The Brief

Middle schooler allegedly attacks classmate twice, choking him severely. Police recommend attempted murder charges to district attorney.

School staff calls police to report squirrel with injured leg in school courtyard.

Unknown man in swimsuit briefs adorned with Australian flag trespassing at high school pool. Lifeguard sees a man follow boys 9 and 12, into the locker room. Man strips, pulls back the shower curtain to see the boy and asks: “Does this make you uncomfortable?” Man flees. Police list indecent exposure and lewd acts as possible offenses.

Officer dispatched to investigate ringing school alarm. Burnt English muffin found in teachers’ lounge. 

From Crescent City, Weed and Alturas in the far north to Calexico and El Cajon nearly 800 miles south, all along the Pacific Coast, across the sprawling Central Valley and up into the High Sierra and down into the Mojave Desert, police are dispatched to California schools thousands of times on any given day classes are in session.

Reasons are myriad: Students bringing guns and knives — and even a spear and a bow and arrow — to school, sexual assaults and “perversion reports” and fights. Then there are lost keys, malfunctioning alarms, and dogs — even cattle — loose on school grounds. Once, police were called for help with a swarm of bees.

Cops rush to reports of students attempting suicide and overdosing on drugs, bullying, sexual assault and unwanted touching. They surveil high schoolers leaving campuses for lunch. They break up fights between parents over spots in elementary school pickup queues. They haul drunken adults from the stands at school sporting events. They once investigated a teacher’s claim that someone stole $10,000 from her classroom desk.

Mostly the call logs capture the anguish of youngsters with mental health challenges, victims whose nude photos are showing up on social media for all to see and parents turning to school administrators to deal with it all.

Such details emerged from nearly 46,000 police call logs and dispatch records EdSource obtained from 164 law enforcement agencies in 57 of California’s 58 counties as part of a sweeping statewide investigation into school policing.

The data offered a raw, first-blush look at why school staff summon cops, reasons that sometimes lead to juvenile and adult arrests.

All incidents included in the police logs largely remain out of public view due to state laws that shield juveniles and allow police to withhold information on investigations. As a result, the data collected as a representative sample of the state is also clearly an undercount of what routinely occurs in California schools.

An EdSource analysis found that nearly a third of all calls for police were for incidents deemed serious. After consulting police experts, EdSource tagged the data with a definition for serious incidents as those that reasonably required a police presence. Included among serious incidents are those tagged as violent, which include anything involving a violent act, including self-harm.

The share of serious incidents increases to 4 out of 10 when police patrols are set aside. They make up about a third of all records, but most have little detail on what police were doing at or near the school.

The analysis also showed that high school students in districts with their own police departments are policed at a higher rate than in districts that rely on municipal police and sheriffs.

School police calls across California

Four years after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, igniting a national revolt and the defund-the-police movement, only about 20 of California’s 977 public-school districts made significant changes to school policing.

Most that acted ended contracts with municipal police departments to post cops — commonly called school resource officers — in schools. And three districts that made changes reversed course and brought police back after short hiatuses.

EdSource’s investigation sampled records showing calls from and about schools to city and school district police departments and county sheriffs. In some cases, officers stationed in schools dispatch themselves to a problem by radioing their dispatcher. Schools without campus police often call 911. Typically, police record their activity as “patrol” or “school check,” vague descriptions that raise questions about the use of public resources.

Whenever a school resource officer ran along a corridor, one hand on a radio microphone, or a sheriff’s deputy raced along a country road with lights and sirens on to reach a distant rural school, they contributed to what data showed is a vast, continuing police presence in California’s pre-K to 12 public education, EdSource found.

The records resurfaced a debate lingering years after Floyd’s killing about how much policing schools need and if deploying armed officers does more harm than good.

Similarly to police debates at the municipal level, school policing can be polarizing. Across California, the issue emerges as a political divide, with some seeing the police as necessary to ensure safety and others seeing them as agents of racial injustice.

In 2021, the ACLU of Southern California issued a scathing report that recommended an end to school policing in the Golden State, calling it “discriminatory, costly, and counterproductive.” In schools with regularly assigned cops, students across “all groups” were more likely to be arrested or referred to law enforcement, researchers found.

