The Brief

A beloved teacher arrested for soliciting a minor. A coach convicted of sexual abuse. A school district hit with a multi-million-dollar jury verdict for failing to protect students.

The steady drumbeat of stories in recent years about educator sexual abuse in K-12 school districts across California shows the scope of misconduct is much wider than previously known. Yet the stories only hint at how common sexual harassment and grooming behavior has become in schools, with the best available data from the U.S. Education Department suggesting that 1 in 10 children is targeted for grooming at some point in their K-12 education.

A new bill, which is poised to pass the Legislature in the coming days, would give local and state officials more tools to identify and combat sexual abuse, and educate students to better identify the most common signs of grooming behavior. Senate Bill 848, or “Safe Learning Environments Act,” was authored by Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, a Democrat from Alhambra, in response to an investigative report in Business Insider, The Predators’ Playground. The 2023 story documented decades of sexual misconduct involving nearly two dozen different educators, ranging from lewd remarks about students' bodies during class to statutory rape, at a single California school, Rosemead High, which is in Pérez’s district.

Since the article was published, at least five civil lawsuits have been filed by former Rosemead students, while the state attorney general’s Bureau of Children’s Justice opened a rare investigation into the handling of educator sexual misconduct claims, which is ongoing.

“California lacks a comprehensive standardized approach to preventing abuse in K-12 schools,” Pérez told fellow lawmakers in urging their support. “Several high profile cases continue to highlight systemic failures and underscore an urgent need for stronger preventative measures to protect children.”

In an interview with CalMatters, Pérez said she could personally relate to the Rosemead story. When she was in high school, a male staffer some 20 years her senior took an interest in her, asking her questions about sex and boys her age. Then one day, when she returned to campus soon after graduating, he stopped her to ask if she’d turned 18 and if he could take her to dinner. That’s when, Pérez said, it dawned on her that he’d been grooming her for a sexual relationship.

State Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez addresses fellow lawmakers on the Senate floor at the state Capitol in Sacramento on Aug. 21, 2025.

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Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters

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“I didn't tell my parents or anything, but I talked about it with my friends,” she recalled. “And I remember talking about it, even at 17. That's when my friends started sharing their own stories.”

Law would mandate a database of employee misconduct

If it becomes law, Pérez’s bill would create a database of employee misconduct that district administrators must use to background prospective job candidates, require school district officials to report and track “egregious” instances of employee misconduct, mandate training for both educators and students on how to combat and recognize the signs of grooming, and require school districts to implement new written policies defining professional boundaries. It would also apply stricter prior employment check requirements for non-teachers, such as coaches, janitors and bus drivers, update the legal definition of “grooming” to include electronic communications and extend mandated reporter requirements to all employees.

Much of the policy changes in the bill are drawn from a January report produced by the state-funded Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team. The report studied the financial impact of a wave of lawsuits made possible through a landmark 2019 law that temporarily dropped the statute of limitations for victims of childhood sexual abuse to file civil claims against school districts for failing to protect them. Many of the resulting jury verdicts and settlements have been in the tens of millions of dollars, with some much higher.

As CalMatters previously reported, insurance premiums have skyrocketed for school districts, pushing some to the brink of financial insolvency. Estimates for the total value of claims statewide are around $3 billion, with many cases ongoing.

Pérez said this grim reality played a key role in her decision to draft the bill. “There are now dollars and cents being assigned to these cases,” she said. “It's really opened up this conversation about what can we do to better prevent this abuse from happening.”

Billie-Jo Grant, a professor at Cal Poly Pomona and a leading researcher in educator sexual misconduct, said the majority of grooming cases in schools go unreported. In many cases, a student is ashamed or feels complicit in the behavior, Grant said, while employees routinely fail to report suspicious behavior for fear of tarnishing a colleague’s reputation.

Because of a lack of federal data, Grant has tracked teacher arrests using published news clips, which show that more than 3,000 educators nationwide have been arrested since 2017 following allegations of sexual misconduct involving students. California’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing, meanwhile, has opened more than 1,300 investigations of teacher sexual misconduct over the same time period – a figure that does not include cases which are never referred to the state by school district officials.

Grant, who frequently serves as an expert witness in criminal sexual abuse cases, described Pérez’s bill as a great start toward creating more complete data on the frequency of abuse. She stressed, however, that relying on school officials to determine whether misconduct allegations are “substantiated” will lead to underreporting.

