The Brief

Tai Harris breathes and lives music. The Van Nuys resident worked in the business side of that industry for many years, but said she became "jaded" several years back. So she made a big career change seemingly out of left field — by diving headlong into working with Los Angeles' unhoused population at a local nonprofit.

"I saw the position either on Craigslist or Indeed, and I was like, 'Wow, that sounds interesting,' you know, helping homeless individuals obtain resources," Harris said.

In four short years, Harris climbed the ranks, becoming an associate director focused on housing the unhoused.

But this year, she decided to go back to school to supplement the hands-on experience she's gained working in the sector. Harris is one of 20 students in a pilot certificate program — the first of its kind in the state — launched this year by Santa Monica College to train a workforce that is integral to solving this vexing challenge.

"There's education around social work, there's education around music, but to have something specific to homeless service work, it was like, 'Whoa, I definitely want to know more about this and be involved,'" Harris said.

Help wanted: Homeless service work

There are some 1,300 jobs in the homeless services sector in L.A. County that have remained unfilled, according to SMC and others working in the sector. These jobs cut across a variety of roles, particularly entry-level positions on the frontlines.

The passage of Measure H in 2017 helped fund the creation of these jobs — something that Measure A, which voters approved this November, will continue to do.

"What's often overlooked is all the heroes that work behind-the-scenes and on the frontlines and work as case managers or work in outreach," said Steven Sedky, associate dean for career education at SMC. "But there's not enough of them to do the work."

The Homeless Service Work program was created to fix that need — a model the college hopes will be replicated throughout California.

"We have close ties to our local communities, we have close ties to industry leaders," Sedky said. "Community colleges are well positioned to do this work."

A program years in the making

The concept to create a pipeline was brought to the school in 2019 by a trustee, Nancy Greenstein, who was holding a series of conversations among residents in the Westside and those working in the sector on finding solutions to the crisis. An issue quickly came to the fore: staffing.

"One is burnout," said Patricia Ramos, dean of academic affairs at SMC. "The work is really hard."

Another reason is the mismatch in skill sets.

"They seem to be getting a lot of students out of social work school and other places, and the education felt like it needed to be more hands on and more kind of helping students to become more resilient in all of the, you know, trauma that they were going to be facing in the job," Ramos said.

The pandemic hit, but eventually these discussions regained steam, tapping into a bigger network with a more fleshed out vision that led to a partnership between the college and Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), which provides funding to offset costs like faculty salaries, student laptops, counseling and other student services under the certificate program.

"We were, as a college, prepared to help scale and develop this workforce development system. And LAHSA came to us because they do training themselves and they are not able to develop and scale an academic program," Ramos said.

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Michael Owen Baker

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Courtesy LAHSA

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A curriculum designed for students to hit the ground running

In turn, industry leaders led the design of the four-course certificate curriculum that includes an internship to get on-the-ground experience — all combined to give students the training they need to engage and work with individuals while navigating a complex bureaucracy of services and government entities.

"We really relied on the experts in the field who have decades of experience on what the skills, knowledge, and abilities needed to put into the curriculum," Sedky said. "Then one step further in the curriculum development process is thinking about how those fit into classes, what those classes are, and what that sequence is."

The program has also brought in sector veterans to teach classes, including Leepi Shimkhada with L.A. County Department of Health Services, who is leading a course in health equity.

"A lot of times in homeless case management we find people who have various degrees, which is great, right? It brings people from multiple disciplines together, but rarely do we have that person who has had formal training in what it means to be a case manager in homeless services, because it's really a complex space to be in," Shimkhada said.

Often, she added, challenges facing unhoused people are often multifold, including health, mental health and substance abuse disorder.

"There are funds for outreach teams, for interim housing programs, to provide ongoing supportive services when somebody moves into permanent housing, to do benefits advocacy, but we just need this workforce that's ready and willing and able to come in and do the work very quickly," Shimkhada said.

Tai Harris, a student in the new Santa Monica College certificate program on homeless service work.

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Courtesy Tai Harris

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Cultivating the next generation of leaders

The program has drawn students from all walks of life, said Sedky at SMC. They include high school graduates and mid-career people who are considering a career change after having volunteered in the space.

"We have a Ukrainian refugee. We have a bus driver who drives through Skid Row and wants to do more," Sedky added. "We have a few people that are already working in the sector and they want to move up in the sector."

Harris from Van Nuys would fall into that category. She said the program has opened access to a wealth of knowledge from those who've worked in the industry for decades.

"For me, it was to be able to learn more about policies and, you know, to have my pulse even more so on things that are going on and things that are coming in the future," Harris said.

But it's also about being in a cohort of like-minded people — committed to the cause — who the program hopes will become next generation of leaders in the sector. Because the work is hard, burnout is real. The pay scale for entry level jobs, said Harris, is typically between $20 to $25 per hour.

