The Brief

This year, every 4-year-old in California can enter transitional kindergarten at their local school district. But fewer parents know about TK, and that it can be an option for their family, than they did just a few years ago, according to a survey by the Stanford Center on Early Childhood.

Here are some frequently asked questions about this new grade in California’s public school system.

What is transitional kindergarten?

Transitional kindergarten is part of California’s ambitious plan to create the nation’s largest free early education program. The state describes TK as the first of a two-year kindergarten program to prepare children for the rigors of elementary school.

Starting in 2012, some school districts introduced TK on a limited basis to serve a group of children who narrowly missed the cutoff date to enter kindergarten. In 2021, they began accepting more 4-year-olds by expanding the birthday cutoffs each year. Starting this school year, all school districts are required to offer universal access to TK. They must also limit classroom sizes to one adult for every ten students.

How is TK different from other types of preschool?

TK is the only free school option for all 4-year-olds in California. Two other publicly funded preschool programs — Head Start and the California State Preschool Program — prioritize students based on certain criteria, like income and living situation. Private preschools are businesses or nonprofits that are required to comply with local zoning, and health and safety codes. They set their own curriculum.

Does my child have to attend TK?

No. TK and kindergarten are considered optional in California. Children are not mandated to enroll in school until first grade.

How do I know if my kid is eligible for TK?

Students who will turn 4 by Sept. 1 of the school year can enroll.

What do kids learn in TK?

TK is a play-based program, where children learn through play and interaction with each other. Schools are expected to align with the state’s framework, the Preschool/Transitional Kindergarten Learning Foundations, when they set the curriculum for TK. The document lays out the knowledge and skills that 3- to 5-year-old children can acquire, such as focusing attention and collaborating with others, if given the benefits of a high-quality early education.

Parents may find that transitional kindergarten doesn't have as much play as other options.

Erika Vargas, a transitional kindergarten teacher at Global Family Elementary School in Oakland, says a year in TK gives children a “grace period” to learn the routines and expectations of being in school and develop the skills necessary for kindergarten.

“Our goal is to expose them to literature, to develop that love of books, reading, writing and drawing,” she said. “Socially, we want them to learn how to make friends and resolve conflicts.”

Kids also start on basic skills such as learning the alphabet and numbers, but the focus is more on social and emotional development, said Tanya Harris, director of elementary education for the Alameda Unified School District.

Why does California want to make TK universal? 

Gov. Gavin Newsom said the goal of making TK universal is so that “every 4-year-old in California from here on out can start their schooling on the right track, setting them up for success further down the road.”

Experts also say that TK brings students into the K-12 system sooner so that they can acclimate to going to school and feel comfortable in a classroom, while parents benefit from an extra year of free care and education for their children.

When should I start researching transitional kindergarten options for my child?

Many school districts start enrollment in January for the fall and may give priority to school placement for those who enroll early. (Los Angeles Unified begins this process in October.) Also, schools often hold tours and information sessions in the spring. But don’t expect your local school district to reach out to you with a reminder to sign up for your child. Many parents have told us they find out about TK from other parents and do their research into options and deadlines.

What happens if I wait to enroll my child until right before school starts?

Children can enroll in school at any time, but that may limit your options for which school or program your child can enroll in. Some schools may fill up, which means you will have to look at other options.

How can I assess if transitional kindergarten is right for my child?

Since TK may not cover all the child care hours parents need to fit their work schedule, parents must consider if they can make it work logistically and if their child can handle switching from school to an aftercare arrangement.

Some families prefer to keep their child in a program that can provide full-day care, said Kym Johnson, CEO of Bananas, an agency that refers parents to child care options in Alameda County.

On the other hand, some parents want their kids to enter a school environment. “Four-year-olds are at different stages and levels of independence,” Johnson said. “We believe families know what's best for their kids.”

What should I look for in a TK program?

A high-quality TK classroom ought to have ample space for play-based activities, said Hanna Melnick, senior policy advisor for the Learning Policy Institute based in Palo Alto.

“You want to see literacy, math and science activities in the classroom that are thoughtfully planned,” Melnick said. “And you want to make sure that the curriculum and assessments are taking into account the needs of the whole child — their social and emotional needs, their physical development as well as what’s more considered traditional academic development in math and reading.”

Dale Farran, a professor emeritus at Vanderbilt University, said parents need to look for learning opportunities in the classroom that go beyond basic instruction.

“They need to be up, they need to be exploring, they need to be interacting with each other and with the teacher, and they need to have an environment that facilitates all of that happening,” Farran said.

(Looking for a school in Los Angeles Unified School District? Check out our guide: How to choose a school in Los Angeles)

What should I ask the school about how TK is run?