A 2020 University of Maryland study published in the journal Criminology and Public Policy, found school districts that increased policing through federal grants “did not increase school safety.” Researchers recommended improving safety through “the many alternatives” to police in schools.

In California, school policing is “a structure. It’s part of the budgets, it’s part of the vocabulary of the schools. It’s part of what the expectation is from the parents and the students,” said Southwestern Law School professor Jyoti Nandam, who has researched school policing for 25 years and calls it “completely unnecessary,” adding, America is the lone civilized country where it is practiced.

In rural California, school policing is seen as routine, allowing students to become “comfortable interacting with someone in a uniform, wearing a badge, and carrying a gun, so that as they grew older, they see those people as a friendly face, a resource that they could go to as opposed to someone that they should be afraid of,” Tulare County School Superintendent Tim Hire told EdSource. The practice is spreading in Tulare, where three small districts recently agreed to share a resource officer to travel among them.

Such decisions are often couched as safety matters, a vigilant effort to prevent the next school shooting and avoid the failure of Uvalde, Texas police to stop the gunman who slaughtered 19 students and two teachers in 2022.

When state Assemblymember Bill Essayli, R-Riverside, introduced legislation in February to require an armed police officer in each public school with more than 50 students, he described the need in base terms: “We need good guys and girls with guns, ready to act.”

Essayli’s idea is “a step backward,” Assembly Education Committee member Mia Bonta D-Alameda, said at a hearing where the bill died in April. “We know it to be true that there’s a disproportionate impact on Black and brown students when police officers are in schools.”

A matter of local control

The state Department of Education offers no guidance or best practices, calling policing a local matter, a spokesperson said. There’s little consistency statewide in whether police are deployed in schools. Nineteen school districts have their own police departments, including Los Angeles Unified, which refused to release its police call data, some with only a handful of officers.

Los Angeles Unified cut its police department’s budget by 35% in 2020 and banned officers from being posted in schools. Following reports of escalating violence, the district recently reinstated police to two schools through mid-June. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho had informed the school board that he was planning to return police to 20 schools, but he got community and trustee backlash.

Oakland Unified disbanded its police department in favor of non-police staffers to keep peace in schools and respond to emergencies. Principals were trained on when to call city police only as a last resort. Still, data shows eight of the district’s 18 traditional middle and high schools combined to call city police 225 times, with nearly half of them serious, between Jan. 15 and June 30, 2023. Reasons include assault with a deadly weapon, suicide attempts, battery and terrorist/criminal threats.

Retired Long Beach and San Diego school Superintendent Carl Cohn, who served on the California State Board of Education from 2011 to 2018, said Oakland’s model of deploying people to talk students through peaceful resolutions of disputes can work. In the early 1990s, he ran the Long Beach schools anti-gang task force, hiring people with “street cred,” including former gang members.

They “could stop instantly what was going on on a campus by their mere presence,” Cohn said. “Their credibility with youngsters that might be on the verge of gang affiliation was really powerful.”

Yet Cohn’s “not on board with this notion of ‘let’s abandon the school police altogether.’ It’s the type of thing where ultimately there’s enough bad things from time to time happening that the safety of children has to be front and center.” Police must be well-trained, and school officials must cooperate with them, he added.

Shutting down the Oakland Unified police department of 11 officers and changing its policing culture is tough and ongoing, said a leader of a racial-justice group that pushed for the change.

“There’s still the ideology of policing that exists on campus and is embedded in the infrastructure of schools that we’re also up against,” said Jessica Black, a Black Organizing Project activist. “The criminalization of young people, implicit bias, and anti-Black racist practices” still need to be confronted.

It was only after Floyd’s murder that Dr. Tony Moos, a physician, learned that her four children who had each attended high school in the affluent Santa Clara County city of Los Altos had “negative interactions” with school resources officers “that they’d kept to themselves,” she said.

Moos was motivated to act and got the city to examine school police practices and make changes.

After hearings that included a Black high school teacher saying a resource officer had once pushed her to the ground, the city pulled police from the high school. The city also replaced its police chief in 2022. The new hire, a Black woman, came with much-needed experience.

