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.

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority told its employees Friday to stop work, shut down their computers and stay off agency systems while it looked into “a potential security issue affecting our systems,” its chief executive confirmed to LAist.

That shutdown order was still in place Monday evening, according to a LAHSA official not authorized to speak on the record.

Gita O'Neill, the agency’s interim CEO, told LAist on Friday evening that the agency did not “yet have enough information to say definitively whether any sensitive or confidential personal information was accessed.”

She has not answered questions about whether or not services for unhoused people are disrupted.

Gita O’Neill, interim CEO of LAHSA, speaks ahead of the annual homeless count on Jan. 20, 2026.

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LAHSA holds highly sensitive information collected from people experiencing homelessness in the region. The agency oversees the Homeless Management Information System, or HMIS, which includes unhoused people’s names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and disabilities, as well as self-reported mental health and substance abuse history, income sources and domestic violence history.

In a statement Monday, LAHSA said it had taken its internal computer systems offline “as a precaution” and “engaged outside cybersecurity specialists to investigate the nature and scope of the incident.” The statement, sent on O'Neill's behalf by outside public relations strategist Trevor Daley, continued to call it “a potential cybersecurity incident.”

The agency is “taking steps to maintain essential operations,” the statement added, saying LAHSA “remains open” while the investigation continues. It said the agency is working with its technical and legal teams.

What staff were told

Friday’s email to "Team LAHSA" carried the subject line "URGENT: Log Off and Shut Down for the Week." LAist obtained a copy, and O'Neill confirmed by text message that she had sent it.

“As a precaution while we look into a potential security issue affecting our systems, we're asking all staff to stop work and take their machines offline for the remainder of today and through the weekend,” the email said.

It told employees to “Log off and shut down your LAHSA computer” and not to log back in or connect to LAHSA systems, including email, “until you receive an all-clear from us.”

The email also told staff to report anything “unusual” before shutting down, such as “files renaming on their own, unexpected pop-ups or messages.”

What LAHSA leadership has said

In a texted response to LAist on Friday evening, O'Neill said she asked staff to take their computers offline “out of an abundance of caution” while the agency’s IT team assessed the situation.

“Our IT team is actively reviewing the situation now and working to understand exactly what occurred and whether any information was affected,” she wrote. “Protecting people’s personal and confidential information is a top priority in that review.”

Leaders of three LAHSA-funded service providers told LAist on Monday afternoon that they had not received any communications from LAHSA about the potential cybersecurity issue. All three use the HMIS system that holds unhoused people’s personal details.

Previous attacks against another LA housing agency

Another L.A. housing agency was previously hit by cyberattacks. The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles — a separate agency known as HACLA — has said hackers got inside its network in 2022 and may have accessed people’s names, Social Security numbers, financial accounts numbers and medical information.

Two years later, HACLA was breached again, according to an official notice, with hackers potentially accessing names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and phone numbers.

LAist reporter Aaron Schrank contributed reporting to this story.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath announced Monday that she is running to be the county’s first elected chief executive. Horvath is the only candidate so far to enter the race, which is set for 2028.

The new executive post will take the place of the county’s appointed CEO and implement key priorities of the county Board of Supervisors. The executive will oversee the county budget, which is currently roughly $50 billion, and labor relations with more than 100,000 employees.

Horvath was first elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2022 and was re-elected in June to another four-year term. She represents the county’s 3rd District, which covers the San Fernando Valley and parts of the Westside and Central Los Angeles. She is a former mayor of West Hollywood.

The supervisor made her announcement Monday via social media and her campaign website. She called the race a “once-in-a-generation opportunity.”

The backstory

Voters created the position in 2024 when they approved Measure G, which was proposed by Supervisors Horvath and Janice Hahn.

Among other changes, the measure allowed the Board of Supervisors to expand from five to nine members by 2030 and established an independent Ethics Commission, which held its first meeting last month.

The pushback

On Monday, Supervisor Kathryn Barger issued a statement saying she believed it was “premature” to campaign for the new county executive position when it remained unclear whether “the office itself is constitutional.”

Barger pointed to questions raised by former federal judge Stephen Larson about whether California’s Constitution allows an elected county executive to veto board decisions, control county contracts and take on powers state law currently gives the Board of Supervisors.

“Moving forward with an office that would fundamentally change how Los Angeles County is governed, without first resolving these questions, is putting the cart before the horse,” Barger said in her statement. “We need clarity.”

The primary election is scheduled for March 7, 2028.

The Los Angeles Unified School District said it’s reviewing how to proceed after Google’s announcement last week that it will not allow schools to use its search engine unless they opt in to using artificial intelligence.

Google said that in the coming months, access to products like Gemini and Google Search would be turned off by default until schools turn them on, saying it believes “schools should have control over AI in their classroom.” But Google Search, by default, includes an AI chatbot and uses AI to summarize search results — meaning that schools that restrict AI would not have access to Google Search.

Earlier this school year, LAUSD implemented a moratorium on students using generative AI on district-issued devices.

“We are reviewing Google’s announcement and its potential implications for schools, educators and students,” said a spokesperson for LAUSD. “Los Angeles Unified believes emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, have the potential to enhance teaching and learning when introduced thoughtfully, responsibly and with clear safeguards.”

“Search and A.I. are deeply integrated,” Chris Phillips, vice president for education at Google, said to The New York Times. He told the outlet that if a school bans AI, students “will not have access to search, and they’ll see a message from their school that indicates it’s not available.”

What are schools doing now?

Currently, students in LAUSD can still use Google to search for information, a district spokesperson said, but the AI mode — in which students can converse with the company’s chatbot, Gemini — is turned off. Some searches may still show an AI-generated summary or overview. The district has asked Google for a modification to allow the summaries to be turned off.

