The Brief

As California expands transitional kindergarten at public schools to all four-year-olds, teachers have run into a more-common predicament: how do you help kids who are not potty-trained?

“It is very normal in the younger grades that those teachers will deal with accidents in the classrooms — it's just been more of a shift to students coming to school that are still in diapers and pull ups. That is a little bit different,” said Mara Harvey, president of the Natomas Teachers' Association in Northern California.

Most children are potty-trained by age 4, according to the Academy of Pediatrics , but that can also vary based on a child’s development. And even if they are potty-trained, accidents and regressions can still happen.

Teachers — unlike staff at childcare centers — typically can’t directly help a child go to the bathroom, or change their pullups or clothes. It’s not in the purview of their job descriptions, Harvey explained.

“As teachers, we don't have specific training. And I know that a lot of people think like, “oh, it's just changing a diaper, right? But we are not in a position to have any kind of contact with a student that would allow us to change a diaper … that is not part of our jobs,” she said.

What does the state require?

The California Department of Education requires districts to admit all eligible students, regardless of if they’re potty-trained or not, but leaves it up to districts on how to best address the needs of those students. The agency created a toileting tool kit for districts.

At some districts, aides and nurses can help assist kids, but at Harvey’s district, there isn’t staff trained to help (except for students who have Individualized Education Programs). When a child has an accident, or needs to change a pullup, the schools will call their parents, she said.

“For teachers, it's really just that they need direction and support as to who is responsible for this,” Harvey said.

So what can parents of TK students expect when it comes to toileting assistance for their children? Bottom line: Ask your school or district. 

At Rowland Unified School District, health assistants, instructional aides, and personal care assistants are trained to help students use the restroom or help if they have an accident.

“So everybody has at least a health assistant and most everyone has one of the other two. And sometimes parents prefer to come themselves because there's parents that stay at home or closeby to the school,” said Annette Ramirez, director of student services in the Rowland Unified School District.

Coming up with a support plan 

She said teachers ask parents of young students to bring an extra set of clothes, and other supplies, like pullups or wipes. If a student has an accident, they typically call the parents, but the staff on site can also help. She said teachers are often talking about what a student needs at back-to-school-nights or at conferences.

“We have a strong line of communication between school and home. And that is the first most important line to make sure that the children are safe and secure at the school site and feel good about themselves,” she said.

At Long Beach Unified, “teachers are not required to assist with toileting needs, [but] have the option to volunteer,” said a spokesperson. The district also has paraprofessionals, instructional aides and health techs who are among the staff trained in changing students.

What are teachers told?

The California Department of Education’s guidance says “[d]istricts, schools, and programs may also need to analyze current duty statements for teachers and staff and engage in bargaining with union representatives about which jobs will include direct toileting support activities such as assisting a child with changing clothing or cleaning themselves.”

At Los Angeles Unified School District, teachers, like in many other school districts, provide verbal assistance.

“Let's say there’s an accident, so we verbally talk through it with them… “Here’s a change of clothes....Change, wipe yourself. Here’s the front of your pants,’” explained Dean Tagawa, the head of LAUSD’s Early Childhood Education Division. “Meanwhile, we're reaching out to the family if they need to come and help.”

Prevention is also key. Parents should ask teachers about how often kids get bathroom breaks. Tagawa said especially toward the beginning of the year, breaks might be every 15-20 minutes.

Learning from friends might also benefit kids in getting potty-trained. “When kids go together and they see other children going and learning how to toilet train, it makes it easier for them to have a model … A lot of times it takes them, a week or two weeks to become fully potty trained,” Tagawa said.

California is a major hub for data centers — the facilities that store and transmit much of the internet. But just how much these power-hungry operations affect the state’s energy use, climate and public health remains an open question for researchers.

A new report released this week by the environmental think tank Next 10 and a UC Riverside researcher attempts to quantify that impact — but its authors say the report is only an estimate without harder data from the centers themselves.

“We are just making these reports pretty much in the dark — since there's almost zero information,” said Shaolei Ren, an AI researcher at UC Riverside and co-author of the report. “We have extremely little information about data centers in California.”