Out of public view

California law grants police wide powers to withhold documents, including investigatory records, requested under the Public Records Act without revealing how many such records are being withheld. Many departments withheld from EdSource some — or even all — of the school calls they received.

The same is true about what information police can reveal in news releases or public statements about individual school incidents, especially involving juveniles. The public is often then not informed about police activity in schools.

That means that the serious incidents — weapons, death threats, rapes, assaults, fights, drugs — that police are responding to in 3 out of 10 calls often remain confidential.

Police in Crescent City, Del Norte County, for example, didn’t release information about the attempted murder of a student at Crescent Elk Middle School by a classmate who allegedly repeatedly choked him on Jan. 23, 2023, until EdSource asked about the incident more than a year later.

When EdSource asked police in Avenal, Kings County to elaborate on a call record of a late-night report of “shots fired” at the city’s high school, a lawyer responded claiming the information was exempt from disclosure.

“The problem is that (the exemptions) apply to virtually everything law enforcement does. They never expire. So, every police report is potentially covered by the investigatory records exemption,” said David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, an open government group. The lack of disclosure of police activity in schools makes it all the harder to determine what the correct level of policing should be, he added.

Given the importance of the issue, the lack of information is troubling, Loy said. The debate over school policing “should be held on the basis of full and complete data and not driven by anecdote.”

A day of policing

The one-day record of police responding to a school for serious incidents was 10, the data sample shows.

That was May 17, 2023, at Burroughs High School in the Sierra Sands Unified School District in Ridgecrest, a desert city of 28,000 in eastern Kern County near Death Valley.

The first occurred at 8:38 a.m. when a school resource officer arrested a student for battery and released him to his parents. District Assistant Superintendent Brian Auld, who’s in charge of security, told EdSource the student “didn’t even go to the police station.”

That was followed at 9:09 a.m. by reports of two students who appeared to be under the influence of drugs. They were evaluated and returned to class. Another report of two students apparently under the influence came in at 10:26 a.m. One student was impaired and released to their parents, Auld said.

Less than 10 minutes later, the resource officer responded to a student in “mental distress” who was taken for a psychological evaluation.

At 1:23 p.m., police were alerted to a terrorist threat that ended up involving a student threatening to beat up someone, Auld said.

About 20 minutes later, two girls began fighting in art class.

One grabbed what Auld called “an art project” — apparently a ceramic object — and allegedly swung it at the other girl’s head. Police called it assault with a deadly weapon, arresting the aggressor. “Deadly weapon sounds like a knife or a gun. The officer made the decision that (the object) could have done serious bodily harm,” Auld said. “I’m not downplaying it.”

At 3:14 p.m. a report of disturbing the peace came in. No details were provided.

At 10:26 p.m, a vandalism report to the police turned out to be benign — police found that soon-to-graduate seniors had decorated the school with toilet paper.

Ridgecrest is “a unique, isolated community” near a military base. The school district considers its relationship with the police as a successful partnership, Auld said.

District officials “have some, or even total, discretion regarding whether or not an arrest is made,” he added. The district has 15 counselors, mental health therapists and a registered behavioral therapist, Auld said. It’s also implementing restorative practices and social-emotional learning to “change behaviors before they result in suspensions, expulsions and arrests.”

The Kings of calls

The most total call and dispatch records in the data for one school that relies on calling 911 was Lemoore High School, in Lemoore, a city of 26,600 in Kings County with 471 calls over a nearly six-month period.

Lemoore police, which refers to school police as youth development officers, provided scant detail on the reasons for the calls, listing hundreds in records as premises checks.

In an interview, Lt. Alvaro Santos, who supervises Lemoore’s school policing, attributed the numbers to the department’s practice of having all available officers “drop what they’re doing” during the times students arrive at school and leave for lunch and later go home, basically surrounding the buildings, some on side streets out of view of students.

“They’re around the school. They could be either parked on a side street or they could be driving by looking for vehicle code violations or anything that would pose a danger to the students,” Santos said. He said the schools are near a main road through the city and that there are concerns about drunk drivers in the area.

