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.

State regulators voted Thursday to stop Southern California Gas Co. from charging customers to help pay for planning miles of pipelines that would bring hydrogen gas to the L.A. Basin.

The company says the project would reduce the region’s reliance on methane gas.

Southern California Gas estimates it would cost about $266 million to study and plan the project — called Angeles Link — and asked the state Public Utilities Commission to allow it to recover those costs through customer rates. The company had proposed a monthly increase of $0.35 on the average residential customer bill over the course of three years.

The commission unanimously rejected the request, saying the company had not proved any direct benefit to customers. The decision effectively halts the project for now, and comes amid a stall in federal funding for hydrogen projects under the Trump administration.

Local environmental groups involved in the community advisory process had also grown frustrated by negotiations that they said, in a letter to state regulators, “does not prioritize genuine community engagement.”

As global pollution levels continue to climb, the commission’s decision also highlights the growing challenge of transitioning to a cleaner energy supply amid rising utility bills and open questions about the safety and true environmental cost of largely untested technology.

Why hydrogen?

Hydrogen is a colorless gas that is considered "clean" because it doesn’t involve carbon, which — when burned to create energy — becomes carbon dioxide, a major planet-heating gas.

But it takes energy to produce hydrogen, and most hydrogen these days is created by burning fossil fuels. “Green” hydrogen is created by using clean energy sources like solar and wind to split water into oxygen and hydrogen.

SoCal Gas said the Angeles Link project would prioritize green hydrogen.

Most experts see green hydrogen as an important clean-burning fuel for hard-to-electrify industries, such as long-haul trucking and gas-fired power generation. The city of Los Angeles, for example, wants to retrofit its Scattergood Power Plant near El Segundo to burn hydrogen instead of methane gas to generate electricity.

There are many open questions about how safe the highly-combustible gas is for proposed uses and how much water it will require to make. At the same time, extracting and burning fossil fuels for electricity and fuel also takes water — a growing problem as climate change drives longer and hotter droughts.

Experts say, if done right, hydrogen can reduce that water intake and not have a major impact on water supplies.

Also, burning hydrogen could actually worsen local, lung-damaging nitrogen-oxide air pollution, at least with the technology as it currently stands, according to energy researchers.

Reactions to the decision

SoCal Gas will now have to turn to shareholders or other sources of funding if the company wants to proceed. The company did not directly answer LAist’s questions about whether it would.

“We continue to believe that hydrogen—including clean renewable hydrogen—can help advance California’s energy and climate goals while supporting the long‑term affordability, security and reliability of energy service for customers,” SoCal Gas spokesperson Brian Haas wrote in an email to LAist.

Environmental groups celebrated the vote, while emphasizing they see green hydrogen playing a role in the state’s future.

“Residential customers should not subsidize speculative infrastructure for large industrial users,” said Michael Colvin, director of the California Energy Program at Environmental Defense Fund, in a statement.

“We look forward to working with regulators, utilities and large customers to build a credible, cost-effective strategy to cut climate pollution from sectors that are hardest to electrify,” the statement read.

Global events like the World Cup and the 2028 Olympics are sure to draw thousands of new visitors wanting to get to know Los Angeles.

L.A. has a lot to offer, including its vast and varied portfolio of public art. It’s even been referred to as the mural capital of the world. So if you want to explore some of the city’s art, here are a few murals you won’t want to miss.

Sports 

“LA Rising” at the Miyako Hotel in Little Tokyo celebrates the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani, depicting him in his two roles — hitter and pitcher.
- Where to find it: 328 First St., Los Angeles

“Blue Heaven on Earth” is a love letter to the Dodgers, depicting both Shohei Ohtani and the late Fernando Venezuela.
- Where to find it: 1647 Blake Ave., Los Angeles

A mural honoring Winter Olympics Gold Medalist Alysa Liu in Gardena.

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Jay L Clendenin

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California native and Olympian Alysa Liu captured the world’s attention with her figure skating in the Winter Olympics. This mural in Gardena celebrates her win.
- Where to find it: 15532 Crenshaw Blvd., Gardena

A mural of L.A. Lakers legend Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna can be found outside Hardcore Fitness L.A.

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Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times via Getty Imag

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Los Angeles Times

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“City of Angels!” pays tribute to Lakers legend Kobe Bryant and his daughter, Gigi.
- Where to find it: 400 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles

Music

Whitney Houston, Rihanna, Aaliyah, Amy Winehouse and Selena are memorialized on this Hollywood mural.
- Where to find it: 7677 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles 

“Jazz on the field” is an ode to Wrigley Field and the Dunbar Hotel in South L.A. and depicts jazz icons Louis Armstrong and Etta James, as well as Martin Luther King Jr.
- Where to find it: 43rd St. and Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When Kendrick Lamar featured Tam’s Burgers in his “Not Like Us” music video, the burger spot in Compton commissioned a mural highlighting the rapper’s unforgettable single.
- Where to find it: 1201 Rosecrans Ave, Compton

Historic to LA

A section of the Great Wall of Los Angeles mural, designed by muralist Judy Baca, that showcases pivotal moments in Los Angeles History.

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Ashley Balderrama

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LAist

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“The Great Wall of Los Angeles” is one of the largest murals in the world, and it’s supposed to get bigger. The half-mile art piece depicts California’s rich history.
- Where to find it: Along the L.A. River in the San Fernando Valley, on Coldwater Canyon Avenue between Burbank Boulevard and Oxnard Street. 