Ren and his coauthors conclude that between 2019 and 2023, electricity use and carbon emissions by California data centers nearly doubled, while on-site water consumption slightly more than doubled. Much of the increases were attributable to the electricity required to run artificial intelligence computations. But many of the report’s estimates, including its health impacts, are based on limited data — a key issue researchers said they encountered repeatedly when crafting the report.

The report underscores a growing tension in the industry : advocates who support clean energy and experts who study energy demand agree the days of steady, flat energy use at data centers are over, but there’s far less consensus on just how sharply electricity demand will climb.

“In very simple terms, a lot of the uncertainty comes from: what is our life going to look like with AI in the next five years, 10 years, 20 years — how integrated is it going to become?” said Maia Leroy, a Sacramento-based advocate who focuses on clean energy and the grid. “Are we reaching a point where the use is going to plateau, or is it going to continue?”

Experts say more transparency is essential to better understand what resources data centers demand in California.

Liang Min, who manages the Bits and Watts Initiative at Stanford University, says the state should improve its forecasts for energy demand to support clean energy goals. Min, who investigates AI’s growing strain on the electric grid, told CalMatters that demand at power centers rises in rapid, unpredictable phases and can shift quickly with each new generation of hardware.

The California Energy Commission, which plans for energy use and the growth in demand, “can play a pivotal role,” in understanding and adapting to the demands of AI.

As demand grows, policy responses lag

In Sacramento, efforts to add transparency and guardrails around data centers have struggled this year. California lawmakers shelved most consumer and environmental proposals aimed at data centers, even as they approved a plan to regionalize California’s power grid to help meet demand from the sector. They set aside two bills focused on curbing data centers’ energy use — one requiring operators to disclose their electricity use and another that offered clean power incentives .

Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a separate proposal that would have required data center operators to report their water use, even after the bill was weakened. In the end, Newsom — who has often highlighted California’s dominance in the artificial intelligence sector — signed only one measure, allowing regulators to determine whether data centers are driving up costs .

Mark Toney, who leads The Utility Reform Network and supported the transparency measure, has questioned whether data centers justify the costs they’re pushing onto ratepayers.

He warned of the centers’ “voracious consumption of energy and water, increased carbon emissions, and jacking up ratepayer bills.”

Hard facts about data centers are tough to find in California because most rent out power, cooling and floor space to other companies, said Ren, the UC Riverside researcher. Such colocation facilities don't run their own servers or technology, so they report less information publicly than data centers built by major tech companies in other states.

While estimates vary, California has the third-most data centers in the country, after Texas and Virginia. DataCenterMap , a commercial directory that tracks data centers worldwide, lists 321 sites across the state. More in California are expected in coming years.

The centers operate around the clock and often rely on diesel backup generators to maintain service during power failures — a practice that adds both greenhouse gases and local air pollutants. They also consume energy and water depending on their cooling methods.

Rising data-center demand, and rising questions

F. Noel Perry, the businessman and philanthropist who founded Next 10, said his organization's report shines light on what is fundamentally a black box. “To solve a problem, we have to understand what the problem is,” he said.

“We've seen the proliferation of data centers in California, in the U.S. and across the world — and we also are seeing major implications for the environment,” Perry told CalMatters. “The real issue has to do with transparency — and the ability of elected officials and regulators to create some rules that will govern reductions in emissions, water consumption.”

The report estimated that data centers used 10.8 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2023, up from 5.5 terawatt-hours in 2019, accounting for 6% of the nation’s total data center energy use. Unless growth is curbed or better managed, the report’s authors project demand could rise to as high as 25 terawatt-hours by 2028, equal to the power use of roughly 2.4 million U.S. homes.

Carbon emissions from the sector nearly doubled during the same period, climbing from 1.2 million to 2.4 million tons, researchers estimated, while on site water use grew from 1,078 acre feet in 2019 to 2,302 acre feet in 2023. That’s enough to meet the annual water needs of almost seven thousand California households.