More serious calls

Sampled data shows that middle schools have a higher rate of serious incidents reported to police than high schools. At Cesar Chavez Middle School, in East Palo Alto, 41% of calls to police reported violent incidents, threats and sexual misconduct, data shows.

In one of two calls that East Palo Alto police labeled “perversion report,” a student allegedly used a phone to make “a TikTok” of another girl using the restroom, according to a recording of a heavily redacted 911 call to police from a school official. Police refused to release any details.

Fresno’s Gaston Middle School is in a neighborhood plagued by violence, gangs and drugs, all of which follow students through the school doors, both police and Fresno Unified Superintendent Bob Nelson said.

A patrol car for a Fresno Unified student resource officer sits outside of Gaston Middle School and its health clinic.

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Lasherica Thornton

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EdSource

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“I would love for there to be no acts of any physical harm on another person, but that’s impossible,” Sgt. Anthony Alvarado said.

Fresno Unified has been debating what level of policing to have in its schools for several years. In 2020 police were pulled from the district’s middle schools but remained in high schools. After several violent incidents, police were returned to some middle schools in 2022 and the rest in 2023.

School 'feels like a prison'

The daily presence of Kern High School District police at Mira Monte High in Bakersfield “feels ghetto,” sophomore Jose Delgado said.

The school “feels like a prison. It’s like they don’t trust us at all.”

Still, Delgado said, he understands the need for police, noting a lot of fights at the school. “It’s for the best, but it makes us feel ghetto.”

Data shows 163 police call records at Delgado’s school for the five-and-a-half month period. They describe incidents including assault with a deadly weapon, an irate parent, out-of-control juveniles and resisting a police officer.

Delgado’s sense of school as a prison and not being trusted are among the reasons why the negatives of school policing “completely outweigh the positives,” Nandam, the Southwestern Law School professor said.

The students who police typically interact with “are not the children that are doing well in school,” Nandam said. “Part of why there isn’t an outrage, a global outrage, is because it’s not impacting the people that are in power, the people who have agency.”

Children seeing police in schools can be akin to going to an airport and encountering armed officers at a security checkpoint, said University of Florida education professor Chris Curran, who has studied school policing extensively. “It’s natural to wonder what’s wrong, why are there people with guns?” he said. “You find yourself saying, ‘What do I not know about? What’s this danger that has necessitated assault rifles?’”

No state guidance

When he was a state Assembly member in 2020, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, Assemblymember Mia Bonta’s spouse, clearly came down on the side of removing police from schools when he spoke at a forum after Floyd’s murder.

“It’s just really important to call out this incredible moment,” he said, lauding districts, including Oakland, that ended policing. “There’s a general dehumanization of children of color, a belief that they need to be surveilled and monitored and watched and policed.”

“The outcomes don’t make our students safer,” he said. School policing is “not achieving what we’re seeking,” a video of the forum shows. It was hosted by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond.

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Andrew Reed

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EdSource

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Asked recently if Bonta’s position on school policing as the state’s top law enforcement officer mirrors what he said in 2020, his press secretary replied “no” via email.

Bonta, who’s expected to enter the 2026 governor’s race, “has always believed that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for school safety, and that schools need to work towards data-driven policies that fit their community,” Alexandra Duquet wrote.

“School resource officers can be an important component of ensuring students and school personnel safety,” Duquet wrote. “Their primary focus should be ensuring the safety of all on campus — not discipline — and they be given tools such as implicit bias training that ensure the equitable treatment of all students.”

Thurmond, a declared 2026 gubernatorial candidate, took no position on school policing during the forum. He recently told EdSource he favors “well-trained school resource officers to handle serious situations.” He also called for “more training of school staff so they’re not calling police for something that’s a student discipline matter.”

Thurmond also said that during his time as a member of the West Contra Costa Unified School District board from 2008-2012 he saw police officers help students, calling them “some of the best social workers I’ve worked with.”

State Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, who during Thurmond’s forum praised Oakland’s shuttering of its school police department, said in an interview that school districts should consider alternatives to police the way some cities have started using trained civilians to respond to 911 mental-health-crisis calls.

State Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley.

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Rich Pedroncelli

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“Kids are emotional. Kids don’t have impulse control the way adults should, and to bring an officer in, especially since all of our officers are armed, can, rather than defuse the situation, make it worse,” Skinner said. Kids can act out what they experience at home or on the street, she added.

