The Brief

If you’re trying to address homelessness in L.A., there is some foundational information you need in order to evaluate what’s working and what’s not, such as:

• How many unhoused people is the city moving into housing? 
• How many of those people are staying housed?
• How has this changed from the number of people housed last year?

For almost a year, we’ve been hunting down answers to these seemingly simple questions for the Promise Tracker, a project to hold L.A. Mayor Karen Bass accountable to her campaign pledge to house 17,000 unhoused Angelenos by the end of her first year in office.

For most of the year, we couldn’t get accurate answers. In fact, no one has been able to give clear answers to these questions for years, so this was a problem long before the current administration. But the Bass administration set their goal of housing 17,000 Angelenos without a thorough understanding of how such data is tracked and logged, meaning that for much of her first year in office, they — and therefore us at LAist — were operating without a clear picture of how much their interventions were working.

We revealed in late April that council members were not receiving the data reports they had ordered months earlier about the mayor’s signature homeless housing program Inside Safe, which would show exactly where the money is going and how many people have been sheltered. Council members then pressed the mayor’s office for the data, and numbers eventually started being provided to the council about two months later.

Until November, the overall housing numbers reported out by the city were rife with duplicates and other issues. As we investigated each of these issues, we learned that there were two key reasons why:

• The data collection process for some housing programs left room for many errors and missing information, and there wasn’t a system in place to ensure accuracy.
• Data on people entering housing was collected separately by program, so it wasn’t clear how much overlap there was among people moving between programs or cycling in and out.  

Although government officials say they have been working to address both issues, this was the obstacle in front of us all year: Even though we received updates on how many times people were housed, the numbers were likely inflated, and we had no idea by how much.

We also didn’t know how many of those people were still housed, or how many returned to the streets. Nor how this year’s numbers compare to previous years. All this made it impossible to have a clear picture of how progress was or wasn’t being made.

The city has allocated $1.3 billion for this year alone to invest in solutions for the homelessness crisis — a budget Bass called “unprecedented.” The state of emergency she declared as one of her first acts as mayor increased her powers to tackle the crisis.

Getting clear and accurate answers on how many people are being housed is essential to holding the Bass administration accountable on this problem. Government entities are calling out data issues as well. Just last week, the city controller’s office released an audit report showing that the lack of accurate data has prevented people who are unhoused from accessing available shelter and temporary housing.

L.A. City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez also referenced this problem during an August city council meeting about Bass’ signature temporary housing program: “There's a fundamental problem with getting some very basic information here, and it's costing taxpayers millions of dollars.”

Tracking programs, not people's overall path

There actually is a lot of data about how many people are being housed, but it’s tracked by program, making an overall picture of progress challenging to get.

The government funds several programs to place people into temporary and permanent housing: Bass’ Inside Safe program, tiny home villages, family shelters, permanent housing vouchers issued by the federal government, vouchers for veterans, and more. Different agencies track data for certain types of programs — the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) manages data for temporary housing, the Housing Authority of the City of L.A. (HACLA) oversees vouchers, and the city’s Housing Department tracks how many people live in new permanent housing units funded by the city’s Proposition HHH.

Because a person might be a part of more than one homelessness program over time, they might be recorded more than once. And because these agencies don’t have direct access to each other’s data, this leads to duplicates, which can lead to inflated numbers.

At a Dec. 6 press roundtable showing homelessness progress numbers for Bass’ first year, city officials urged reporters not to add up the number of people housed in each program to get a total number of people housed because they had not removed any duplicate records.

The data is set up this way because individual programs are tracked separately.

Tracking the outcomes of programs makes sense — there are a lot of taxpayer funds on the line. Inside Safe alone has a budget of $250 million for just this fiscal year. And the city’s HHH housing program is authorized to borrow up to $1.2 billion, with additional funds for this housing coming from other levels of government. So it’s important to make sure that money is being spent effectively.

Program-oriented data answers questions like:

• How many times did people enter a particular housing program?
• How many times did people leave?
• What do numbers look like at specific shelters?

This can tell you whether services are being utilized and how much it costs, on average, to provide a service, like housing one person in one Inside Safe motel room.

But when the numbers only tell a story about programs and not people, it’s hard to get a sense of what’s happening overall. It prevents government leaders — and the public — from getting answers that measure overall progress, such as:

• How many people moved into housing across all programs this year?
• How many moved from one program to another? 
• How many returned to encampments? 
• How many left for other housing alternatives not provided by the government? 

Bass summed up the problem when she spoke with our radio program AirTalk in November.

“The data is process-oriented — how many people came into housing,” she said. “It’s not outcome oriented, meaning: How many people stayed in housing and what happened to them four to five months down the line? That data is not available.”

The numbers themselves were often inaccurate

In fact, there were many data points we couldn’t get at all — and neither could the City Council for nearly the first half of the year. As we reported in April, the Bass administration said the numbers couldn’t be trusted.