The report’s authors also estimated the public health costs from air pollution associated with data centers have potentially risen, from $45 million in 2019 to more than $155 million in 2023, with the burden expected to reach as high as $266 million by 2028.

Most of those costs stem from indirect pollution produced by fossil-fueled power plants that supply the grid. But authors pointed out that regions dense with data centers — particularly Santa Clara County, home to Silicon Valley — could face higher localized risks from diesel backup generators.

Dan Diorio, vice president of state policy for the Data Center Coalition, said the report exaggerates the impact of backup diesel generators, which are tightly regulated and rarely used in California, minimizing their contributions to air pollution. Data centers don’t control the water used in electricity generation, said Diorio. Since those water impacts don’t happen on site, it’s not fair to blame that on the centers themselves.

“It paints a skewed picture of this critical 21st-century industry,” Diorio said in a statement.

Diorio said the report also overlooks how cooling technology varies by region and has become more efficient in recent years.

But the authors say their findings underscore the need for uniform reporting standards for data centers’ energy and water use. The report said California should establish ongoing local monitoring and review of data centers — and make the findings public.

Ren, the UC Riverside researcher, said that California’s cleaner grid and stricter pollution rules are helping blunt some environmental impacts of data centers already.

“California — versus the national average — is doing a better job due to the cleaner grid,” he said.

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

Bone-colored bluffs and jagged cliffs line the Monterey shoreline where chalky sand meets redwoods.

Its rugged coastline, including beloved destinations such as Big Sur, is well-known California iconography protected by the California Coastal Act for nearly 50 years.

In a push to address the state’s gripping housing crisis, the California Coastal Commission last week approved a rule change to make it easier to build affordable housing in Monterey and elsewhere along the hundreds of miles of the Pacific coast.

It was the latest effort by the powerful state agency to combat its poor reputation among housing advocates and Democratic leaders who see it as an obstacle to drastic housing reform in California’s coveted coastal regions. While minor and uncontroversial, the amendment was one of a few shifts the commission has made in recent months in an effort to be viewed as playing a part in addressing the state’s crippling housing crisis.

It released a report for the first time in 2024 that showed local governments were responsible for approving the vast majority of permits in coastal regions, and this year the agency worked with housing activists to make it easier to build student housing in coastal cities. Nor did the coastal commission oppose the landmark housing reform law that excludes most new developments from environmental review.

“I think it’s going to have a real-life change,” Susan Jordan, a longtime conservation activist and founder of the California Coastal Protection Network, said of the regulatory amendment at the meeting.

Reputation rehab: Steps toward more housing

Twelve people — six local elected officials and six members of the public — vote on the independent, quasi-judicial state agency tasked with conserving more than 800 miles of the California coast and keeping it open to the public. Its authority spans about 1,000 yards inland from where the land meets the water at high tide.

The commission has faced relentless scrutiny in recent years for not permitting enough affordable housing in coastal cities, or doing so too slowly, as state lawmakers have stripped numerous housing regulations to make it easier to build more apartments.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, a critic of the commission, and other Democratic leaders have appointed three pro-development local officials this year to help get more housing and other developments approved along the Pacific coast.

In October, Newsom appointed wealthy real estate developer Jaime Lee to replace Effie Turnbull Sanders. An attorney appointed by former Gov. Jerry Brown, Sanders was lauded by environmentalists for heralding environmental justice policies to the agency.

Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas , a Salinas Democrat, named two pro-development appointees to the commission in May: Chris Lopez, a Monterey County supervisor, and Chula Vista councilmember Jose Preciado.

Ray Jackson, a Hermosa Beach councilmember, was appointed earlier this year by Democratic Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire of Santa Rosa, and is largely a skeptic of big developers.

In a unanimous vote last week, Peciado, Lopez and Jackson each approved changing the commission’s rules to give affordable housing projects in coastal areas more time to be built, from two to five years after permits are issued. Lee was not at the Nov. 6 meeting.

Staff and commissioners hailed the change as a step in the right direction for affordable housing developments that cannot be financed quickly enough under the previous two-year deadline.