Skinner, the author of several major police accountability bills, also said she saw value in the data EdSource obtained and published.

Police logs can help officials decide if civilian staff should deal with more school incidents at a time when California’s suffering a police shortage, she said. That could leave sworn officers available for “real public safety needs. We never want to prevent a school from calling 911 if that’s needed. However, there might be some appropriate guidelines or boundaries that cities and schools could work out.”

Stopping a police chase

The executive director of the Alabama-based National Association of School Resource Officers, Mo Candy, a retired cop, said districts would be mistaken to remove resource officers from campuses. Police will always be needed to respond to schools, and “we need for students and faculty to be able to feel like this officer is more than just a law enforcement officer, that they really are another trusted adult in that school environment.” A trained and well-known officer, “may be the person who comes into a situation with the coolest head,” he said.

Loretta Whitson, executive director of the California School Counselors Association, has seen what can happen when police approach a student situation lacking the cool-headedness Candy described.

As a school counselor in the Monrovia Unified School District in Los Angeles County, she once worked with a child who ran away from school multiple times. Finally, an exasperated principal called the police, who chased after the student.

“The principal didn’t stop them. I felt as (officers) went on in their rant this kid is getting more damaged. So, I said, ‘Stop, stop,”’ Whitson said. “We already had a very damaged kid, and this wasn’t helping.” The student was later found to need special education services, she said.

Tom Nolan, a retired Boston police lieutenant turned sociologist who’s taught at several universities and studied school policing, said when law enforcement officers are called into a school situation, “they become the shot callers,” deciding what to do whether it is in the child’s best interest or not. Too often, principals are calling them for minor problems like lost keys and disciplinary matters, he said.

“The research is unequivocal in demonstrating that the police coming into schools, or police being assigned to schools, is almost always a bad idea. It has bad outcomes for children. It has bad outcomes for school safety.”

Nolan said police are not school counselors and shouldn’t play that role. “That’s something that’s a very specific skill set that is attained through years of graduate level study by mental health practitioners and clinicians.”

The California Police Chiefs Association declined to make anyone from its leadership available for an interview. In an email, its executive director described school policing as a matter best discussed at local levels.

Brian Marvel, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, a powerful federation of police unions, wasn’t available for an interview, a spokesperson said. In a statement, Marvel, a San Diego police officer, said cops assigned to schools “play an important role in” schools. They act as “educators, emergency/crisis managers, first responders, informal counselors, mentors, and model the kind of behavior that builds trust and respect between law enforcement and the communities they serve.”

Data shows that sometimes, regardless of who might be available to counsel or advise a student, one may just do something dumb, like putting a death threat in writing.

On June 15, 2023, James Morris, the county administrator who also acts as Inglewood Unified superintendent, received a death threat via email, police call records show. Morris, a veteran administrator, was brought on to lift Inglewood out of years of state receivership because of fiscal woes.

“I can just say, generally, it was a student,” Morris said when asked about the threat. Police took a report, but Morris said he didn’t want charges filed.

“I’ve been doing this for 44 years. It takes a lot to rattle me,” he said. “It was a young person who just needed help.”

A jury found Duane “Keffe D” Davis guilty of orchestrating the 1996 killing of rap icon Tupac Shakur, marking the first conviction in a case that has gripped hip-hop fans for decades.

The 63-year-old Davis was convicted Monday of a single count of murder with a deadly weapon and could be sentenced to life in prison. The jury deliberated for less than 3 hours after a weekslong trial in Las Vegas.

After the verdict was read, Shakur's sister, Sekyiwa “Set” Shakur, cried and hugged the prosecutors. Also in the courtroom was Davis’ son, who covered his face with one hand.

Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal told jurors in closing arguments that Davis acquired a gun and “went hunting” for Shakur and Death Row Records co-founder Marion “Suge” Knight after they beat up Davis’ nephew earlier that night.

Palal acknowledged that Davis’ accounts of the killing evolved over the years but argued those differences reflected Davis’ changing motivations and efforts to protect himself. One critical detail, he said, remained consistent: Davis repeatedly placed himself inside a white Cadillac from which the shots were fired.

