The Brief

With a new grade called transitional kindergarten, there are younger kids in elementary school this year than ever before in California — and with that comes its own set of challenges for schools who are trying to implement it.

In 2021, California passed a law that gave districts four years to make TK universal for 4-year-olds. TK has been around since 2012, but only for a small subset of older 4-year-olds who just missed the kindergarten age cutoff by a few months.

“It was a big undertaking,” said Laura Hill, policy director and senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. “There are plenty of folks who might say that was not enough time, not enough resources,  but it is the case that the state did try to be thoughtful about how to make it happen.”

The state doesn’t yet have data on total enrollment this school year — the first year that TK is universal — though district data, such as from Los Angeles Unified School District, shows enrollment has grown to the highest total yet.

Expanding access statewide has required new infrastructure — with money that some districts don’t have. It's required a new group of teachers with the right credentials. And while a year might not seem like much, 4-year-olds have different developmental needs than kindergartners.

“Many of them are still in need of naps,” said Hill, who co-authored a report on the rollout of TK last year.

And for some, it might be their first time in a big group setting.

In one school district, Hill and her colleagues interviewed educators who described the first week of school with younger 4-year-olds as “shark week” — because of the high number of biting incidents.

“Biting is just one of those things that a child who is frustrated and doesn't have the words and isn't feeling like they can cope right now might resort to,” Hill said. “What they were seeing was both the children not quite ready making this transition and the adults having less experience working with children this young and helping them kind of sort this all out.”

Mary Edge-Guerra, who oversees TK at Downey Unified School District, points out there are children who are only 3 years old at the start of the school year since they just have to be 4 by September.

“As TK evolved in bringing younger students, it’s looking more preschoolish than it once did than when it first started,” she said. “They need that developmental time to grow, and as their gross motor and just developmental milestones are being met, then the instruction needs to adjust.”

From lunch to naps, 4-year-olds need more care

During lunchtime at Smith Elementary in Lawndale, TK teacher Lauren Bush’s instruction goes beyond the classroom. As her students lined up in the cafeteria, she guided them through the menu options from the salad bar to the entree choice of a burrito or a tamal.

Teachers help children eat their lunches at Marguerita Elementary School in Alhambra.

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“ Wow, Jasmine! That's healthy,” Bush said to one student after she asked for carrots and cucumbers.

When the kids sat down at their tables, she also helped them open up their food packages, or instructed them to blow on their burritos to cool them down.

To help accommodate younger kids at lunchtime, Principal Cristal Moore said the school shifted their lunch schedules this year so that TK students are only with kindergartners in the cafeteria.

“We knew they were gonna need more help with, ‘Can you put a straw in my milk?’ — just really trying to make sure that we were there to support them,” Moore said.

Teachers must also decide whether to set aside time for a nap during the school day — TK does not require one.

When Bush started teaching TK a few years ago, she didn’t include a nap in the six-hour schedule and realized her students were more likely to whine, fight and cry at the end of the day without a break.

“The resting is good for them, even if they don't sleep,” Bush said. “It's just a total reset. It's a lot of stimulation for a lot of hours for their little bodies.”

Bathroom support

Four-year-olds may also still need help going to the bathroom, or have accidents at school. The state Department of Education requires districts to admit all eligible students, regardless if they’re potty-trained. And for many teachers, helping children with the bathroom or changing diapers isn’t part of their union-bargained duties.

Some districts have aides and health assistants who can help. Others call a students’ parents if they have an accident at school.

At Marguerita Elementary School in Alhambra, TK aide Veronica Gonzalez is trained to assist. She said while most students can go to the bathroom on their own, others still need help.

Nap time at Marguerita Elementary.

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“Last year we dealt with one [student] and she was only afraid of going to the bathroom because she was afraid of flushing the toilet… and then for like two weeks, we’d flush the toilet together.”

Facility requirements 

Instruction for TK is supposed to be based around play, versus academic.

In Claudia Ralston’s TK classroom in Alhambra, the room is set up so students can learn how to interact with their peers. There are play stations, including a pretend role-play area with a grocery checkout counter.

“Obviously they're only 4 years old, they need to move around while they're learning. So that, that in itself –the environment is different,” Ralston said. “We are setting up an environment so that they are learning as well at the same time.”