“I think next year would be a good opportunity to roll out an education campaign in the Legislature to highlight some of the movements we made toward this,” Commissioner Linda Escalante said. “I don’t know if we can have a white paper that we can walk around with and figure out some of the reputation issues that we have.”

A history of protecting the coastline

Critics of the commission point to the exorbitant coastal housing prices, some of the highest in the country, and the disproportionate number of white residents, as exacerbating the housing shortage. To some, the commission’s priorities have not matched the urgency of lawmakers and local officials to help solve the cost problem.

Two-thirds of coastal residents are white, about twice as many as in the state as a whole, according to an analysis by Nicholas Depsky at the United Nations Development Programme.

Fewer than 2.5% of California residents live in coastal cities, or “coastal zones,” which comprise less than 1% of land in the state but are home to some of the most valuable real estate in the world, from Malibu to Marin.

Waves break near beach homes in Malibu on Dec. 28, 2023.

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Damian Dovarganes

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The Coastal Commission began as a 1972 ballot initiative in the shadow of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, one of the worst environmental disasters in the country at the time. Amid a broader national environmental movement, there was greater concern about how to protect California’s coveted shoreline in the midst of unregulated offshore drilling and fears of relentless development that would mirror Miami’s coastline.

Four years later, the state Legislature made the commission permanent with the Coastal Act to protect its natural habitats and keep beaches open to the public.

Early tensions between then-Gov. Jerry Brown and the commission brewed when he slammed its members as "bureaucratic thugs” in 1978, just years after championing its creation. Brown would spend his final years in office, nearly 40 years later, roiled by criticism from environmentalists who accused him of appointing commissioners who were too pro-development. Those fears were heightened with the ousting of executive director Charles Lester in 2016, a strong advocate for coastal protection.

Scrutiny of the commission has accelerated in the Newsom administration, as the governor has publicly chided the agency for its broad powers. After the Los Angeles fires, he swiftly moved to suspend all of its authority over rebuilding efforts in the Pacific Palisades, which abut the coastline.

Last year, the commission rejected billionaire Elon Musk’s proposal to increase the number of SpaceX rocket launches off the Santa Barbara coast while criticizing his support of President Donald Trump. Newsom said he was “with Elon” after the company filed a lawsuit for political discrimination. The case is still pending.

Lee, the newest commissioner, hails from Los Angeles and has built a reputation as a prolific builder known for revitalizing Koreatown. Her real estate company, Jamison properties, has built 6,600 multifamily units and is one of the largest private landowners in Los Angeles, according to its website.

Lee did not return emails and phone calls seeking comment from CalMatters.

The new appointments have made many pro-housing advocates hopeful. “We now have three out of 12 voting members who are appointed to the commission in this period when many legislators and the governor want reform at the commission to design more affordable housing,” said Louis Mirante, a lobbyist with the business coalition Bay Area Council. “That tells me that these members will probably move that vision forward.”

Lopez, who has emphasized his support for affordable housing on the coast since joining the commission, said the optimism is warranted.

“I think that that excitement is well placed given where we’re sitting at right now and given the voice that the speaker and the governor are giving at this issue and wanting to see a remedy to it,” Lopez said. “And I do feel it’s the reason I was put here was to have that conversation at the forefront.”

Environmental advocates watch

Environmentalists have mostly been quiet about the new appointments. Instead, they are waiting to see how they vote before raising the alarm.

“While there have been concerns expressed within the environmental movement, at this point we have no idea how this commissioner (Lee) will be,” said Jennifer Savage, associate director of Surfrider Foundation, a coastal protection advocacy group. Lee was not an obvious choice for many, but Savage is optimistic that she’ll support coastal protection.

“It’s actually not that surprising that the governor would appoint someone with housing expertise,” given the political climate, she continued.

A longtime local water authority official and current administrator at San Diego State University, Preciado said part of his pitch for the role to top Democratic leaders was that he wanted to see more of the coast developed to help create jobs and homes for working-class families.

“We have a keen interest in developing the California coast in such a way where underrepresented communities that live on the coast have more access,” Preciado said of himself and Lopez.

