The Brief

With a state mandate looming, the Los Angeles Unified School District this week joined other districts in preparing to introduce a semester of personal finance by the Legislature’s 2027-28 deadline.

The LAUSD school board gave the go-ahead on Tuesday while stipulating that elements of financial literacy and economic justice be incorporated into the course.

As of 2023, only 27% of the state’s high school students attended a school that offered a course in personal finance, the California Department of Education reported. But to increase access and make it a high school graduation requirement, the state passed Assembly Bill 2927 in 2024, which proponents argue could boost students’ lifetime earnings by roughly $100,000.

Twenty-nine states already require such a course.

“If you speak to any adult, they will tell you one of two things,” said Tim Ranzetta, a co-founder of Next Gen Personal Finance. “One is, ‘It’s a class I wish I had.’ The second is, ‘Can you educate my kids?’”

Per the resolution , the LAUSD will be required to provide an update that includes a start date of February 2026. The course will address:

• Budgeting 
• Borrowing 
• Interest rates
• Banking 
• Taxes
• Credit
• Retirement planning
• Insurance

LAUSD’s program will also incorporate financial justice — an element that can help students understand American history, literature and government from an economic perspective.

“During a time when the future of a family may seem uncertain, when many students and youth find themselves suddenly the heads of household, it’s all the more important,” said LAUSD student board member Jerry Yang at Tuesday’s meeting.

Yanely Espinal, the director of educational outreach at Next Gen Personal Finance, added that including financial justice can help students understand ongoing wage gaps based on profession, gender and other factors.

It’s “getting students to understand the reality that we live in within the financial world,” Espinal said. “It hasn’t always been so picture perfect, and while it is increasingly improving and becoming, there’s a lot of effort to try to make it more fair.”

‘Most sought-after elective courses’

Last year, Fresno Unified School District became one of the earlier California districts to offer a financial literacy elective course in the majority of its high schools.

“We just kind of floated it out there, like, ‘Hey, if we were able to offer this elective course, who’s showing interest in it?’” said Jeff Allen, a teacher on special assignment who has been focused on implementing the course districtwide. “Overnight, it became one of the most sought-after elective courses.”

And in that year alone, the district hired 15 personal finance teachers and taught 998 students.

Further south, at Olympian High School in San Diego’s Sweetwater Union High School District, Allison Saiki has been teaching financial algebra for years — and has recently worked to add financial literacy this semester.

“We have social media where students can go and learn from … financial influencers,” Saiki said. “But I have students that say, ‘Hey, you know what? We see a lot of that outside, but we don’t know what’s real. But we can come to you and we say, ‘Hey, is this true?’… and we decipher it together.”

Saiki, who has been awarded as the school’s teacher of the year and has been recognized districtwide, also transforms the classroom into an active economy, with its own currency, employment, pay, property and tax. Students fill out I-9 forms and learn about 401(k)s.

Teaching the subject has also helped Saiki personally.

“I look back and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m an impulsive spender!’” Saiki said.

“Professional development has given me an opportunity to look at my finances and be like, ‘Wait a minute, let’s fix some things, so that I can do everything that I am telling my students to do.’”

Beyond the requirements 

Even though the mandate only calls for a one-semester high school course, Espinal said educators can start introducing students to basic principles of financial literacy even earlier.

For example, at the elementary school level, she said teachers can mimic scenarios of how they might split their birthday money into different piggy banks.

“You should decide how many of those dollars will go to saving, how many will go to spending, how many will go to charity or donations or gifting to others — and how much will you invest for the future, for bigger goals that are much beyond the next few weeks or months of your life,” Espinal said.

Middle school can be more specific, and high school should be oriented toward students’ lifetime goals, according to Espinal.

She stressed that many of the topics covered are already relevant for high schoolers, who may be navigating car insurance as young drivers, or looking into ways to pay for college. LAUSD school board member Kelly Gonez also stressed the importance of extending financial literacy into adult education during Tuesday’s board meeting.

“That early exposure amounts to very specific decisions that they have to make,” Espinal said. “But you can’t really make those decisions unless you’re informed about everything that weighs into that decision-making process.”

The former Huntington Beach city attorney is disputing allegations that he was fired for cause by the Trump administration after less than a year.

Why it matters

Michael Gates, a popular but controversial figure in Huntington Beach politics, told LAist on Friday he had made it known that he planned to resign prior to a supervisor telling him he no longer had a job.

Gates says he is going back to a job with the beach city.

How we got here

The Orange County Register published a story Friday, including a federal employment document, showing Gates was officially fired for cause. The document is undated and does not specify a reason.

The Department of Justice has not responded to LAist's records request for the documents.

The Register reported that a Department of Justice source said that Gates repeatedly referred to women colleagues by derogatory and demeaning names and had complained about the department employing a pregnant woman.

