The Brief

Since last spring, Los Angeles community colleges have been rolling out a number of classes in Spanish — not classes to learn Spanish, but classes where Spanish speakers can learn other subjects.

The expansion of “in-language” classes is part of a national effort to better serve community college students whose first language isn’t English. This population is “a large and growing segment of the community college student population,” whose educational needs have not been widely evaluated.

And in California, the movement is also a reversal of nearly a century and a half of policy that has minimized Spanish, since the state’s constitution was ratified in 1879.

To understand the reversal at LACCD, though, one must start with a family’s move to Los Angeles.

Educated, but not in English

On a recent visit to his childhood home in South Los Angeles, 50-year-old Gabriel Buelna heard his parents talk at the dinner table about one of the biggest challenges they faced when they came to L.A. in the mid-1960s.

“I understood a little bit of English, not a lot,” his mother Lilia Buelna said. She had taken office skills classes in Mexico for four years and worked for an engineering firm in Tijuana before moving to L.A.

Her search for English classes had as much to do with navigating life in her new home, she said, as it did with continuing her education.

“[I wanted] to earn my high school diploma and from there study something else, like business,” she said.

She and her husband, Enrique Buelna, moved into the South L.A. house after they married in 1963. He’d lived there for about five years and also struggled to find classes beyond the rudimentary language skills. They said the classes they found at the local church, high school, and community college didn’t build on the education both already had.

A 1963 wedding portrait of Gabriel Buelna’s parents: Lilia and Enrique Buelna, who married in Tijuana, Mexico, where this picture was taken.

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“They didn’t teach well. I wasn’t satisfied [with the classes]. [Teachers] would tell you ‘Write dog 20 times,’” Enrique Buelna said.

In Mexico, he’d also taken office skills courses and worked in Mexico’s equivalent of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency. In the United States he worked for a furniture manufacturer that was eventually bought and run by the employees, including him. He said he wishes he could have overcome the English language barrier to take business administration classes, because that would have prepared him for the kind of decisions he’d have to make at the furniture business.

“Knowing what to do if someone gave you a bogus check or how to deal with vendors. I had little knowledge of buying and selling [at that level],” Buelna said.

It ended up costing him and the other owners of the company a lot.

Enrique Buelna, 90, went to various schools to learn English, but was unsatisfied with the quality of classes, he says. In 1983, the sofa factory he owned burned down and Buelna lost everything. “I wish I would’ve known more about insurance, and the laws — but there was always that language barrier that made it hard to know what I needed for myself and my business.”

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“We forgot to buy insurance,” Enrique Buelna said. A fire, he said, destroyed most of the business.

Their son, Gabriel Buelna, hears these stories differently now than he did when he was a kid. He practices family law, holds a doctorate in political science and teaches Chicano studies classes at CSU Northridge.

“Their capacity was hindered. There was an immigrant ceiling … they come from Mexico with some level of education … they're trying to enter the business class, they're trying to do that and the language component is the biggest anchor,” he said.

But it’s the hat he’s been wearing since 2017 that he’s used to turn his parents’ experiences, and his opinions and views of the immigrant experience, into change for public higher education. That’s when Buelna was elected trustee for the L.A. Community College District board, the policymaking body for nine campuses that enroll over 200,000 students.

“The narrative has shifted from [my parents’ time], which was ‘too bad, so sad, learn English … you're in the United States’ to where now I think the question is, do we as leaders have an obligation to allow all of our citizens to hit their maximum capacity … for folks to do that in a way that works for them,” he said.

Lilia Buelna, 78, studied business and accounting in Sinaloa, Mexico, where she is from. When Buelna moved to the United States, she taught herself English by reading the dictionary and frequenting Catholic parish ministries throughout South Los Angeles. Buelna still keeps English dictionaries around the house.

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Last year, in a one-year term as board president, Buelna expanded the number of career and technical classes offered in foreign languages, the vast majority in Spanish, and called them “in-language” classes.