"It takes a certain type of individual to work in this field. No two days are the same. No two seconds, honestly, are the same," Harris said. "You have to be someone that really has a passion for this work. It's a great thing that this program has come about to be able to help get those next groups of people into this field."

Left-leaning candidates running in three school board contests flagged by EdSource as races to watch are each leading comfortably in unofficial election results more than a week after a so-called “blue tsunami” swept the country.

Unofficial results also show progressive candidates ahead in some races in the Inland Empire, a conservative stronghold where several far-right school board candidates ran on issues such as gender identity and parents’ rights. Counties have until Dec. 3 to certify election results.

In the Orange Unified School District, four moderate incumbents are far ahead of conservative challengers in separate races. One of them, board President Stephen Glass, defeated challenger Jack Chang, and has declared victory. The conservative candidates ran largely on parents’ rights and fiscal responsibility.

“We won,” Glass said on social media. “We’ll keep putting students first and supporting every teacher, every classified professional and every family.”

All four incumbents are up by double-digit percentage points, Orange County election results show. The election follows last year’s recall of two conservative school board members.

In a race for the Davis Unified school board, an anti-transgender candidate who once stripped down to a bikini at a school board meeting, lost decisively, according to unofficial election results. Beth Bourne, president of the Yolo County chapter of Moms For Liberty, trails incumbent Elizabeth Moon by 89 percentage points, results show.

In Palo Alto — where issues over academics dominated the race — newcomers Avery Wang and Linda Henigin are ahead in unofficial results for two seats. John Craig, who ran in tandem with Wang, conceded on election night. Wang ran primarily on retaining academic rigor, especially in math. “It’s the beginning of a movement,” Wang told Palo Alto Online.

Henigin ran on a platform of improving student well-being following a recent spate of student suicides.

Elsewhere in the state, school board candidates in conservative strongholds such as Chino Valley and Temecula fared poorly in local school board races.

In Temecula, school board President Joseph Komrosky trails challenger David Sola by 10 percentage points, results show. Sola has declared victory. Komrosky had voted to ban critical race theory in district schools and attempted to ban teaching materials that mentioned slain gay rights icon Harvey Milk, drawing a sharp rebuke from Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Komrosky’s apparent defeat was part of what The Press-Enterprise reported as “a seismic shift in local governance given recent elections that gave power to the Christian right.”

In Chino Valley Unified in San Bernardino County, two conservative school board candidates are trailing far behind, results show. Chris Shaw, the husband of State Superintendent of Public Instruction candidate Sonja Shaw, trails Frank Gerdine by nearly 17 percentage points, while Meagan Lichthart is ahead of Shaun Smith, backed by Shaw, by 15 percentage points.

This story was originally published by EdSource.

Major service cuts to Metrolink are on hold for now thanks to a $20 million grant from California’s State Transportation Agency. The Metrolink board of directors approved the agency’s $420 million budget on Friday.

The previous budget proposal included slashing a third of weekday trains and 40% of weekend trains.

“Thankfully, our customers were spared the disappointment and frustration of losing the service they rely on to travel the region for business and pleasure,” Tom Schamber, chief financial officer at Metrolink, said at the board meeting.

How did we get here? 

The Metrolink budget had been approved quarterly since June as staff worked out the annual budget.

Metrolink staff have worked on this year’s budget since last September. The agency has pointed to slowing fare revenue, rising costs due to inflation and low ridership numbers for its budget troubles.

“Fare box revenue ended the year $14 million under budget. This was sobering, and we realized that not only was fiscal [20]26 off, but our ridership expectations for fiscal year [20]27 would need to be recalibrated to this new baseline,” Schamber said.

A majority of Metrolink’s budget is funded by Orange, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties’ transportation agencies. For more than a year, Metrolink officials have been building a budget that member agencies, like the Orange County Transportation Authority and L.A. Metro, would approve.

L.A. Metro and OCTA cut their subsidies to Metrolink by 3% and 10%, respectively.

“The challenges ahead of us were becoming more evident,” Schamber said at Friday’s board meeting. “In addition to disappointing fare revenue and funding limitations, we must absorb inevitable cost increases in several of our largest contracts.”

What we know about the grant

The $20 million grant from the state comes with the expectation that Metrolink will retain the same service levels provided today, Schamber added.

Metrolink CEO Darren M. Kettle said another expectation is that the agency must plan to maintain its services for the upcoming year.

“We don't have a plan. We're working on a plan to make sure we have the funding to deliver the same level of service at a minimum,” Kettle said. “With respect to these conditions, based on what we know now, as of last evening, our staff is confident that Metrolink will be able to meet these conditions.”