• What kind of outdoor time do children get and what do those spaces offer?
• How do you incorporate play into the curriculum? 
• Are there bathrooms attached to the classroom? (If not: Is there a bathroom inside the classroom, where are the closest bathrooms and how do the children get there?)
• Where will they eat their lunch and snacks? Will it be in the classroom or the cafeteria? 
• Do you have any special additional programs for TK students, e.g. dual immersion? 
• What kind of after-school care do you offer?
• Can I take a tour?
• Can I talk to the principal and teacher?

What are common challenges parents encounter?

Many parents find that arranging pick-up and drop-off can be a huge challenge depending on their work schedules. The other big challenge is finding before- and after-school care since TK schedules vary in length anywhere from three to five hours a day. The state has provided funding for schools to add after-school care and enrichment classes in art, STEM or sports, but availability varies from school to school. Some programs charge fees while others are free.

Anything else I should consider?

Napping and toilet training. Some 4-year-olds still nap in the afternoon, which is not part of most TK programs. If that’s a problem, then perhaps you could consider how your child could still nap after school or phase out napping.

Another issue some parents worry about is how prepared their child is to use the bathroom on their own. The California Department of Education requires districts to admit all eligible students, regardless of if they’re potty-trained or not, but it varies by district when it comes to addressing the needs of those students.

Marji D. Calbeck, director of elementary support for the Mt. Diablo Unified School District, recommends that parents talk with teachers at the start of the school year about any concerns and even pack their kids an extra change of clothes in case they have an accident. Potty accidents happen in school, she said, noting it’s something educators should be equipped to deal with.

What if my child isn’t ready for TK? What are my other options?

California offers several publicly funded early childhood education programs, to help meet families’ diverse child care needs.

Under the state’s Universal Pre-Kindergarten (UPK) initiative, income-eligible families can enroll in federal Head Start programs, the California State Preschool Program or subsidized early learning programs such as home-based “family child care” or private preschools.

CSPP offers part-day and full-day options for 3- and 4-year-olds.

Click here to find out whether you meet the income requirement to enroll your child in CSPP.

Where can I find more information?

First, check out LAist's School Game Plan, to better understand what you might want out of your child's education.

The state has set up a comprehensive website with information about TK. To find a program in your area, start with your local school district. You can look up school districts here. You can also explore parent forums or groups on social media. Parents can also search for child care that meets their specific needs via MyChildCarePlan.org, a search tool supported by California’s network of resource and referral agencies.

If there’s a question you have we didn’t include, feel free to reach out to us — Daisy Nguyen or Elly Yu — and we’ll do our best to find answers.

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Illustration by Olivia Hughes/LAist.

Before they ever picked up a paintbrush, youth artists behind a new mural in MacArthur Park started by listening.

“We interviewed people in MacArthur Park about their experiences living in the community,” said Tania Castro, a recent high school graduate and one of 20 young artists who worked on the project. “Some stories were a little bit sad because they said they lost their jobs and they need more opportunities.”

Those conversations shaped “Roots of Our Labor,” a new mural unveiled this week by LA Commons across the street from MacArthur Park. The project, led by artists Luis Mateo and Shakir Manners, draws from stories collected in a yearlong process from more than 75 residents in and around MacArthur Park.

Castro says those stories were about more than struggle.

“They also said they loved the community. In the park, you can see a lot of vendors selling things like fruit and ice cream,” she said. “And the kids love it.”

Youth artists and members of LA Commons pose for a photo in front of the "Roots of our labor" mural during its unveiling event on Thursday, April 23, in MacArthur Park.

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Hanna Kang

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The LA Local

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The mural shows a tree bearing avocados and oranges, with a trunk made of intertwined hands and a farmer harvesting the fruit. On one side, a tamale vendor is depicted selling food, and on the other, an ice cream vendor pushes a cart as children gather around him. In the background, scenes from MacArthur Park play out. 

In a neighborhood where ongoing immigration raids have fueled fear and instability, and where MacArthur Park is often defined by visible homelessness and crime, organizers said the mural is intended to highlight the diverse communities who live there and to frame the park as a shared space of connection, culture and daily life.

“I enjoyed making it because it really teaches us about the importance of community and being more inclusive and kind to each other,” said high school artist Leslie Gonzalez. “Most of the people we talked to told us about their backgrounds and they weren’t that pleasant but they still pushed through and got together for each other.”

Painted in March at the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN), the mural is installed on the southeastern side of the UCLA James Lawson Jr. Worker Justice Center.

“Immigrants are critical to the community, especially here in MacArthur Park,” said Beth Peterson, community arts program director at LA Commons. “And I think the mural does a beautiful job of really sharing that story. It really shows how the hands of immigrants have really hung together to form this very beautiful community that we live in today.” 

Detail of "Roots of Our Labor" mural at UCLA James Lawson Jr. Worker Justice Center. The mural celebrates workers in the Westlake community.

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Courtesy LA Commons

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For the lead artists, working alongside youth was central to how the art took shape.

“This artwork honors both the neighborhood and the people who shape it,” Mateo said. “Working with youth was essential to the process, allowing the mural to emerge from shared reflection rather than a single perspective.”