If a school does opt in to artificial intelligence, Google said it will offer a “guided learning” tool in its chatbot for student accounts “to help them work through problems without skipping straight to answers.”

The announcement has prompted outcry from advocates. "Google forced its AI products into classrooms, and parents fought back," said Lila Byock, founder of Schools Beyond Screens, the group that pushed for LAUSD’s AI moratorium, as well as the district’s screen time limit. "Now Google is refusing to take no for an answer. … Schools Beyond Screens calls on district leaders to reclaim their authority from corporate interests and divest from Google."

The district’s ad hoc committee on generative AI is scheduled to have its next meeting on Nov. 13.

Rep. Thomas Massie moved Monday to force a vote to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, setting the stage for a dramatic vote on whether to remove one of the Trump administration’s most prominent figures following sweeping election losses.

The impeachment resolution was introduced by Massie, a Kentucky Republican, as soon as the House opened for the first day of sessions after the midterms. It largely focuses on the war in Iran but also includes references to Hegseth’s role in carrying out military actions in Yemen and Venezuela.

Massie said the secretary’s actions amount to “high crimes and misdemeanors” and his leadership at the Pentagon “thus warrants impeachment.”

A vote in the House could come by mid-week, putting pressure on Republicans — many of whom blamed their election wipeout on the Iran war — but next steps are highly uncertain.

House Speaker Mike Johnson had tried to prevent this outcome, and warned lawmakers against impeaching the Defense secretary while the U.S. is engaged in military actions in the Middle East.

“Impeaching a Cabinet secretary right now, especially the Department of War in the middle of hostilities abroad would be a terrible, terrible look, a terrible thing for our allies and our enemies to see that,” Johnson, a Republican, said as he opened the chamber.

“We don’t impeach Cabinet secretaries for political gain or for cheap tricks, and I think that’s what this is and I think everybody knows it.”

Most House Democrats are expected to support impeaching Hegseth, with Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries saying over the weekend it’s time for the Defense secretary to go.

If the House votes to impeach Hegseth, it would next go to the Senate for a potential trial. Republicans remain in the majority in both chambers, until the new Congress convenes in January with Democrats in control.

Hegseth issues his own defense and prepares for a fight

Hegseth maintains he’s eager to litigate the military actions that he and President Donald Trump have taken against Iran, Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels and Venezuela’s previous leaders.

“If you want to take issue with what we did in Epic Fury or Rough Rider or nabbing Nicolás Maduro, you’re taking issue with the troops and what they accomplished, which is historic,” Hegseth told reporters Monday, using the military code names for the Iran war and campaign of strikes to halt the Houthis’ attacks on shipping in the Middle East.

Hegseth also announced that he would hold a rare news conference on Tuesday — his first in over 180 days — on the impeachment threat. His last briefing was in May, and he has not held one on the Iran war, strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats or other U.S. military actions since then.

The Pentagon chief is bearing the brunt of anger and calls for his ouster after the Iran war and its economic impact contributed to severe Republican losses in the midterm elections that cost the party control of Congress.

Hegseth waves off impeachment push as ‘noise’

Hegseth, after giving a speech at the Naval War College in Rhode Island, brushed aside the impeachment push.

“There’s a lot of politically motivated people who may have substantial policy disagreements, but their disagreements are with success,” he told reporters. He added that “if we want to litigate” the military actions that the Trump administration has taken, “I’m happy to do it all day long.”

“My team, we’re not worried about the noise — it’s what I told the troops, too — ‘don’t worry about the noise,’” he said.

Asked about Vice President JD Vance blaming the Iran war for the massive GOP losses in the election, Hegseth noted that Trump said he would do it again, and “I agree.”

He largely repeated a line that Secretary of State Marco Rubio said to reporters a day earlier: “It doesn’t have to be necessarily popular, but it can be necessary.”

Hegseth argued that the war was necessary because “someone had to confront the Iranian regime’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon” and said “the choice was don’t act and wish it away or take a bold move.”

Iran has long maintained that its nuclear program is peaceful. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran has 440.9 kilograms (972 pounds) of uranium that is enriched up to 60% purity, a short, technical step from weapons-grade levels of 90%.

Trump defended Hegseth to reporters on Sunday night.

“He’s guilty of two things, basically winning two wars,” Trump said. “I believe we saved the Middle East and Israel combined. And it’s awfully hard to say let’s impeach somebody who did that.”

Pentagon chief insists ‘Iran is devastated’

Hegseth reiterated that “Iran is devastated,” even though the Islamic Republic has been able to keep striking military bases in the Middle East that are used by the United States, causing billions of dollars in damage, as well as commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Disruptions to shipping in the waterway, where one-fifth of the world’s oil passed before the war, have led to higher energy prices that hit voters’ pocketbooks.

He said the next steps on the war are up to Trump, including telling Iran: “Hey, we’re done, and we’re going to watch your nuclear material. You better not move it.”

Hegseth’s defense of the war comes after about 6 in 10 voters said the U.S. made the “wrong decision” in taking military action against Iran, according to The AP Voter Poll, a survey of more than 100,000 voters in the United States.

With anger in Congress rising, Hegseth has been on a social media blitz, posting a video last week acknowledging the threat of impeachment. He said it would be “all about the politics of personal destruction” and insisted that “won’t work with me. You can rest assured of that.”

Since then, scores of political appointees within the Pentagon have posted images of Hegseth emblazoned with the words, “Stand. Fight. Defend the Republic.” The White House also posted a video to social media that featured praise from Trump.

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Associated Press writers Kevin Freking and Joey Cappelletti contributed to this report.