What’s next? 

Kettle said staff got a head start on next fiscal year’s budget through the state grant application. Officials said the rail agency is also gearing up for the 2028 Olympic Games.

The Federal Aviation Administration grounded all flights nationwide Friday afternoon because of communications problems at regional air traffic control centers.

The FAA notice said the ground stop was being imposed “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.”

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said there is a communications issue affecting the 22 regional air traffic control centers that direct planes en route between airports nationwide. He said FAA technicians are investigating. This is the first nationwide ground stop since January 2023, when a key FAA computer system malfunctioned. Before that the last time had been after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin said there was no indication yet that “this was a nefarious attack against us. It’s just a telecommunications outage.”

“Everybody’s safe. There’s no reason to be concerned about your loved ones if they’re flying,” Mullin said.

There is no timeline for restarting flights. Mullin said investigators will look at whether there is any link to the FAA’s nationwide rollout of a new artificial intelligence system to help identify problems and reroute planes. But that system operates out of one location near Washington, D.C., and just sends recommendations to the air traffic control centers.

The government has been working to overhaul the outdated technology that air traffic controllers rely on since Congress approved $12.5 billion for the project last year. Miles of old copper wires have been replaced with fiber optic lines and old radio systems are gradually being replaced at airports across the country.

But much work remains. Duffy has said that another $30 billion will be needed to complete the work, and the White House has begun lobbying Congress to approve it.

The problem appeared similar to a regional air traffic control communication outage in September that snarled hundreds of flights across the Northeast, aviation safety expert Steve Arroyo said, except this time on a nationwide scale. It may be linked to the outdated technology used by air traffic controllers.

“If you don’t have that ability, whether it’s because the old wires that they have are just run down or for whatever reason, you’ve got to stop airplanes on the ground,” said Arroyo, who is a former United Airlines pilot. “And not put them in the air where you’re going to risk not being able to communicate with them.”

Friday’s ground stop was different than the one after Sept. 11 because planes were not being told to land immediately and pilots likely were able to communicate with ground controllers at airports, Arroyo said.

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AP writer Mead Gruver contributed to this report from Fort Collins, Colorado.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

By the time Gov. Gavin Newsom spared the lives of over 500 prisoners who were sentenced to death last week in the nation’s largest act of mass clemency, capital punishment had long become an afterthought in California.

The state hasn’t executed anyone since 2006. Newsom guaranteed that wouldn’t change when he issued a moratorium on the practice shortly after taking office in 2019. He later dismantled the San Quentin State Prison death chamber and sent condemned prisoners across the state to other facilities.

Of the 548 people whose sentences he moved to commute last week, the vast majority were waiting to be appointed lawyers for appeals and challenges. Just 45 faced imminent execution if the moratorium were lifted, though that was unlikely with Newsom’s successor, Gov.-elect Xavier Becerra, saying he also would not execute anyone while in office.

And even before Newsom acted, a pending California court case that argues the death penalty is applied in such a racially biased manner that it’s unconstitutional, might end the imposition of death sentences indefinitely.

Voters as recently as 2016 indicated they wanted to keep the death penalty on the books when they passed a ballot measure to speed up executions and rejected one to repeal the practice. Death penalty opponents believe they won’t immediately have to run another campaign to repeal capital punishment if they prevail in the court case.

Still, the contradictory status quo remains: Like about half of U.S. states, California still has the death penalty on the books. It also allows for a death sentence under broader circumstances than any other state, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Those include the murder of a police officer, prosecutor or any other public official, and murders involving gang activity or financial gain.

Local prosecutors have vowed to continue pursuing the punishment when allowed, meaning the state is likely to slowly continue sending defendants to death row, even if the Supreme Court approves all of Newsom’s commutations.

“I think for all intents and purposes, the death penalty is over in California and nobody will be executed again,” said Michael Romano, director of the Three Strikes Project at Stanford Law School, who chairs a state committee on revising criminal sentences. “The energy and focus and money around criminal justice reform have shifted elsewhere.”

Romano predicted advocates will turn their attention to issues like restricting solitary confinement in jails and prisons and changing the cash bail system.

It’s unclear where California voters stand, but in a nationwide Gallup poll conducted in October in the wake of a botched execution in Tennessee, American support for capital punishment dipped just below the majority for the first time in 55 years.

The sweeping commutations mark how far California has moved in three decades, from the nation’s toughest crime laws to, under Newsom, experimenting with a Nordic approach focused on rehabilitation and preparing most offenders to re-enter society.

Despite their 2016 vote in favor of the death penalty, Californians have also since 2012 passed ballot measures to reduce criminal sentences. The Legislature has passed several laws allowing prisoners new release opportunities and the state Board of Parole Hearings earlier this year allowed some prisoners serving life without parole to gain the opportunity to be resentenced, inspiring a legal challenge from law enforcement groups.