The panel of 16 jurors, four of whom are alternates, heard testimony from 24 prosecution witnesses and three defense witnesses over nine days.

“The core facts remain. The material facts remain,” Palal said.

The prosecution said Monday evening that the state would dismiss the gang enhancement part of the charge due to witness logistics.

The decades-old case

The trial brought to a head a decades-old case that for years has drawn the attention of hip-hop fans and true crime experts alike. Shakur, who was considered one of the most influential rappers of all time, was in Las Vegas on Sept. 7, 1996, and stopped at a red light when a white Cadillac pulled up beside him, and shots were fired. He died six days later from his wounds. Knight was also wounded but survived.

For years, nobody had been charged in the rapper’s death until Davis began making public statements, saying he was in the Cadillac and gave the gun to others in the backseat. Davis described the shooting as an act of retaliation after Knight and Shakur’s entourage beat up Davis’ nephew hours before the shooting.

Under Nevada law, someone who helps another person commit murder can be convicted of the crime. Davis is the only person still alive among the four men prosecutors say were in the Cadillac. The man who prosecutors say originally gave the gun to Davis is also dead.

Prosecutor says Davis' statements didn't need to be corroborated

Palal told jurors that if they believed Davis' statements, they did not have to be independently corroborated with additional evidence.

Still, he pointed to the rivalry between the South Side Compton Crips and Mob Piru, the fight with Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson and testimony that members of Shakur’s circle identified Anderson and Davis as suspects the night of the shooting. Witnesses had testified to the heated gang rivalry between the South Side Compton Crips and Mob Piru, which were associated with dueling record companies Bad Boy Records and Death Row Records.

“Who fired is not the question,” Palal said. Prosecutors haven't argued that Davis pulled the trigger, but instead that he was criminally responsible because he provided the gun and ordered the attack.

Palal also argued the shooting was premeditated, pointing to testimony and Davis’ accounts that the group searched for Shakur before spotting him on the road and making a U-turn. “It’s a plan, not an impulse,” Palal said.

Davis' own words are front and center

Palal held up Davis’ 2019 memoir, “Compton Street Legend,” and played an interview in which Davis encouraged people to buy it to get the “real truth.” Although the book contains a disclaimer saying some facts were changed, Palal argued that names, hotels and other details changed while the central account did not.

Palal also rejected the defense’s contention that Davis fabricated his accounts to make money. “It is an entirely different proposition to be profiting from a murder,” Palal said. “And that is what Mr. Davis is doing.”

Sanft also turned to his client’s memoir during his closing argument. While reading an excerpt, he said the N-word aloud, prompting people watching in an overflow courtroom to recoil and shake their heads.

In multiple interviews, Davis said he handed the gun to the back seat, but in others as well as in his book, Davis wouldn’t say who pulled the trigger.

In a rebuttal argument, prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo pointed to a scrapbook Davis kept containing articles about Shakur.

“This guy's scrapbooking his murder, for God's sake,” DiGiacomo told jurors.

The prosecution's witnesses included a gang expert who described Davis as the shot caller that younger gang members had to obey. Sanft asked jurors if there was any evidence that Davis had ever called the shots before or after the shooting.

During the trial, investigators said a Las Vegas hotel bill was found at Davis’ residence during a police search, but it wasn’t clear when it was dated — or where that evidence is currently located.

The case is nearly 30 years old, which has affected the kind of evidence presented in court. Prosecutors warned jurors that material collected in the ’90s is different from what law enforcement collects today, including hotel surveillance video from the night of the shooting.

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Landrum Jr. reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press journalist Rio Yamat contributed to this report from Las Vegas.

The large truck left Perris Monday morning to make a 70-mile delivery to Altadena. Its cargo: a nearly 500-square-foot modular home.

“The stork delivered our big baby today… it’s kind of like hope on wheels,” said Candice Kim, project director of the Altadena Builds Back Foundation.

It’s the first of a new, 14-unit rental complex reserved for low-income renters, like the ones who lost their homes when the original courtyard apartments on East Pine Street in West Altadena burned down.

Kim said the prefabricated aspect of construction is an important step in the process.