The state has different requirements for new TK classrooms than for upper grades. They have to be larger, so kids have room to play. They need to have bathrooms inside the classroom or close by, and they have to be close to parent drop-off areas. But not all schools have built out these spaces.

“We need to make sure that families have access to [TK] and that it's as good as it can be,” Hill said.

A hundred million years ago during the late Cretaceous period, the oceans were filled with giant predators, prowling for their next meal. There was the mosasaur — a giant toothy marine reptile (and a surprise hero in Jurassic World). There were large sharks.

And now, in the journal Science, researchers present evidence for ancient colossal octopuses — what they believe are the largest invertebrates ever described. Using innovative fossil reconstruction techniques, the researchers revealed remnants of two extinct species locked inside large rocks. They appear to have been up to 60 feet long — longer than a school bus — rivaling other apex predators of the time, and calling to mind the Kraken of legend.

"I wasn't expecting any octopus of this magnitude at all," says Fernando Ángel Fernández-Álvarez, a zoologist at the Spanish Institute of Oceanography who wasn't involved in the study. "And we now have the proof that they were living in the past."

The findings also reveal that these squishy leviathans likely feasted on crunchy prey items (think shrimp and lobster) and favored one side of their jaw over the other.

"I already thought octopuses were extraordinary animals," says Yasuhiro Iba, a paleontologist at Hokkaido University and lead author on the new publication. "But this study made me feel even more strongly that their uniqueness has deep evolutionary roots."

Jaws encased in ancient rocks

The findings are all the more remarkable because octopuses don't tend to preserve well.

Fossils usually form from bones and other hard materials. So a creature like an octopus — which is made up of almost entirely soft tissue — has been harder to come by in the fossil record.

"There are very few, very rare records about the octopus and their evolution," says Jörg Mutterlose, a paleontologist at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany and one of the researchers. This has limited our understanding of the development of these creatures and their habitats across time.

But more than a decade ago, Iba approached Mutterlose with an idea. He wanted to examine the fossilized contents of big rocks called concretions that had formed on the seafloor some 100 million years ago in what's now northern Japan.

"We thought there was a real possibility that octopus remains might also be hidden inside them," says Iba, "even if nothing was visible from the outside."

So he approached Mutterlose and they worked together, using a new technique that they call digital fossil-mining. They cut the concretions into thin slices, took pictures of any preserved fossils, and then created 3D reconstructions, a process facilitated by an AI model.

And there, locked inside, were octopus jaws, "which is very similar to the beak of a bird," says Mutterlose. They consist of a lower jaw, "which is like a shovel" and an upper jaw. Octopus jaws are hard, so they can fossilize.

And the animals use them like we do — to chomp down on food. The jaws aren't big enough to swallow a large animal, says Mutterlose, so the ancient octopuses would have used their long, strong arms to catch prey and "tear it apart into pieces."

A majestic view

The lower jaws were the biggest ones ever found for an octopus, and they offered a window into the lives of these animals. Considering work done in other species, Mutterlose says, "archaeologists reconstruct quite a lot about evolutionary history simply based on the size and form of teeth."

To that end, he and his colleagues used the jaws to estimate the body size of the octopuses. And that's when their calculations revealed that these animals were probably gargantuan — well larger than the giant Pacific octopus, today's biggest member of the family whose arm span often exceeds 13 feet.

Closer inspection of the specimens revealed numerous chips and scratches. "Obviously, something happened to the jaws," observes Mutterlose.

That something was likely the consumption of prey with hard exoskeletons, including shrimp, bivalves, lobsters and nautilus-like animals that would have worn away the jaw as they were crushed and eaten, leaving the marks behind.

These were active carnivores — and the researchers say they may have even hunted other large predators, but this remains speculative.

In addition, the right side of the jaws tended to be more worn down than the left side. "Single-sided usage might indicate that the brain was already fairly well developed," suggests Mutterlose. This means that these early octopuses may have already been displaying the advanced intelligence that they are known for today.

"Modern octopuses are intelligent, flexible and very unusual predators," says Iba. "Our results suggest that some of those remarkable traits may already have been emerging in early octopuses during the Cretaceous."

One can discern quite a lot from a few key specimens, says Mutterlose. "Just [a] few fossil findings may shed very new light on the evolution of the biosphere," he says.