Gates said the allegations are a "100% fabrication" and that he is considering legal action for defamation.

Gates told LAist that the firing was an effort to reverse the narrative about a “dysfunctional” department.

“It was a very unprofessional environment,” Gates told LAist, adding that morale was low in the Civil Rights Division where he worked. “In terms of leadership, it was very dysfunctional,” he said.

This is a developing story. We'll have more reporting throughout the day.

Starbucks baristas at some unionized stores across the country are on strike, including locations in Southern California.

Workers at coffee houses in Long Beach, Santa Clarita and Seal Beach walked off the job Thursday on "Red Cup Day" — an annual event where the coffee chain gives out free reusable cups. They joined baristas at the Downtown Disney Starbucks, who started their strike on Saturday and closed down the store.

The strike is part of a nationwide dispute between the union representing workers at more than 550 of the coffee chain's locations and Starbucks, who have been bargaining a contract for more than a year. Last week, unionized baristas voted to authorize a strike, accusing Starbucks of refusing to budge on their demands for higher pay and better hours.

"The cost of living is only going up. We're trying to go to school, we're trying to pay bills and it's just not enough," said Mai Tran, a striking barista at the Downtown Disney location from the picket line on Tuesday. "We just want to serve coffee…and we can't."

Starbucks said in a statement that it's the unionized workers who are refusing to bargain.

"Our commitment to bargaining hasn’t changed," Starbucks executive Sara Kelly said in a statement last week . "Workers United walked away from the table but if they are ready to come back, we’re ready to talk."

Disagreement over wages

One of the big disputes is pay. Starbucks Workers United is demanding a wage bump for baristas that the company says is unreasonable.

Neither side has made their exact proposals public, but Starbucks claims the union's demands are exorbitant and that its current pay and benefits together come out to an average of $30 an hour for baristas, which it called the "best in retail."

The union says its members need higher take home pay to make ends meet, and that limited hours can mean baristas don't actually have access to Starbucks benefits. Workers also point to a recent tracker published by the labor group the AFL-CIO that found that Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol made 6,666 times the median pay of a Starbucks barista in 2024. Niccol was offered tens of millions to leave his post as Chipotle's top executive for Starbucks last year.

" I am on strike because I have just about had it with Brian Nichols, our CEO. His greed is out of control," said Christi Gomeljak, who added that she has worked at Starbucks for more than five years and makes just above $20 an hour. "It would be so easy for them to give us a contract and to treat us fairly."

The strike is open-ended, so it's unclear when it might end. The union has said more stores could join the strike in the days and weeks to come.

Los Angeles County jails pared back access to life-saving opioid addiction treatment this fall during one of the system’s deadliest years on record, according to records obtained by CalMatters and interviews with staff.

The policy change came one week after Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit against the county over “inhumane” conditions across its jail system, citing a “shocking rate of deaths,” including overdoses.

In interviews with CalMatters, two Correctional Health Services physicians expressed alarm over the reductions, saying that even the slightest delay in treatment is “wildly dangerous” and can lead to more fatal overdoses.

“Patients are begging me for help,” said a physician who spoke with CalMatters on the condition of anonymity because of fear of professional retaliation. “I’m on edge, waiting to see if someone is going to die.”

The reduction in treatment also comes as the jails hold about 700 more people every day as a result of a tough-on-crime ballot measure voters approved last year. Proposition 36 increased sentences for certain drug and theft crimes, leading to a surge in jail populations and straining county resources, according to a Sept. 10 Correctional Health Services memo to the Board of Supervisors.

Los Angeles County allocates roughly $25 million annually for the treatment program. County supervisors this year gave the program an additional $8 million from opioid lawsuit settlements. That sum ultimately did not increase funding for treatment because the department used the money for a different need, according to a statement from the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.

“The overall (medication-assisted treatment) program funding remained the same” despite the extra money the department received, the statement reads.

In a Sept. 16 memo obtained by CalMatters, Chief Medical Officer Sean Henderson said Correctional Health Services “will be taking a pause on primary care in ordering buprenorphine.” The medication reduces cravings and prevents overdoses.

The new mandate restricts how quickly and broadly Correctional Health Services physicians can prescribe the medication. Priority will be given to people when they first enter the jail system — the largest in California — which houses roughly 13,000 people across nine main facilities. Everyone else who wants medication will be placed on a waitlist.

“It's misleading because we just put people on this list and then they stay on the list,” said a physician.

That means that if someone does not accept treatment upon arrival, they won’t be able to access it during the remainder of their incarceration, even if they change their mind, said both physicians who spoke with CalMatters.

Legal experts and physicians say there could be a myriad of reasons why people deny treatment when they’re first arrested and incarcerated. For example, a person could be unfit to make medical decisions if they are in active withdrawal.