“The reason… our grantee chose modular, was that … it allowed us to create the rental housing much faster so we can get people back home faster,” Kim said.

A lottery will be held in October to decide who the units will be offered to. The developer has created a “Pine Notification List” people can sign up for.

Rebuilding is moving forward in Altadena as the public and residents weigh in with concerns about whether the area’s mixed economic and racially diverse character is gone for good.

This project’s backers say the delivery of the first unit in this development for low-income Altadena residents is an important part of the effort to keep the area open to people with modest means, as it was before the fires.

“If we have private developers come in, the concern is that rents will no longer be affordable,” Kim said, “and that could change the character of our community.”

How it came together

The owner of the property had managed it for years. After the Eaton Fire, she decided to sell it, but wanted the future building to remain for low-income residents. Eventually, the owner talked to Beacon Housing at an Eaton Fire Collaborative meeting.

One of the modular homes that will make up 14 housing units for low income residents at an Altadena complex.

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Pavel Molokanov

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Courtesy Beacon Housing

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Eventually, the Altadena Builds Back Foundation helped put together nearly $6 million for the project, some of it from $72 million received in donations by the Pasadena Community Foundation after the Eaton Fire, and the other part from area philanthropist Molly Munger, who graduated from nearby John Muir High School.

Many questions remain about the direction of Altadena’s rebuilding efforts. The state eased density limits at the same time that insurance payments continue to vex people whose homes were destroyed.

Former Altadena renters also continue to struggle. A survey conducted last year by the Eaton Fire Collaborative found that 72% of renters are still in need of housing. That survey also found that the fires destroyed the homes of more than two-thirds of Altadena renters.

Nutrition services workers file into the kitchen at Valley High School in Santa Ana from as early as 6 a.m. to start prepping for the breakfast and lunch hours.

For the last five years, the Santa Ana Unified School District initiated a scratch-cooking program, meaning the kitchens have pivoted from majority individually wrapped lunches to homestyle cooked dishes.

As the program rolls out, the menu has evolved. This school year, Santa Ana Unified high school students are served chilaquiles, birria, carnitas, fettuccine alfredo, and so much more.

“We try to focus initially on the demographic of our community, and we want to give them items that they have heard of or are familiar with, at least to start out,” said Jonathan Park, chef at Santa Ana Unified School District. “That way we can really see whether the scratch cooking is working.”

Park works with nutrition specialists on building out a well-balanced menu each month and gives each school detailed instructions on rolling out those meals.

“A lot of the time our staff isn't used to that type of cooking,” Park said. “Cooking now has really been part of their job. Every day they're prepping something, or they're cooking something from a raw state.”

Why it matters

Valley High School serves more than 1,000 students a day at lunchtime, Visoso said. With youth homelessness and hunger on the rise in Orange County and beyond, Visoso said she wants to make sure students are eating well, but also that they’re eating enough.

Students who don’t want a meal are encouraged to take one anyway and leave it at the share station for someone else to pick up. Food is very rarely left at those share stations, she added.

Josh Goddard, director of nutrition services for the Santa Ana Unified School District, said funding for school nutrition is generally limited.

“We get about $6 per lunch. We get about $4 per breakfast,” Goddard said. “That's got to cover everything from the food that goes into the plate to the people that put that plate together, and then all the other little miscellaneous things that are needed to get the food where it needs to go.”

And the scratch-cooking program is not where he wants it to be, yet, he added.

“We're not going to be satisfied until every single student feels proud of what they pick up; they feel like they're seen on the menus. They feel like their voices matter. Every single student needs to feel that way,” Goddard said. “We have a lot of work to do, and gratefully, the Santa Ana Unified School District has prioritized that, and will continue to do that.”

Jonathan Park, chef at Santa Ana Unified School District, prepares a batch of spaghetti noodles for lunch. Santa Ana Unified high schools have prioritized freshly made breakfast and lunch meals.

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Destiny Torres

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LAist

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How it works 

Designing the menu means trying to give kids what they want to eat with dishes or ingredients they're familiar with, but also incorporating new foods. Each menu includes 20 food options for breakfast and lunch.