“I think what’s left out is all of the times where they simply don’t do an investigation, look at a complaint at face value, and ask the teacher if they’d resign. And that’s the end of the story,” Grant said. “The problem is there is no accountability for school administrators. Our system relies on them doing thorough investigations.”

Law would mandate a database of employee misconduct

A primary element of Pérez’s bill addresses “pass the trash,” a well-documented process in which teachers accused of sexual misconduct quietly resign, only to be hired elsewhere and re-offend. Research funded by the U.S. Department of Justice shows that an educator will on average pass through three different school districts before they are ultimately stopped. Many of these teachers are able to be rehired because of confidential separation agreements, in which school officials agree to not disclose allegations of misconduct to would-be employers in exchange for the educator’s resignation.

That’s what happened earlier this year with David Pitts, a former Rosemead High choir teacher who was placed on administrative leave at a nearby school after he was named in Business Insider’s reporting. A school district investigation of Pitts’ behavior nearly led to an administrative hearing at the state level — a final step that most cases never reach because the teacher has quietly resigned — before Pitts settled. Under the terms of his settlement agreement, Pitts will remain on the payroll until 2026. District officials agreed that if they receive any reference check from a potential employer, they would respond only by “providing Employee's dates of employment and assignments, and indicating that Employee retired from the District." Both Pitts and the district’s head of human resources declined to comment.

Pérez invited Cindy Lam, a Rosemead alum who said she was groomed by Pitts when she served as his student piano accompanist in 2001, to testify in Sacramento in support of her bill.

“By the time he initiated sex with me, I was putty in his hands. And by the time I realized I had been groomed, I was completely isolated and psychologically destroyed,” Lam said. “A law like SB 848 would have adequately educated me about grooming behaviors. I would have known that these interactions were inappropriate and reported them.”

Opposition to the bill, which has bipartisan support, is focused on due process concerns raised by employee unions that have historically opposed similar attempts to strengthen pass the trash laws in California. The California Teachers Association — the state’s largest teacher’s union, which opposed similar legislation in 2012 and again in 2018, — notably does not oppose the bill. The California Federation of Teachers and California State Employees Association, however, which together represent both teachers and the non-credentialed educators who would be included in the disciplinary database that Pérez’s bill would create, recently opposed it. Both unions cited concerns over due process as the primary reason.

“We need to ensure a policy that captures individuals that are unfit to work in education while making sure innocent and unfairly charged employees have fair access to justice,” said California Federation of Teachers legislative director Tristan Brown. “We are committed to working with the senator to make that a reality.”

Numerous other states already rely on similar hiring databases, however, which regulators have cited as key tools in keeping students safe. California is one of just 16 states that lack a comprehensive pass the trash law, a 2022 report published by the Department of Education found.

Back in the Rosemead community, many have welcomed Pérez’s bill as a needed change in a community where boundaries between teachers and students have frequently been blurred. Kristy Rowe, a Rosemead alum who graduated before Lam, testified in support of Pérez’s bill as well.

Rowe said she had a sexual relationship with Paul Arevalo, a business teacher known on campus for inviting cheerleaders to sit on his lap in between classes. Not long after Rowe met him, Arevalo was investigated by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for allegedly offering to buy another female student condoms and sending her sexually explicit messages during class, disciplinary documents show. Arevalo went on to marry a former student and, after transferring to a nearby school in the district, was placed on leave in 2017 when administrators found he’d sexually harassed another student, records show. Arevalo declined to comment.

“Comprehensive legal reform is urgently needed to center the voices of potential victims, to mandate specialized training for educational personnel, and to ensure that future harm is avoided,” Rowe told lawmakers. “Addressing these gaps is not only a matter of justice, it is a moral imperative to protect children, empower survivors, and create a society where such abuse is neither tolerated nor hidden.”

Matt Drange is a freelance investigative reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area and an alumnus of Rosemead High School. He can be reached at mattdrange@gmail.com.

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

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene became a household name in the run up to the 2020 election for divisive rhetoric, political stunts and enthusiastic support of President Donald Trump. But after growing disagreements with Trump during his second term, Greene announced she will leave Congress in January before her term is up.