Buelna and district administrators sidestepped a state requirement that students enrolled in these classes also be enrolled in English as a second language classes. They justified the action by saying that their institution should remove barriers that exist for students to enroll in career education classes, and if English is one of those barriers, then the classes should be offered in the students’ native language.

By the numbers

Classes are mostly in Spanish, but some are taught in both English and Spanish while others are in Armenian, Russian, Mandarin and Korean, Buelna said.

The classes first rolled out on a small scale this past winter, with 313 students enrolled in 15 language classes. Enrollment grew to almost 1,500 students in 59 classes in spring. Enrollment in this fall semester’s 30 in-language classes hit a high of 1,572 students as of Sept. 6, according to Buelna.

The classes have ranged from automotive, culinary, and sewing to a variety of office skills classes, such as intro to spreadsheets.

A survey conducted by the community college district suggested the classes are tapping into an unmet need. About 75% of respondents said they speak two or more languages at home, the most common by far (74%) being Spanish. Armenian, Tagalog, Russian, Chinese languages, and French each were spoken by roughly 3% of respondents.

Nearly two thirds of respondents said they would be interested in taking classes in a language other than English. The most popular subjects chosen were education, health sciences, business and arts.

The survey also revealed resistance. Nearly 20% of respondents said they would not take such a class.

“I’m totally against the classes being taught [in] other than English except foreign languages. We should be united using a language,” one respondent answered.

What an in-language class is like

There are two groups of people waiting to be admitted to the Mexican consulate next to L.A.’s MacArthur Park. The first group is there to process passports and other government documents. The second, much smaller group by an unmarked door, is waiting to be let into Vocational Education 320: Overview of Health Sectors & In Home Support Services, a class offered by East Los Angeles College in conjunction with the consulate.

“Yesterday we talked about the different nursing careers,” class instructor Adrianne Villalvazo said, in Spanish, to 16 people in one of the consulate’s meeting rooms as class begins.

Villalvazo finished medical school a few years ago, she said, and plans to practice family medicine. During the three-hour class, she shows students a video in Spanish that explains a phlebotomist’s training to draw blood, shows a chart listing the average pay for health careers, and listens as one of the students stands in front of the class with hand-drawn illustrations and explains the work of a physical therapist.

Dulce Guzman presented that last one. She moved to L.A. from Mexico City 15 years ago. “I like learning in general,” she said. “I also want to learn about the elderly because I notice that they’re among the most neglected in our communities.”

“I knew I had one year to get policies done,” Gabriel Buelna said, regarding his re-election for the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees in 2022. “With that one year, I took advantage.”

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Since arriving in L.A. she’s worked in restaurants and cleaning hotel rooms. She currently works as a caregiver, she said, for county-provided in-home support services. Her dream is to open a child care business and to earn her caregiving certification.

“My calling right now in my heart, the universe is telling me right now, to take care of older people, I think I’m good,” said Antonio Mungia, who moved to L.A. from central Mexico 23 years ago. He’s worked in restaurants and had an office job after taking an office skills course. His most recent job was taking care of a terminally ill woman who died while he was taking this class.

He hopes to learn how to take blood pressure, administer oxygen, and the ins and outs of adult diapers. He chose this class because it’s given in Spanish.

“There is nothing like learning in your own language, the language you were born with, the language that you speak,” he said.

Sacramento may scale L.A. offerings

By state law, English is to be the language of instruction in California community colleges; students who take classes in languages other than English (except those to learn a foreign language) must also enroll in English as a second language classes.

But that English-only policy was born out of xenophobic times in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

“Many California community colleges are technically Hispanic-Serving Institutions,” which means they enroll a certain percentage of Hispanic students, said Federick Ngo, a higher education policy expert at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“Those institutions are kind of grappling with their identity and their mission in light of who they're actually enrolling, and so it does make sense that if you have a large Spanish-speaking population, that you would want to perhaps expand course offerings [in Spanish],” he said.

Other experts say that creating a learning space in a student’s native language increases the opportunities for learning success which in turn nurtures excitement about learning and understanding.

More community colleges may be on their way to creating such spaces.