“The Blessing of the Animals” at La Placita Olvera depicts the Catholic tradition of blessing one’s animals.
- Where to find it: 115 Paseo De La Plaza, Los Angeles

“El Grito” depicts a scene that sparked Mexican independence from Spanish rule.
- Where to find it: Placita de Dolores at 831 N. Alameda St., Los Angeles

When you take a bite of the lomo saltado burrito from Merka Saltao, a fast-casual Peruvian restaurant in Culver City, one of the first things you'll notice is the sauce.

The wok-fried chunks of steak, dressed in a soy-and-oyster sauce reduction spiked with vinegar, saturate the rice inside the tortilla, highlighting the sweet heat of ají amarillo mixed with the velvety texture of pinto beans.

It's a beautiful confluence of flavors. It is also, depending on who you ask, either a creative act of evolution or a betrayal of Peruvian culinary heritage.

Standing on business

The lomo saltado burrito at Merka Saltao wasn't exactly a calculated move. Lifelong friends Alonso Franco and Ignacio Barrios — who met in high school in Lima — came to Los Angeles to bring Peruvian food to the masses, first through a ghost kitchen concept they ran from 2021 to 2023. The burrito happened almost by accident: a member of their kitchen team brought in a tortilla one day, someone suggested wrapping the lomo saltado in it, they ate it, and within three days, it was on the menu.

Merka Saltao co-founders Ignacio Barrios, left, and Alonso Franco, right, inside their Culver City restaurant. The two lifelong friends from Lima opened the fast-casual brick-and-mortar location for their Peruvian concept in August 2025.

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The data from the ghost kitchen made the case for keeping it there. Franco and Barrios had launched with around 140 dishes — lomo saltado, ceviche, chicken dishes, the works. But the numbers kept pointing to the same thing: wherever lomo saltado appeared on the menu, in whatever form, burrito, bowl, salad, it was the winner.

(Ceviche, for all its cultural cachet, is raw fish with raw onion — a harder sell for a weekday lunch. Lomo saltado, Franco noted, is steak and fries — basically a hamburger.)

The backlash

The two friends made the leap to brick-and-mortar in August 2025, opening Merka Saltao in downtown Culver City. It's one of the more competitive dining corridors in L.A., the kind of block that can support a $16 wellness bowl and a craft beer bar in the same stretch, populated by Amazon employees on lunch breaks, families on weekend outings, and food-literate regulars who will absolutely have opinions about what goes in a burrito.

Those opinions arrived faster than Franco expected. Within the first week of opening, an influencer came in and posted about the restaurant — but instead of showing the full menu, the bowls, the chicha morada, the flexibility of the concept, they showed the burrito. Just the burrito.

Franco working the wok at Merka Saltao. The high-heat wok technique at the heart of lomo saltado traces its roots to Chinese immigrants in Peru

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Christopher Mortenson

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Courtesy Merka Saltao

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The comments turned quickly. "No! Peruvians don't eat burritos. ¿Qué car—o es eso?" — roughly, "what the hell is this?" — wrote one commenter. Another said "Burritos? We don't eat burritos in 🇵🇪”. Franco describes sitting at his computer reading the pile-on, feeling something between anger and devastation. "There was a moment where I probably even cried," he said, "thinking, I've made a mistake." But then he looked at the numbers. 30,000 had seen the post…. And half the comments were in his defense.

He took the conversation to Reddit, posting to r/FoodLosAngeles asking the community directly: am I wrong for this? The response was overwhelming — hundreds of comments, almost entirely in his favor, and a surge of new customers walking through the door shortly after.

Fusion by default

This is Los Angeles, where many of the dishes that define the Southern California diet were born precisely from cultures colliding. Roy Choi built an empire on Korean tacos. Al pastor traces its technique to Lebanese immigrants who brought the vertical spit. The California roll, invented by Japanese chefs in Los Angeles in the 1960s, introduced an entire country to sushi. None of these dishes destroyed the traditions they borrowed from. If anything, they expanded their audience. And the lomo saltado burrito isn't exactly a novel concept in Southern California to begin with — everyone from Pablitos Tacos in North Hollywood to Le Hut in Santa Ana, run by 2025 James Beard Award-nominated chef Daniel Castillo, has featured their own version. Even Disney's California Adventure got in on it, serving a lomo saltado burrito out of the Studio Catering Co. food truck as recently as last year.

The lomo saltado bowl and burrito at Merka Saltao in Culver City — two versions of the same dish that sparked an unlikely online debate about Peruvian culinary identity.

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Franco would also point out that lomo saltado itself — the dish the purists are so eager to protect — is a product of Chinese immigrants bringing the wok and soy sauce to Peru roughly 300 years ago. "Peruvian is by default fusion," he told me. "So we have all the right to wrap it up in a burrito." What the online critics were really doing, whether they knew it or not, was defending a dish that was itself once considered inauthentic — and doing so in the name of authenticity.

Where things stand

Since the backlash, Franco says business has been mostly steady — breaking even, which for a concept that requires high volume at a low price point, he considers a good sign. The controversy changed things in ways he didn't expect: people started coming in specifically because of the story, not just the food. He began putting himself front and center in the brand, regularly making videos on social media about what it's like to run the business, occasionally poking fun at himself and the whole debate. When we visited during the weekday lunch rush, there was a steady line of people waiting to order, many stopping to talk with Franco directly.

In a way, he's answered the authenticity question not with an argument but with a presence — showing up, telling the story, letting the food speak. "Honoring my food, if that requires pairing lomo saltado with a salad or wrapping it in a tortilla, I have no problem," he said. "I'm not being less authentic. We are evolving in Peru anytime. I have to be authentic on the individual flavor and then be flexible to reach more people to discover our flavors."

The burrito, it turns out, was never the point. It was just the door.