Wealthy coastal residents have long sparred with the commission over violations for blocking public access, such as Silicon Valley billionaire Vinod Khosla, who has been entangled in a slew of legal fights with regulators and coastal groups for years over access to Martins Beach near Half Moon Bay.

An empty road leading to Martins Beach near Half Moon Bay on Aug. 29, 2017.

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Karl Mondon

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Bay Area News Group

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Many commissioners and staff view protecting public access and conservation as their primary purpose rather than housing policy.

Conservationism is out of style, even among Democrats, which has led support for the commission to dramatically shift in recent years, according to legislative director Sarah Christie.

To some commissioners, lawmakers’ push to rip away more and more of its housing authority is a misguided attempt to simplify a complex issue. They point out that 80% of coastal cities and counties have their own coastal laws and are not subject to the commission.

“It’s creating a lot of chaos and dysfunction at the local level and is making it harder,” Christie said of the movement toward slashing housing regulations. “In the Legislature’s enthusiasm and zeal in order to effectuate housing more quickly, they’re kind of stepping on themselves.”

Jackson, a commissioner who represents the South Bay, said lawmakers need to focus more on affordable housing rather than increasing supply more broadly.

Special environmental considerations and its highly sought after nature are what make the coastal zone uniquely expensive, Preciado said. “I think that a broader view, a more objective view, is that developing on the coast is different than developing in urban areas.”

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

For years, Gov. Gavin Newsom has staunchly opposed increasing taxes on wealthy Californians even when the issue repeatedly reared its head during recent tough budget years. But faced with deep federal cuts to social services programs, labor and health care groups are asking voters to circumvent the governor — to tax a very small number of people.

Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West and St. John’s Community Health in Los Angeles want voters statewide to approve a “billionaires tax” to help prop up the state’s health care and education systems.

The proposed ballot initiative would levy a one-time, 5% tax on the approximately 200 billionaires in the state, generating roughly $100 billion in revenue, according to proponents.

Going to the ballot is a common move for advocacy groups frustrated with Sacramento politics, which, while dominated by Democrats, can still be factious. Dave Regan, president of SEIU-UHW, said at a news conference the ballot initiative is the “only solution anyone can see.”

“We are facing literally a collapse of our health care system here in California and elsewhere,” Regan said. “This will help us keep health care facilities open. It will stabilize premiums and coverage for all Californians, protect health care jobs, and also improve public education.”

The proposed initiative would tax the 2025 net worth of billionaires residing in California, allowing them to pay off the obligation over five years. The revenue would go into a special fund with 90% reserved for health care spending and 10% reserved for K-12 education spending.

It needs 874,641 signatures to be placed before voters on the 2026 ballot, a number that the groups are confident they can reach. Getting voters to ultimately approve the tax, however, could be a hard sell.

While California has taxed the income of millionaires , lawmakers have never successfully passed a wealth tax . Instead of targeting earnings, the state would levy such a tax on the net worth of an individual, everything from investments to property value and even other assets, like jewelry and paintings.

The governor is a big reason why. Newsom has never supported a wealth tax, at times angrily rejecting conservative efforts to link him with one as “shameful.” He quashed the most recent legislative effort last year.

Democratic lawmakers this year had considered raising revenue to help support the state’s social services programs, which receive billions in federal funds annually, but pivoted to focus on Newsom’s Proposition 50 redistricting fight .

Regan said there are no plans to cut a deal with state lawmakers and pull the initiative from the ballot.

President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax reform and budget bill — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — is projected to cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid over a decade . California is estimated to lose roughly $30 billion in federal Medicaid funds annually as a result. The state’s Medicaid agency estimates 3.4 million people will lose coverage as a result of federal eligibility changes.

The bulk of cuts won’t take effect until 2027. But states, including California, are already taking steps to shrink their health insurance programs for low-income and disabled individuals.

California lawmakers facing a $12 billion deficit earlier this year made cuts to the state’s insurance program for immigrants without legal status , including a partial enrollment freeze that starts Jan. 1. They also reinstituted the Medi-Cal asset test , which limits how much enrollees can have in property value and savings.