Fernández-Álvarez says the results paint a vivid picture of the ocean ecosystem of the late Cretaceous — one that would have been filled with myriad large and hungry predators.

It must have been, he says, "a very majestic view."

The Trump administration is making it easier to deport immigrants protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.

A new precedent decision published Friday by the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) says being a DACA recipient is not enough reason to provide relief from deportation.

A three-judge panel of appellate immigration judges sided with Department of Homeland Security lawyers who appealed a decision from immigration judge Michael Pleters terminating removal proceedings for Catalina "Xóchitl" Santiago, citing Santiago's active DACA status. They sent the case back to a different immigration judge for review.

Although the decision does not mean Santiago will be immediately deported, it potentially weakens DACA protections for hundreds of thousands of others.

Santiago's case gained national attention after she was detained by Customs and Border Protection officers while boarding a domestic flight at the El Paso airport in August. She was placed in immigration detention until a federal judge granted her release last October. She has been fighting the threat of deportation in the immigration court system since.

The BIA is an administrative court within the Justice Department. After a case is heard by an immigration judge, both the immigrant and DHS have the right to appeal that decision to the BIA. BIA's public decisions set the precedent and tone for how immigration judges nationwide should make decisions and how the general public should interpret immigration law and policy. Friday's order is the latest step by the Trump administration to strip away protections from DACA recipients.

"For over a decade, DACA has endured relentless, politically motivated attacks," said Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, deputy director of Advocacy and Campaigns at United We Dream, an organization fighting for the rights of immigrants.

"This decision is yet another step in dismantling the program without the government taking responsibility for ending it outright. ... This is a quiet rollback of protections, and our communities are paying the price in real time."

The BIA order, which is technically known as an interim decision, notes that DHS argued Pleters, the immigration judge, should be recused from the case because he is married to Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar of Texas, who has been outspoken about DACA issues on Capitol Hill, this case specifically and whose district includes El Paso. Neither the judge nor Escobar is identified by name in the interim order.

The BIA did not sustain DHS' appeal based on that argument, however, instead saying that "the Immigration Judge erred" by basing his decision to terminate removal proceedings solely on Santiago's DACA status.

DACA, created in 2012 to protect children who arrived in the country illegally prior to 2007 from deportation, now covers around a half-million people. Starting last year, DHS officials began urging DACA recipients to self-deport, arguing that the program itself does not equate to automatically providing legal status.

The DACA program is meant to offer temporary protection from deportation but is not an immediate path to citizenship or a green card. Participants have to renew their protection every two years.

This second Trump administration has tried to strip 505,000 DACA recipients, also known as Dreamers, of benefits, though no regulatory changes have been made to end the program. Last year, the Department of Health and Human Services said it would make DACA recipients ineligible for the federal health care marketplace and the Education Department said it was looking into five universities that offer financial help for DACA recipients.

In a letter to senators earlier this year, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that between January and November of last year, 261 DACA recipients were arrested and 86 were removed from the country.

In the letter, Noem reiterated that DACA is temporary.

"It comes with no right or entitlement to remain in the United States indefinitely," she wrote.

DHS did not respond to an immediate request for comment on whether active DACA recipients are at risk of removal.

Board of Immigration Appeals underscores Trump's policies

Over the last year, attorneys with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who represent DHS in immigration court, have increasingly appealed more decisions to the BIA.

According to a recent NPR analysis, BIA decisions backed government lawyers in 97% of publicly posted cases last year; that's at least 30 percentage points higher than the average over the past 16 years.

The board's decisions have made it harder for immigration courts to offer immigrants bond in lieu of detention. It's eased the way to deport migrants to countries other than their own. And a new proposed regulation would make it harder for people to appeal their immigration decisions at all.

All these actions over the last year came as the board pumped out 70 published decisions, a record number of precedent-setting cases.

Immigration courts are housed within the Executive Office for Immigration Review, or EOIR, at the Justice Department. They are not a part of the judiciary.

Two L.A. Unified school unions voted to approve their new contracts Friday night.

Members of United Teachers Los Angeles, which represents 37,00 teachers and other personnel, will get a nearly 14% raise, plus paid parental leave for the first time ever.

According to the union, 92% of eligible members voted yes.