California Assembly Bill 1096, authored by Assemblyman Mike Fong, is making its way through the legislative process. If approved, it would suspend the English as a second language requirement in community colleges.

LACCD Trustee Gabriel Buelna wants to see in-language instruction expanded to math, biology, literature, and other classes in order “to meet that need [to learn], and for language rights to be seen as equal and not second or third class,” he said.

The number of people in the U.S. who speak a language other than English has been rising. LACCD’s in-language classes are set to help adult learners enter work places where the ability to speak multiple languages is an asset.

“It seems to me to be a very student-centered approach, responsive to [LACCD’s] local labor markets and communities,” said Nikki Edgecombe, a research scholar at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College in New York.

Edgecombe added that LACCD is further along in this effort than other institutions of which she’s aware. The next step, she said, is to measure whether students taking these classes reached their job and education goals and, if so, what will expansion of these classes mean for the surrounding areas.

“How can we affirm the linguistic diversity of our communities and leverage that linguistic diversity to support healthy communities, to have more workers with some post-secondary training that can then work in support and serve those communities better?” she said.

“Una persona que sabe dos idiomas vale más,” said 90-year-old Enrique Buelna as he talked about making sure his kids spoke English and Spanish. The phrase translates to, “A person who knows two languages is worth more.”

The key word is worth. His son Gabriel believes Spanish speakers have been seeking the return of self-worth that nearly a century and a half of public policies have taken away from them.

Lineage Logistics has removed all food waste inside the Boyle Heights cold storage that burned down in June, the company and air quality officials said this afternoon.

Now, Lineage has seven days to remove debris, power wash and disinfect certain areas.

The fire started on June 17 and burned for about a week, displacing many Boyle Heights residents and causing widespread air quality issues across the region.

Then putrid odor from an estimated 88 million pounds of food rotting inside the facility began to blanket Boyle Heights and surrounding communities.

Lineage said total cleanup cost is expected to run more than $100 million.

"The City gave Lineage 45 days to remove the biohazard food waste; today is day 60 on the City’s timeline," said L.A. City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, whose district includes Boyle Heights, in a statement today.

The food waste removal, Jurado added, "does not erase two months of odors, pests, and disruption."

South Coast AQMD said it has received more than 4,900 odor complaints from surrounding communities since July 12 and has issued 38 notices of public health and safety code violations.

Last week, a L.A. City Council committee voted to withhold permits to rebuild the warehouse, pending a full investigation by the fire department. That motion heads to the full City Council for consideration.

In a last-minute move, state legislators added language to a bill on Friday evening that street safety advocates say would threaten a long-planned project to slow speeding cars on Forest Lawn Drive near Griffith Park in Los Angeles.

The proposal, which would amend a larger bill if approved, targets projects that would reduce lanes on roads that provide access to “two or more adjacent cemeteries” in cities with populations over 2 million. Los Angeles is the only city in California large enough to meet that requirement.

Since 2022, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and the city council office of Nithya Raman, who is running for mayor, have studied and planned to reduce the number of lanes along a one-mile stretch of Forest Lawn Drive. The proposal would cut the number of lanes to three — two through-lanes and one center turn lane.

The stretch of road is the point of entry for Forest Lawn’s Hollywood Hills location and Mount Sinai Memorial Park. The cemeteries are home to the graves of famous actors such as Debbie Reynolds and Brittany Murphy, at Forest Lawn, and comedians Don Rickles and Bob Saget at Mount Sinai.

Forest Lawn Memorial-Parks and Mortuaries, which operates a chain of cemeteries including the Hollywood Hills location, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying against the project at the state and local levels, according to an LAist review of lobbying activity. Mount Sinai has also advocated against the project.

“After years of work to finally make this street safer, Sacramento is threatening that progress because powerful interests objected,” Michael Schneider, CEO of Streets for All, said in a post on the street advocacy group’s website condemning the bill’s language. 

The project

According to the L.A. Department of Transportation, Forest Lawn Drive has seen more than 95 collisions, resulting in four deaths, since 2013. Earlier this month, a driver died on the road after their "vehicle collided into a tree and became engulfed in flames,” according to the LAPD.