Susan Shelley, vice president of communications with the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, said most Californians will probably assume that the tax will not affect them, but establishing a wealth tax in the state could create a troubling precedent.

“We tax income at a very high level, but we don't tax wealth and assets,” Shelley said. Nearly half of the state’s personal income tax revenue comes from just 1% of the state’s earners. Over time, she added, a wealth tax “could come all the way down to the middle class and they say you have too much equity in your house and we’re taking it.”

Shelley also said the proposed initiative would incentivize billionaires to leave the state, creating a “huge hole in the state budget” that would hurt the economy in the long term.

Proponents of the measure disagreed with that characterization of the proposal. They said that it would not levy taxes on the middle class nor would it affect businesses because it targets the net worth of ultrawealthy individuals.

Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at UC Berkeley and supporter of the proposal, said the tax is structured to prevent billionaires from avoiding the bill simply by leaving the state.

It would tax their wealth established in 2025, and any billionaires who moved to the state in 2026 would not be subject to the levy.

“California billionaires are not going to be able to avoid the tax by moving their assets outside of California,” Saez said.

Supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit www.chcf.org to learn more.

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

Fans tired of waiting for the next Frozen sequel or the next chapter in the Star Wars saga may soon have new ways to engage with those worlds — by creating their own content using Disney's IP.

That was the tantalizing hint Disney CEO Bob Iger dropped during an earnings call Thursday, as he described how the company is exploring ways to make the Disney+ subscription-based streaming service more interactive, and customizable for users.

While Iger stopped short of making any formal announcements, he suggested Disney is in discussions with artificial intelligence companies about tools that could allow subscribers to generate and share their own content built from Disney-owned stories.

"AI is going to give us the ability to provide users of Disney+ with a much more engaged experience, including the ability for them to create user-generated content," Iger said.

Disney+ declined to offer additional details about what form these new creative tools might take or which tech companies were involved in the negotiations. Meanwhile, AI remains a concern in many parts of the entertainment industry, with many companies including Disney engaged in lawsuits against AI players for copyright infringement.

Iger acknowledged this tension. On the earnings call, the CEO said the company's conversations with potential AI partners are focused on enabling new forms of fan engagement and guarding against uses that could dilute or misuse Disney IP.

"It's obviously imperative for us to protect our IP with this new technology," Iger said.

The trend towards increased interactivity 

Disney isn't alone in trying to rethink the boundaries between audiences and the entertainment they consume.

At the recent TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Netflix's chief technology officer, Elizabeth Stone, offered her own look at a future shaped by deeper user engagement.

"The future of entertainment is likely to be even more personalized, even more interactive, even more immersive," Stone said during an on-stage conversation with TechCrunch editor-in-chief Connie Loizos.

In addition to games and social media videos, one of Netflix's most talked-about experiments in this direction arrives next year: Stone said viewers of the classic talent competition Star Search reboot will be able to cast votes directly from their TVs or phones, influencing which contestants advance – or do not.

Younger audiences and deal-making climate drive quest for interactivity

This engagement layer sits on top of Netflix's vast library of films and TV series. But platform leaders increasingly see passive watching as only part of the picture.

Younger audiences, especially Gen Z, are gravitating toward spaces where they can participate, remix and respond rather than simply watch. According to Deloitte's 2025 Digital Media Trends survey , more than half of Gen Z respondents say social media content feels more relevant to them than traditional TV shows and movies. The research also points to the growing popularity of indie creators, and a change in consumer expectations around quality: Content doesn't always have to be polished to be extremely popular, as some of the most-watched feeds on YouTube and TikTok prove.

At the same time, despite ongoing litigation, entertainment corporations are starting to get comfortable with the idea of licensing content to AI companies. One of the most high-profile in recent weeks is the licensing partnership between Universal Music Group and the AI music creation platform Udio.

"It shows that the AI companies can work with the creative community to come up with models that work for both of them," Copyright Alliance CEO Keith Kupferschmid told NPR regarding this particular deal. "And I think we're going to start seeing more and more deals come through because they realize they can do this and do it the right way."

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