The final 2-year deal includes:

• Updated salary scales
• Average salary increase of 13.86%, with a minimum increase of 8% 
• More than 450 new PSAs, PSWs, school psychologists and counselor positions 
• Special education agreement with first-ever 20:1 ratio for RST and planning time at schools, with 80% of students in general ed setting for 80% of the day  
• Protections and right to bargain over subcontracting and AI 
• Healthcare for substitutes after 93 days of work 

Separately, members of AALA/TEAMSTER also ratified their new two-year contract Friday night, which includes a 12% wage increase. The union represents 3,000 L.A. Unified principals and administrators.

The final deal includes:

• A 12.15% wage increase
• A defined eight-hour workday and a 40-hour workweek
• Flex time with notice and no pre-approval

What's next

Next step is a vote by the LAUSD board.

One more to go

Meanwhile, members of SEIU Local 99 will start voting today through early May. That union represents bus drivers, cafeteria workers, classroom aides and other school support staff.

The tentative deal promises to bring their 30,000 members a 24% pay increase and expanded healthcare access. 

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Inglewood police officers could soon be outfitted with body-worn cameras.

The Inglewood City Council will vote Tuesday on a $6.3 million purchase from police tech company Axon to kit out the city’s police department with body cameras as well as drones, Tasers and 98 stationary Automated License Plate Recognition devices, known commonly as ALPRs. 

Activists have been calling for Inglewood police to wear body cameras since Bryan Bostic’s unexplained death in police custody March 10. Video of the incident captured by a bystander shows police pinning Bostic to the ground. Investigations by the offices of the L.A. County District Attorney into the police use of force and L.A. County Medical Examiner into Bostic’s cause of death are ongoing. 

The city says it has been researching the tech additions, including the body cameras, since last August, and the police department began chasing grants for body-worn cameras and drones in January. 

The L.A. Police Department began widely using body cameras in 2015, followed by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department in 2020. 

Activist Najee Ali, who has helped coordinate recent demonstrations calling for Inglewood officers to wear body cameras, said the devices would be a game-changer.

“We are optimistic this is going to happen,” Ali said. “Certainly this is long overdue.” 

Ali said activists had been planning to put forward a city ballot initiative to mandate police body cameras. He remains concerned about how the city will set police body camera policy. 

City staff wrote in meeting documents that the new tech would enhance the department’s capacity ahead of a string of mega-events — including this summer’s FIFA World Cup, the 2027 Super Bowl and the 2028 Olympics. 

The city has not yet finalized contract terms with Axon. Councilmembers could vote Tuesday to authorize city staff to wrap up negotiations and execute a final agreement. 

The city estimated Inglewood could pay an average of $1.3 million annually over the life of a five-year agreement with Axon, which would provide software platforms along with the new equipment. 

Here’s the tech that comes in the package

The package would include body cameras as well as new Tasers, meeting documents indicate. The Inglewood Police Department has 186 sworn officers, according to the city website. 

Twenty-five vehicles would be outfitted with Fleet 3 video cameras that can automatically read and look up vehicle license plates. The ALPR tech will also be rolled out via 98 stationary cameras affixed to light posts and mounted in other locations.

Stationary ALPRs scan license plates and log a vehicle’s location at a given time. Police tout their ability to rapidly locate stolen vehicles or fleeing suspects. Critics say they lack oversight and that their data can be too broadly shared, including with federal immigration agents.

The devices Inglewood is purchasing also have livestream video capability, according to Axon’s website. 

The city will also get a total of seven camera drones, including the Skydio 10 and its indoor-focused cousin, the Skydio R10. 

How to make your voice heard

The Inglewood City Council meets at 2 p.m. Tuesday in Inglewood City Hall, 1 W. Manchester Blvd. Members of the public will have an opportunity to comment on the proposed purchase ahead of the city council’s vote.  

Limited seating is available in council chambers. Members of the public have been directed to watch proceedings and deliver public comment from an overflow room during some recent meetings.

If people can’t make the meeting, they may submit written comments to the city clerk at athompson@cityofinglewood.org, or to the deputy city clerk at dwesley@cityofinglewood.org.

Comments must be submitted by 8 a.m. Tuesday in order to be distributed to councilmembers ahead of the meeting. 

Full meeting documents are available at cityofinglewood.org.