency set a separate deadline of weeks for the food and other material to be removed before the remaining freezer room is fully sanitized.

What’s been cleaned up so far?

The freezer that was extensively damaged by fire has been cleared. The remaining freezer held the vast majority of the rotting food that has been polluting the air in nearby neighborhoods.

Lineage Logistics has for weeks reported on its website about its progress toward 100% cleanup.

Residents can get a sense of their pace for cleanup by tracking their reports:

• Aug. 7: 85% of food waste had been removed 
• Aug. 11: 92% of “bulk food cleanup” was completed
• Aug. 12: 93% of food had been cleaned up

It’s unclear how exactly Lineage is arriving at these measurements and how the city or some other agency is independently verifying this progress.

Will they meet the deadline?

Lineage is clearing between 1 and 1.5% of food each day, according to their progress reports. This roughly aligns with the weekly goal AQMD ordered Lineage to maintain, 10% or 8.8 million pounds of food removed each week.

At that pace, it is unlikely they’ll be able to remove the remaining 7% of food waste in the next 24 hours.

Unless they significantly accelerate, this puts full food cleanup somewhere into next week. That revised timeline better aligns with the one Dominic DiCarlo, vice president of global safety and compliance for Lineage, outlined during the AQMD hearing last week.

DiCarlo added that the company expects to spend between $80 and $100 million on the cleanup and related expenses, which has been described as continuing around the clock.

Lineage did not respond to The LA Local’s request for more information about their progress toward the mayor’s deadline on Thursday.

What happens if they blow the deadline?

Jurado expressed frustration with what residents have had to deal with.

“For nearly two months, families in Boyle Heights have lived with unbearable odors, flies and pests, truck traffic, uncertainty, and disruption to their homes, businesses, and daily lives,” she said. “They were told there was a deadline, and they had every right to expect that deadline to mean something.”

Bass’ executive order did not provide details on what would happen if Lineage does not meet the Friday deadline for clean up. But at the virtual community meeting Thursday, she said called on the city’s attorneys to pursue civil litigation and added the city was even considering putting a lien on the warehouse property to reimburse the city’s costs responding to the disaster.

“We want the community to be made whole as though this tragedy never happened,” she said.

Bass was previously among several local elected officials who had pushed AQMD to levy fines on Lineage for its air pollution violations, which it did not do. She has pushed city agencies to prevent Lineage from reconstructing the facility and continuing its business there. Local lawmakers have also introduced legislation that could increasingly regulate similar businesses in the future.

AQMD can levy penalties if Lineage does not meet its deadlines for cleanup in the coming weeks.

What are residents saying?

As it became clear Thursday afternoon that Lineage would likely miss the cleanup deadline, Alma Marquez of Protect LA Now demanded long-term housing for residents impacted by the fire and for their homes to be cleaned and tested.

Marquez wondered what kind of consequences Lineage could face by missing the deadline, especially after air regulators have failed to require Lineage to pay any financial penalties.

“Is the mayor going to fine them? … Is the state going to come in and actually hold people accountable?” she told Boyle Heights Beat.

“The families that we have been organizing with are absolutely angry, disheartened, frustrated, saddened of how they’ve been treated, not just by the corporation … but the community feels very disappointed in how the government, that’s supposed to be the buffer between the corporation and the public, has not protected the public,” Marquez continued.

Meanwhile, residents on Prado Street were still hopeful that cleanup would be finished by the deadline.

“Ojalá,” that’s what Irma Soto said when she was asked if she believed workers would finish in time. “I hope they finish so this could all end.”

“It smells horrible,” she added as the stench emanated from the neighborhood early Thursday afternoon.

Soto said she’s been seeing more trailers picking up debris lately. Her neighbor said there appears to be more nighttime work near the facility recently.

“Who knows if they’ll finish, but they are working faster,” the neighbor said.