In response to concerns about speed and safety, the Department of Transportation proposed reducing the number of lanes. The project would also install plastic posts to separate vehicular traffic from cyclists.

Both cemeteries along the affected portion of Forest Lawn Drive have opposed the project from the start, saying the reduction in lanes would “create severe gridlock.”

The city’s analysis of how traffic could be impacted show that the lane reduction would result in a driving delay of about 15 seconds during weekday evening rush hour and by a little more than a minute and a half during weekend peak hours, when traffic is heavier.

The project was set to break ground earlier this summer before state legislators and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass requested city departments to pause work, citing "significant community opposition."

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass during a talk with LAist's public affairs show AirTalk.

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Bass is facing Raman in a runoff race for the L.A. mayor’s seat this November. The project has become a heated campaign issue with Bass wanting to block the work and Raman supporting the project.

“This last minute amendment to the legislation is clearly meant to stop one road safety project in my district, which is designed to save lives while keeping travel times nearly unchanged for commuters,” Raman said in a statement shared by her campaign.

L.A. Councilmember and mayoral candidate Nithya Raman at a press conference to speak in support of safety updates following a fatal crash that occurred on Forest Lawn Drive, on Tuesday, August 18, 2026.

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The mayor's office did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment

The bill

If the added language is approved, State Senate and Assembly bills 194 would require Los Angeles to get approval from the City Council and the mayor and hold a public hearing before reducing “the number of vehicle travel lanes on a street that provides the only access to two or more adjacent cemeteries.”

The proposed bill change comes at the tail end of the legislative session, meaning lawmakers would have until midnight on Aug. 31 to either advance or reject the legislation.

A joint statement from Forest Lawn and Mount Sinai cemeteries said the legislation, if passed, would represent a “momentous victory.”

“The proposed legislation places important safeguards around any future effort to reduce vehicle lanes on the only street providing access to these adjacent cemeteries,” the statement reads.

Lobbying money

Records held by the California Secretary of State show that Forest Lawn Memorial Parks and Mortuaries paid a lobbying firm $125,000 between April and June to advocate the governor’s office and state legislature regarding “transportation issues.” No additional details are available.

Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur, who represents the project area, confirmed to LAist that he heard from Governmental Advocates, Inc., the lobbying firm retained by the cemetery. Zbur said the firm and other stakeholders reached out to his office about “the harmful impact of the proposed projects on access to the cemeteries and the surrounding area.”

According to city records, lobbyist Rick Taylor and Associates received $360,000 from a law firm working on behalf of the cemetery between 2025 and 2026. Reports filed with the L.A. City Ethics Commission about the lobbying activity list opposition to the Forest Lawn Drive transportation project as the subject.

Status of the project

According to an Aug. 24 statement from the mayor’s office received before the proposed state language was introduced, alternative plans that preserve the four lanes of traffic and include protected bike lanes “are being reviewed.”

The mayor’s office said the project will break ground following additional community outreach.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

After Inglewood systematically violated state law, a judge reminded the city it was required to release records on police misconduct and use of force — but rolled back an earlier ruling that would have required the records to be posted online.

Barring an appeal, the decision brings five years of legal wrangling between the city and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California closer to a conclusion.

Inglewood won’t face serious consequences for the pattern of breaking California public records law, but the city must pay attorney fees for the ACLU and Trisha Shanklin, who joined the ACLU’s 2021 lawsuit. Inglewood police fatally shot Shanklin’s sister, Kisha Michael, and Marquintan Sandlin in 2016.

LA Superior Court Judge Amy Carter said the city will not have to proactively post the records online, which another judge had previously ordered the city to do for the next three years. Carter said during a Wednesday hearing that such a requirement would have to come from state legislators, not a judge.

Over the last decade, California lawmakers have expanded the public’s right to access police misconduct and use-of-force records, but Inglewood has thrown up a series of obstacles to that access.