Even Proposition 36, the tougher-on-crime measure voters approved overwhelmingly in 2024, focused on requiring defendants in drug- and theft-related cases to undergo treatment rather than go straight to jail. Results have been mixed, with few defendants getting mandated treatments, CalMatters has found.

“It wasn’t, ‘Lock people up,’” Romano said. “It was, ‘We are going to give people rehabilitation.’”

For San Bernardino County District Attorney Jason Anderson, that “doesn’t change the fact that the law still allows for the death penalty to be sought.”

Anderson, who opposed Newsom’s commutations, is one of several district attorneys who have said they’ll continue to push for death sentences when appropriate, including in Los Angeles, Riverside and Orange counties.

He discusses the likelihood an execution won’t happen with murder victims’ families when deciding whether to pursue the death penalty, Anderson said, but the moratorium doesn’t deter him. Nor, he noted, has it deterred juries that recommend the sentence.

“All that other stuff is a side argument,” he said, of the long appeals process and unlikelihood of an execution.

Since Newsom’s moratorium, Anderson’s office has secured death sentences against five men.

Another one is on the way. Louis Gabriel Lucero of Victorville pleaded guilty this year to killing his girlfriend and her two sons in 2020. Last month a jury recommended the death penalty and a judge next month will decide whether to impose it or a sentence of life without parole. If he’s sentenced to death, Lucero would be among the first to be sent to a post-clemency death row.

Of the 40 condemned prisoners from San Bernardino County, nine had their sentences commuted automatically by Newsom; the state Supreme Court will need to review those of 31 others who had more than one felony conviction. Anderson has filed a motion to unseal their criminal records so the details of their crimes and what he called their “recidivist nature” are public as the court considers Newsom’s requests.

The Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which opposes the commutations, has filed similar motions. State public defenders and anti-death penalty advocates have also filed briefs supporting the commutations.

Anderson said while he respects differences of opinion on capital punishment, he disagreed most with Newsom’s wholesale commutations, saying the governor should have considered each case individually and that if his goal was to end the death penalty he has “enough power, prestige and political savvy to put another proposition on the ballot.

“You have a law on the books that’s essentially been overridden by one person,” he said.

Newsom said, in an open letter last week to Californians explaining his decision, that he didn’t want to create two tiers of murder victims in which some perpetrators deserved to die for their crimes and others did not.

“I carefully considered different categories of capital crimes and offender characteristics,” he wrote. “I have learned, however, from speaking with the victims harmed by these crimes, that each experiences their loss as the worst of the worst.”

Rather than propose another ballot measure, death penalty opponents are instead hoping a state court strikes down the death penalty in a case brought by the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Office of the State Public Defender.

In a novel challenge to the death penalty, the plaintiffs argue California death sentences are broadly applied with such stark racial disparities that it violates state constitutional protections against discrimination. They say four decades of sentencing data show that Black defendants are up to 8.7 times more likely to receive a death sentence than other defendants in murder cases. Defendants are 8.8 times more likely to receive the death penalty in cases with a white victim than a non-white victim. The state Supreme Court allowed the case to move forward in August; a Sacramento County court is now hearing evidence.

The plaintiffs seek a court order barring counties from imposing death sentences. If they prevail, the death penalty would remain in state statute, said Avi Frey, deputy director of criminal law at the ACLU of Northern California, but “any county that tried to bring a capital prosecution would first need to demonstrate that they had basically corrected” any racial disparities.

Natasha Minsker of the California Anti-Death Penalty Coalition said she’ll now advocate for district attorneys like Anderson to stop seeking the sentence. San Bernardino and Riverside counties are among the top 10 counties seeking death sentences in the nation, Minsker said.

“The reality is most district attorneys in California understand that the death penalty is a failure,” she said. “That is where we’re turning our attention, to those counties that really are outliers.”

Tinisch Hollins is a crime victim and executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice, which advocates for using state funds currently spent on incarceration on crime prevention programs instead.

The commutations, she said, offer some finality in the death penalty debate that she hopes will allow policymakers to move on to other changes in the criminal justice system. She wants the state to expand victims’ services like cash assistance and mental health services for survivors of violence, and to consider more programs that allow prisoners to face crime victims as part of their rehabilitative efforts. And she said even those prisoners whose crimes were eligible for death affect the rehabilitation of others when they interact with other prisoners.

“Their fate is already sealed,” she said, of those whose sentences were commuted to life without parole. “Even for people who have committed the most serious crimes and those who may not ever have the opportunity to return to society, what do we want to happen during their sentence? What do we want to put our dollars toward that will ultimately ensure our future safety?”

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