The new mural builds on LA Commons’ ongoing work in the area, following another mural unveiled last September at MacArthur Park Elementary School. “Roots of Our Labor” is the organization’s second mural supported by Stop the Hate, a statewide initiative led by the Asian American and Pacific Islander community aimed at addressing hate incidents and promoting cross-cultural understanding.

LA Commons, a nonprofit arts organization that creates community-based public art projects through partnerships and a mix of public and private funding, has been in the MacArthur Park area for more than 20 years. Its first public art project in the neighborhood was in 2003. “Roots of Our Labor” is its 22nd public art project in MacArthur Park.

Detail of "Roots of Our Labor" mural at UCLA James Lawson Jr. Worker Justice Center. The mural celebrates workers in the Westlake community.

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Courtesy LA Commons)

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Manners, the artist, described the mural as a reflection of what he sees as the underlying spirit of MacArthur Park.

It represents “the unseen hands that sustain communities, emphasizing that true progress is built collectively through persistence, sacrifice and shared purpose,” he said.

For Gonzalez, the mural is personal as well as something tied closely to her community.

“I feel like a light has shone on me and I’m proud of it because I’ve never done anything this big before,” she said. 

The post New mural celebrates labor, multicultural community around MacArthur Park appeared first on LA Local.

The phone lines at the East L.A. Sheriff’s Station are back up after more than two months of outages caused by copper wire theft.  

The update comes just one week after Boyle Heights Beat reported on the issue, and residents raised concerns at a Maravilla Community Advisory Committee (MCAC) meeting on April 7 about difficulty reaching the station by phone for non-emergencies.

According to the East L.A. Sheriff’s Station, service was restored on Thursday, April 23. By Friday, all dispatchers were back working in the station after temporarily operating out of an off-site communications trailer connected via satellite. 

“This was made possible due to the concerted efforts of the East Los Angeles Sheriff Station Captains Hinchman and Kusayanagi, AT&T, and our Communications & Fleet Management Bureau,” the station said in a statement to the Beat. 

The station also thanked Assemblymember Jessica Caloza’s office and community stakeholders who contacted AT&T to express urgency.

Sheriff’s officials previously said they had called Caloza’s office to help speed up repairs by communicating with AT&T.

What went wrong

According to Sgt. Michael Mileski, the outage was caused by an incident on Feb. 13, where several thousand dollars’ worth of copper wiring was stolen from an electrical vault near the station. Fiber optic cables were damaged in the process, which affected a significant portion of the Eastern Avenue corridor in Boyle Heights and East L.A., disrupting phone lines for 100,000 residents for five days, Mileski said. 

AT&T said in a statement that copper cable outages generally take five times longer to repair on average than fiber outages. 

Copper wire theft has plagued the Eastside in recent years, leaving communities in the dark and disabling public facilities.  

LA Documenter Alex Medina contributed reporting for this story. LA Documenters trains and pays LA residents to take notes at local government meetings around Los Angeles. You can find meeting notes and audio at losangeles.documenters.org

The story Phone lines restored at East LA Sheriff’s Station after 2-month outage due to copper wire theft appeared first on LA Local.

Californians this fall will decide whether to require voters to show proof of citizenship before casting ballots.

A GOP-backed voter ID ballot initiative on Friday qualified for the Nov. 3 ballot, marking a significant win for San Diego Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, who led the signature-gathering campaign. DeMaio and other Republican operatives have pushed for tighter voter restrictions in deep-blue California for years.

If voters approve it, they would be required to show a government-issued ID each time they go to the polls, while mail-in ballots would need the last-four digits of an ID, such as a driver’s license. The secretary of state and county election offices would also be required to verify voters’ registration each time they vote.

Currently, voters only need to provide an ID and Social Security number when they register to vote. Thirty-six states require or recommend voters show some form of identification at the polls, according to a 2025 report by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“This is an initiative that’s incredibly popular amongst Democrats and Republicans,” GOP state Sen. Tony Strickland of Huntington Beach told CalMatters. “I think the only way we don’t get this passed is if we get [outspent]. So we’re working very hard with an on-the-ground campaign apparatus.”

Strickland and others who have helped lead the campaign attribute the initiative’s rapid certification to Julie Luckey, mother of tech billionaire Palmer Luckey who helped seed the majority of the $10 million the campaign committee has raised in the past year.

Voting rights groups say the initiative will suppress turnout among eligible voters who don’t have the documents on hand, many of whom are disproportionately poor and people of color.

Opponents, including the state’s most powerful labor unions, plan to campaign heavily against it.

Voter fraud is rare in California. However, claims of fraud and concerns about election integrity have risen since President Donald Trump touted false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Californians broadly support voter identification at the polls but are split along ideological lines when given specific details about the ballot measure, according to a 2026 poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies. When told the measure is meant to combat voter fraud and that it could suppress eligible votes, support dipped to 37%.

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."