The Inglewood City Council voted to destroy decades of internal affairs records in 2018 just weeks before one law went into effect, though Mayor James Butts denied the move was intended to thwart the law, according to LAist. The LA Times reported that the city nearly did it again in 2021 before being blocked by a judge.

This week’s court ruling found the city has routinely violated the law since then, missing deadlines, sharing incomplete records, and at times, failing to provide any documents at all.

Tiffany Bailey, an ACLU attorney, celebrated the decision and said it streamlines the civil rights group’s ability to get police records from the city in the future.

David Loy, an attorney with the First Amendment Coalition, said the case was a great win for the ACLU.

“These kinds of (public records) delays are not uncommon throughout the state,” Loy said. “I hope and believe this is a signal to other cities to get their house in order.”

Attorneys for the city declined to comment on the ruling, and Mayor James Butts did not immediately reply to written questions from The LA Local.

CalMatters maintains a searchable database of police misconduct and use-of-force records called the Police Records Access Project that includes records from the Inglewood Police Department.

The universe is a strange place — filled with exploding stars, ancient galaxies, and unseen worlds. Now, astronomers are about to get a brand new tool to explore it.

The $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled for launch Aug. 30. Named for NASA's first chief astronomer, the observatory is expected to reveal new information about the expansion of the universe and discover multitudes of planets orbiting distant stars.

Roman, as it is known to its friends, has an unusual history. About 15 years ago NASA was making plans to build a space telescope that could, among other things, search for exploding stars known as Type 1A supernovas. These supernovas were used as a kind of cosmological measuring stick to uncover a mysterious force called dark energy that was causing the universe to expand — a discovery that earned the Nobel Prize in 2011.

Cosmologist Daniel Scolnic at Duke University says finding more of them would be key to better understanding that expansion.

As NASA was developing plans for this new telescope, a call came in from the government office in charge of surveillance satellites.

"The National Reconnaissance Office reached out to NASA," Scolnic says, "saying, 'We have this amazing satellite sitting in a hangar that we're not using. And what what do you guys think about instead of pointing downwards, we point upwards, and you guys use it?'"

NASA said yes. It took some substantial modifications, but now that old satellite is set to become NASA's next major space observatory.

Scolnic says that the new observatory could fundamentally change the scientific model that astronomers use to understand our universe.

"In the last few years, there have been measurements saying that model might be wrong — and that's something that Roman will absolutely nail, whether the model's right or wrong," he says.

Another goal of the telescope is to spend a month surveying all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Julie McEnery is Roman's project scientist. She says even though Roman has broadly the same sensitivity and sharpness of vision as the currently orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, its design lets it do things much faster.

"That one month of observations to survey our Milky Way galaxy would take about a century with Hubble," says McEnery.

Instead of focusing on a single object, Roman is designed to make catalogs of large swaths of the sky, and McEnery says these catalogs will be available to everyone, not just academics.

"You can be a teacher in a high school in Kentucky and your students have the opportunity to see Roman data at the same time as a professor in Princeton," she says.

One professor eager to get his hands on Roman data is Scott Gaudi at The Ohio State University. Along with colleagues, Gaudi developed a technique for detecting planets around distant stars. It's called gravitational microlensing, and it measures the way those planets bend the starlight that passes them by.

Albert Einstein described the idea in 1936 but thought it would be impractical. New technology has proven him wrong — and Gaudi expects Roman will find tons of planets that way.

"We're looking for planets that are just completely undetectable by any other method," Gaudi says. That includes planets at the center of our galaxy, "that are very analogous to our own solar system planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune."

In addition to new planets, Roman should also reveal new galaxies, helping astronomers to get a better idea of the large-scale structure of the universe.

But predicting what will be Roman's greatest accomplishments over the course of its five-year mission is a tricky business.

"The history of astronomy really has shown that when you get a new capability, and especially a survey capability, you learn something new, something unexpected," says Wendy Freedman, an astronomer at the University of Chicago. "Often that turns out to be the most exciting part of a new facility. So I am completely open to what this telescope will find."

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