Greene said it would not be fair to her northwest Georgia district, one of the most conservative in the country, to have them "endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for" while noting that "Republicans will likely lose the midterms."

Greene's split with Trump widened in recent weeks as she pushed for the release of documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

For months, Greene had been publicly pressing Trump and top Republicans in Congress to release all files from two federal investigations into Epstein. She was part of a small cadre of Republicans who helped force a vote on the House floor to release the files — a process that drove Trump to reverse his position on the documents and led to near-unanimous support for the measure this week.

But before Trump reversed course, he lashed out last week, calling her "Marjorie Traitor Greene," and told reporters, "Something happened to her over the last period of a month or two where she changed politically."

In her post Friday night, Greene defended her decision to fight for the release of those documents.

"Standing up for American women who were raped at 14, trafficked and used by rich powerful men, should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the President of the United States, whom I fought for," Greene wrote.

Greene's defiant push against Trump

On a brisk morning this week, Greene stood outside the Capitol with some of the women who say they were abused by Epstein.

"I've never owed him anything," Greene of the president on Tuesday. "But I fought for him and for America First. And he called me a traitor for standing with these women."

The cracks between Trump and Greene grew over the last year, as Greene increasingly pointed out where she saw the president falling short: she called the war in Gaza a genocide, criticized Trump's decision to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, and pressed for expiring health subsidies to be extended, citing the threat of skyrocketing premiums for people in her district, including her own children.

And she was doing it not just on social media or right-wing outlets, but on programs like ABC's The View.

"What Happened to Marjorie?"

"I was thinking, if this was the first time I'd ever seen this person, it sounds like a normal congressperson from Schoolhouse Rock," said University of North Georgia professor Nathan Price after Greene's appearance on the daytime television staple.

For some, this new persona may be hard to square with the Greene many Americans first got to know: the congresswoman who embraced QAnon conspiracy theories, liked a post that called for violence against former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. and heckled school shooting survivor David Hogg in 2020, before he became a prominent political activist.

Even Trump has publicly mused in recent weeks: "What happened to Marjorie?"

Georgia Republican strategist Brian Robinson says it's a fair question.

"I am open to the idea that she's had a 'road to Damascus' moment, a conversion, that she sees the errors of the toxicity and wants something that's better," Robinson said in an interview with NPR earlier in the week.

On her own social media and with journalists, Greene has been open about addressing claims from Trump and others that she has changed or abandoned the president. NPR reached out to Greene for further comment.

"Nothing has changed about me," Greene told the hosts of The View. "I'm staying absolutely 100% true to the people who voted for me, and true to my district."

Robinson said the changes could be part of a natural evolution for Greene, a former CrossFit gym owner from the Atlanta suburbs.

"We love to elect outsiders to Congress," Robinson said. "They go to Congress with very little idea of how it works. And if at some point you're like, 'I want to do substantive things that make America better, then I've got to do this a little bit different."

Or, Robinson said, she may be trying to broaden her appeal with an important constituency as she weighs a bid for higher office. Trump said last week he showed Greene polling earlier this year suggesting she would flounder in a race for Georgia governor or Senate.

"Is she intentionally signaling to women, 'The good old boys club ignores us, and I understand your struggles?" Robinson said.

Both Robinson and Price said Greene's evolution was more about style than substance. She has disavowed some of her more controversial views, but not others, like the unproven assertion that widespread fraud upended the 2020 election result.

The anti-interventionist, anti-elite principles that first propelled her to Congress also remain core to her identity. "What she's responding to is believing that the President has shifted on these issues," said Price.

Some potential political opponents see an opportunity in Greene's break with Trump. Robinson, who worked for Greene's opponent in her first primary race, says in the past he has warned potential challengers not to underestimate her.

"You are wasting your time," Robinson said. "She will beat you. And I would have said that into infinity until this week."

How Greene's district reacted to the shift

But in the 14th Congressional District, it was not clear this week that anything had changed. As chair of the Paulding County Republican Party, Ricky Hess spends a lot of time talking with voters.

"The issues that they want to talk about involve high property taxes, high health care costs, whether or not their kids will be able to buy a house when they graduate," Hess said this week ahead of Greene's resignation.

Hess told NPR he believes Greene's "America First" worldview resonates in this heavily working class and rural stretch of Northwest Georgia.