Waitlist grew for opioid treatment

Between 2,350 and 2,650 incarcerated people in Los Angeles County receive medication-assisted treatment on any given day, said the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services in an email to CalMatters.

As of Sept. 15 — just one day before the policy change went into effect — 363 people were on a waiting list for treatment, the department said.

But that number skyrocketed to 835 people as of Oct. 31. The total includes 471 newcomers who have never been on the program; the remainder are people who asked to re-enroll after dropping out. As of October, the average wait time is 25 days, the department said. The department declined to answer how long the person waiting the longest has been in line for treatment.

In a statement to CalMatters, the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services said the policy change was intended “to help maximize the reach of (its) treatment program within the jails by leveraging the existing medical staff in the (Inmate Reception Center) where patient traffic is constant.”

The department maintained that medication-assisted treatment is “still available for all inmates, including those who may have declined treatment when they first arrived.”

“Length of incarceration varies for each inmate, from just a handful of days for some and many months for others; whether an individual will access (medication-assisted treatment) during their incarceration is based on their personal choice, unique case and the length of time they will remain incarcerated," wrote the department.

Melissa Camacho, a senior staff attorney at ACLU of Southern California, said the reduction in treatment is “mind boggling” in a year where there are record-breaking deaths.

“I’d like to know how many people who died from overdose deaths were on the waiting list,” she said. “Having a waitlist doesn’t matter if the waitlist is too long to get treatment.”

More money for L.A. jail health care

Medication-assisted treatment combines counseling with FDA-approved medications, including buprenorphine, methadone and naltrexone to treat certain substance use disorders. A 2021 report from the National Commission on Correctional Health Care found that drug and alcohol overdoses constitute the third leading cause of death in jails, following illness and suicide.

Los Angeles County was an early adopter of medication-assisted treatment in its jails. Since the program’s inception in 2021, roughly 25,000 incarcerated people have been treated with Suboxone, an oral form of buprenorphine administered daily by medical professionals. But reliance on Suboxone alone proved to be challenging because of staffing limitations, said the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services in an email to CalMatters.

That’s why, according to Correctional Health Services physicians, the current regimen only allows someone to access Suboxone for 30 days when they first arrive in custody. After that, they can receive a long-acting injectable form of buprenorphine that’s administered once a month.

Since July 2022, nearly 40,000 doses of injectable buprenorphine — which cost roughly $1,600 per shot — have been administered to incarcerated people, according to the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.

In a Sept. 10 memo to the Board of Supervisors, Correctional Health Services’ Director Christina Ghaly said overdose deaths constitute at least 28% of deaths this year. That’s a steep increase since 2016, when they accounted for 9% of in-custody deaths.

“Of all the medical care that we offer in the jail, opioid use disorder treatment is by far and away the most life-saving measure we provide,” said a second physician who spoke with CalMatters on the condition of anonymity because of fear of professional retaliation. “It seems paramount to protect these services.”

'It seems like it's backtracking'

In a written statement, the Los Angeles County Chief Executive Office said the county increased funding for health care in jails by $33 million last year to $580 million. The office said the county has been making improvements to the jails that collectively expanded access to care.

“It is true that critical unmet needs remain, and the county is focused on working with (the county health department and jail health care) to meet their highest priority needs in an environment of extremely limited local funding and service reductions to public facing services across multiple departments,” the statement read.

The state’s lawsuit against the jail system claims Los Angeles County and Correctional Health Services failed “to address the unconscionable mass overdose incidents occurring inside (its) jails” and limited access to the medication-assisted treatment program.

According to the lawsuit, three dozen in-custody deaths — approximately one per week — had taken place in Los Angeles County jails this year by the time of the filing. At that rate, the lawsuit stated, this year will account for the highest number of in-custody deaths over the past 20 years.

“Although (medication-assisted treatment) is known to prevent opioid related overdose and deaths and reduce recidivism, (Correctional Health Services) has an exceedingly long waitlist and failed to offer continued maintenance of medication,” the attorney general’s office wrote in the complaint.

“Persons in custody who have overdosed report not having access to (medication-assisted treatment) or receiving their initial dose of the medication but then being placed on a waitlist for access to follow-up medication, with a delay possibly causing a relapse and avoidable withdrawal symptoms.”

Mark Benor worked as a Correctional Health Services physician from 2018 until 2023, as the department was ramping up its medication-assisted treatment program. During that time, he said he became known as “the Suboxone doctor” as he traveled all over the jails to interview people who wanted to participate in the program and submit orders for their treatment.

“They created something that is impressive in the biggest jail system in the world,” he said. “It seems like it’s backtracking.”

Cayla Mihalovich is a California Local News fellow.

This story was originally published by  CalMatters , a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that explains California policies and politics and makes its government more transparent and accountable

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.