“We're able to give them something different, and from there we keep trial and error. We constantly just improve the menu as we go,” Park said. “It's constantly just building off of what the kids like.”

When a new lunch menu drops, Cafeteria Supervisor Janet Visoso told LAist she studies it meticulously.

“I tend to print everything, read it to myself, reread it, rewrite it. That's just the way I learn,” Visoso said. “I don't get bored of my job. I'm excited, and I take it as a challenge.”

Visoso said when she started in nutrition services 12 years ago, the district offered a lot of individually wrapped items.

“Most of the stuff was hot dogs, pizza, hamburgers, and we all love that, but to get scratch cooking and why it counts more is because we feed them a labor of love, and they are actually enjoying what they're eating,” she said.

What do students think? 

The quality and health of the school lunches has improved, Alfonso Guttierez, a senior at Valley High, told LAist.

“Honestly, the previous year was different, and it’s been a big difference,” Guittierez added. “I like it very much.”

Edith Marin, a senior at Valley High School, said she feels extra appreciative of school lunches knowing that staff worked hard to cook them from scratch. For her and her group of friends, birria ramen was a big hit even with Southern California’s heat wave.

“Food cooked hot is just better,” Marin said. “Not all refrigerated food is as healthy, I think.”

Officials said it’s sometimes surprising what the students do and don’t enjoy. For example, when fish tacos and chile verde were added to the menu, staff thought they’d be instant hits — they weren’t.

“We had raw fish filets that we battered and we oven-fried until crispy. We had the slaw. We had the pico de gallo on the tortilla, and we thought that would be a hit,” Park said. “It didn't go so well.”

If you’re heading to Big Bear Lake to beat the heat — keep people and pets out of the water.

Officials have confirmed harmful algal blooms throughout the lake that are showing up as discolored water with a green sheen, scum and floating algae.

The blooms can produce potent toxins that could cause you and your furry friends to get sick.

Marisa Van Dyke, a senior environmental scientist with the State Water Resources Control Board, told LAist these conditions in California’s lakes and streams are primarily caused by tiny bacteria that grow into big, flower patch-like blooms.

“When you inadvertently swallow some of that water, it can contain those toxins,” she said. “It can be quite severe and cause you to need to have some hospitalization or even visit an animal veterinarian to get treatment."

What you need to know

People are being urged to avoid swimming, eating shellfish from the lake and drinking or cooking the water. Officials said boiling or filtering the water won't make it safe.

For anglers on the lake, Van Dyke recommends rinsing the fish off before handling and only eating the filets.

Dogs and children are especially vulnerable to exposure because they’re more likely to swallow water while playing and swimming, according to the State Water Resources Control Board.

Do not let pets in Big Bear Lake or near scum along the shore.

The harmful algal blooms in Big Bear Lake.

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Courtesy State Water Resources Control Board

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“If [the water] looks a little bit more green … and there's a little bit more growth of something that looks kind of like a plant but not quite, there might be a harmful algal bloom occurring,” Van Dyke said. “So keep an eye on children and pets so that they don't get in contact with that material.”

If you do have to dip your toes in, rinse yourself, your family and your furry friends with clean water after. Van Dyke also recommends drying off and changing into a pair of clothes as an extra precautionary measure.

You can learn more about healthy water habits here.

What to watch for

If you come into contact with harmful algal blooms and start showing symptoms such as eye irritation, rash, headache and vomiting — contact your doctor right away. It could also cause neurological effects, Van Dyke noted.

For dogs, the symptoms can include loss of energy and appetite, diarrhea, seizures and vomiting. You should reach out to a vet immediately if they start showing any signs.

People are asked to report any potentially related illness to state officials here.

Where is it safe to swim

Warning signs have been posted around Big Bear Lake, but when in doubt, stay out.

It’s prime time for harmful algal blooms in California. They’re most common between late May through October, although they can pop up year round, according to officials.

Van Dyke said research has shown that in the last decade, harmful algal blooms have been showing up more in lakes and reservoirs.

“There's many things that are driving that, including climate change,” she said. “So it's not just the warmer temperatures, but also less precipitation.”

California has a harmful algal bloom map that shows if any outbreaks have been reported in the area.