"She's pretty tapped into what her constituents are wanting, and I have to believe that most of her actions are in service to that," Hess said.

Hess said voters saw Trump and Greene as fighters on the same team. Though Martha Zoller, who hosts a political talk radio show that airs across North Georgia, said in an interview Wednesday she didn't believe everyone's minds were made up.

"People are kind of reeling, if you want to know the truth," Zoller said. "We haven't had a lot of listeners discussing it because they're waiting to see what happens."

Georgia political observers noted that Greene has been anything but a predictable politician — including her surprise resignation.

Trump has come to a truce with other politicians he's feuded with, including Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. And his future relationship with Greene could still evolve.

But Zoller said the conflict between Trump and Greene has been about more than just two big personalities falling out on the national stage.

"I think that the big discussion we're going to be having as Republicans over the next few years is what is the Republican movement once it's not Trump?"

Zoller said earlier this week it seemed clear that Greene wants to be part of that discussion. But with her resignation, the answer to that question is may be less clear now than before.

NPR's Stephen Fowler contributed to this report.
Copyright 2025 NPR

Promoting illegal car sideshows and street races in Long Beach, whether through social media, print, or group chats, could soon cost you up to $1,000 and six months in jail.

The Long Beach City Council on Tuesday voted to create a new ordinance that makes it illegal to encourage or advertise street takeovers, saying these exhibitions are an outstanding danger to the public and a nuisance to neighborhoods.

The item will come back to the dais as a draft prepared by the city’s attorney’s office, which would then be voted into law.

It will allow police to levy penalties on those they can prove promoted or encouraged people to attend the illegal exhibition, which often includes cars doing donuts and burnouts in public intersections ringed by crowds. Police will track promoters through testimony and social media. Promotion bans like this one already exist in other municipalities like San Jose and Alameda County.

It builds on a 2022 city law targeting those who attend these events, making it a misdemeanor for those within 200 feet of a street takeover. Tuesday’s vote also included an amendment that exempts accredited news reporters from the existing spectator ban.

The city’s northernmost 9th City Council District, where the proposal originated, continues to claim the majority of reported street races across Long Beach, with more instances reported there than other parts of the city combined.

Ninth District Councilmember Joni Ricks-Oddie said the law was a direct response to what her constituents experience regularly.

“Illegal street racing and sideshows remain some of the most dangerous public safety challenges in our city,” she said.

Between 2022 and 2023, the police received 349 calls about street racing or other exhibitions of speed — 210 of which were in Ricks-Oddie’s district that encompasses most of the city above South Street. When asked, police did not provide more up-to-date statistics.

Councilmember Tunua Thrash-Ntuk, whose district borders Rick-Oddie’s, said in the Longwood neighborhood, sideshows are a common occurrence on Susana Road, a street that borders unincorporated land and is next to an elementary school.

“Reckless driving is harmful for everyone,” she said. “It is unacceptable in areas that are highly utilized by children, and we must return our streets and neighborhoods to a state of normalcy.”

In the city’s plan to eliminate all vehicular deaths by 2026, commonly known as Vision Zero, a survey section found nearly a quarter of respondents listed traffic enforcement as the top priority. Ahead of the 2026 budget, respondents ranked public safety among the top three priorities for the city.

The city also plans to install three automated speeding ticket cameras in the 9th District, along Artesia Boulevard from Harbor Avenue to Butler Avenue; Atlantic Avenue from the L.A. River to Artesia Boulevard; and Long Beach Boulevard from Artesia Boulevard to 70th Street.

Long Beach is on track to have more than 50 traffic deaths this year.

Millions of Americans have shed pounds with help from drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound.

But people who take these drugs often experience unpleasant side effects.

"They lose weight, which is a positive thing," says Warren Yacawych of the University of Michigan, "but they experience such severe nausea and vomiting that patients stop treatment."

So at this year's Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego, Yacawych and other researchers held a session to describe their efforts to understand and solve the side-effect problem.

The weight-loss products are called GLP-1 agonists. They work by mimicking a hormone that reduces appetite and slows digestion.

Yacawych and his colleagues wanted to know if they could tweak these drugs to suppress appetite without making people queasy.

The team focused on two areas in the brain stem where GLP-1 drugs have a big effect.

"The first is affectionately known as the brain stem's vomit center," Yacawych says. "It's naturally designed to detect any accidentally ingested toxin and coordinate the feeling of nausea and the vomit response."

The second area monitors food intake and tells people when they're full.

The team found a way to direct GLP-1 to the area involved in feeling full, while keeping the drug out of the vomit center.

When the researchers did this, the mice no longer felt sick. But they also didn't get thin — probably because there are specific cells in the vomit center that do not induce vomiting but are critical to weight loss.

"So it's very challenging," Yacawych says, "to be able to separate these side effects, like nausea, from GLP-1's intended effects, like weight loss."

A possible workaround came from a team led by Ernie Blevins of the University of Washington. They gave obese rats a low dose of a GLP-1 drug along with the hormone oxytocin, which is itself an appetite suppressant. That allowed the rats to lose weight without feeling sick.

Not just nausea

Another side effect of GLP-1 drugs is a decrease in thirst, which could be dangerous for people who are already losing lots of fluids from side effects like vomiting and diarrhea.

"If you're in that state of dehydration and you're not feeling thirsty to replace those fluids, that would be a problem," says Derek Daniels of the University at Buffalo.

To understand how GLP-1 drugs reduce thirst, Daniels and a team began studying the brains of rats. And they got lucky.

"We had a happy accident in the lab," Daniels says. "And the happy accident involved a rat called the Brattleboro rat."

Brattleboro rats are laboratory rodents with a genetic mutation that makes them thirsty nearly all the time. But the scientists discovered that these rats are also very sensitive to GLP-1 drugs, which drastically reduced their water consumption.

The team studied the rats' brains to see where GLP-1 was influencing thirst. That led them to several areas of the brain that appear to affect thirst but not appetite.

The discovery could help scientists preserve thirst by designing drugs that "target good places but not bad places," Daniels says.

Appetite and addiction

A team from the University of Virginia found that GLP-1 drugs are already targeting a brain area that plays a role in addiction as well as eating. It's a region involved in emotion and the reward system.

When the researchers delivered GLP-1 to this brain area in mice, it reduced their desire for "rewarding food, like a burger," says Ali D. Güler of the University of Virginia.

But the animals continued to eat healthy, nonrewarding foods, he says — a bit like people choosing a salad bar over dessert.

Identifying this brain area should help scientists find GLP-1 drugs that target the reward system while avoiding areas involved in appetite, Güler says. And that could lead to new treatments for alcoholism and other substance use disorders.

The finding also could explain the observation that people who take GLP-1 agonists tend to reduce their consumption of alcohol.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday temporarily blocked a lower court ruling that found Texas' 2026 congressional redistricting plan pushed by President Donald Trump likely discriminates on the basis of race.

The order signed by Justice Samuel Alito will remain in place at least for the next few days while the court considers whether to allow the new map favorable to Republicans to be used in the midterm elections.

The court's conservative majority has blocked similar lower court rulings because they have come too close to elections.

The order came about an hour after the state called on the high court to intervene to avoid confusion as congressional primary elections approach in March. The justices have blocked past lower-court rulings in congressional redistricting cases, most recently in Alabama and Louisiana, that came several months before elections.

The order was signed by Alito because he is the justice who handles emergency appeals from Texas.

Texas redrew its congressional map in the summer as part of Trump's efforts to preserve a slim Republican majority in the House in next year's elections, touching off a nationwide redistricting battle. The new redistricting map was engineered to give Republicans five additional House seats, but a panel of federal judges in El Paso ruled 2-1 Tuesday that the civil rights groups that challenged the map on behalf of Black and Hispanic voters were likely to win their case.

If that ruling eventually holds, Texas could be forced to hold elections next year using the map drawn by the GOP-controlled Legislature in 2021 based on the 2020 census.

Texas was the first state to meet Trump's demands in what has become an expanding national battle over redistricting. Republicans drew the state's new map to give the GOP five additional seats, and Missouri and North Carolina followed with new maps adding an additional Republican seat each. To counter those moves, California voters approved a ballot initiative to give Democrats an additional five seats there.

The redrawn maps are facing court challenges in California, Missouri and North Carolina.

The Supreme Court is separately considering a case from Louisiana that could further limit race-based districts under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It's not entirely clear how the current round of redistricting would be affected by the outcome in the Louisiana case.