For example, in a July report the Bass administration said that when it looked at the March 2023 numbers for Inside Safe collected by LAHSA and compared it to reports from people running various shelters, they found that only 59% of Inside Safe’s data on people entering the program matched what was in LAHSA’s system.

The accuracy rates were far worse for permanent housing data and program exit data: 4% and 0%, respectively, according to the report.

Although LAHSA collects and maintains data across all the temporary housing programs in L.A., LAHSA officials usually aren’t the people handling the data entry of when someone enters or leaves a shelter or housing program. That responsibility falls to the service providers, usually nonprofits paid by LAHSA to run the shelter or housing under a contract.

According to LAHSA officials, there are about 6,000 people across different service providers who enter data into this system, making it challenging to ensure consistency and accuracy across the board.

When service providers record a new intake — that is, someone entering one of the government housing programs — sometimes the information they have is pretty limited, perhaps just a first name or a physical description, according to Bevin Kuhn, LAHSA’s senior advisor for IT and data management. These incomplete records of individuals are another challenge that leads to duplicates, Kuhn says. LAHSA officials say they constantly work to de-duplicate by merging profiles that have similar information.

Since we launched the Promise Tracker in May, we had been warned there were duplicates, and we flagged this in our earliest updates. It wasn’t until November, six months later, that the Bass administration shared numbers that it said were de-duplicated for temporary housing.

Providing detailed data entry while trying to move people out of encampments and into housing is “a lot for on-the-ground workers, especially if I’m a caseworker and I’m not data savvy,” said Kuhn. “It’s really hard to capture all those data elements perfectly.”

Most shelters don’t have much day-to-day turnover, Kuhn said. But one Inside Safe operation — in which an encampment is cleared and people living there are offered temporary housing — can lead to dozens of new housing placements in one day, making it a lot more challenging to enter data efficiently.

The L.A. Grand Hotel in downtown, one of the sites used as temporary housing for Inside Safe.

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Brian Feinzimer

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LAist

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LAHSA requires service providers to enter data on people entering and exiting shelters within 24 hours, according to the recent city controller audit. But the audit found that “LAHSA does not monitor or enforce their data entry requirements” to make its bed reservation system function properly.

For the Inside Safe motel program, providers also are required to log when unhoused people exit the motel room program, but LAHSA doesn’t enforce this requirement, a LAHSA executive told city council members in August. This means that a lot of service providers skip this step, she said at the time.

That meant the city might have been unknowingly paying for empty motel rooms, nearly eight months after the program had launched, council members were told by the mayor’s staff.

The mayor’s staff say they worked closely with LAHSA to deploy a system to resolve the discrepancies, and that LAHSA started using a revamped tracking methodology in June that improved the accuracy rates. And Kuhn said the agency beefed up their teams on the ground to work alongside providers to verify the accuracy of data.

It took most of this year to put the necessary changes in place and for the data to reach what the Bass administration considered an acceptable rate of accuracy for sharing with the public.

We're finally getting some clarity

Many of the data problems we encountered appear to be longstanding issues that Mayor Bass inherited when she came into office. She’s expressed frustration multiple times over these systems and the quality of the numbers. And she’s said her administration is working to establish new and better data systems, with the help of a new LAHSA CEO, Va Lecia Adams Kellum.

Bass is also taking on more of a direct oversight role at LAHSA — in a way that prior mayors have not — by putting herself on its governing commission. County supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Kathryn Barger have done the same, with Horvath now serving as the commission’s chair.

They’ve already made some changes to address some of these issues. LAHSA and the mayor’s office confirmed that they removed duplicates from their temporary housing numbers. We now know how many individual people moved into temporary housing.

As of Dec. 1, they reported that 21,694 people had moved into temporary housing in the year since Bass came into office in December 2022.

They also reported a 65% retention rate across all temporary housing programs — that is, 65% of the people who entered temporary housing are still housed as of today in either temporary or permanent housing.

But when it comes to the overall picture, we still don’t have reliable numbers.

There could still be double-counting of people who went from temporary housing into a permanent housing program. We don’t know how many people have left permanent housing and fallen back into homelessness. And we don’t know if that 65% retention rate is an improvement over prior years, because we don’t have a retention rate for 2022.

However, officials say more clarity is on the horizon. According to the mayor’s office, LAHSA and the city Housing Authority (which keeps data on permanent housing) have agreed to share more of their data going forward, so that everyone can better understand how many individuals are being housed across all types of housing, not just temporary housing.

What we know today

Here are the current, best-available answers to those simple, foundational questions that we’ve spent all year trying to figure out:

How many unhoused people has the city moved into housing?

At least 21,694 people as of Dec. 1, according to temporary housing numbers from LAHSA and the mayor’s office. Adding people who’ve used vouchers or moved into new permanent housing units, that number could be as much as 11,000 higher — but because there’s likely some overlap with those in temporary housing, we don’t know how much higher it actually is.

How many of those people are staying housed?

A 65% retention rate for 21,694 people suggests that around 14,000 people who moved into temporary housing this year would still be housed. We don’t know what the retention is for people who have moved into permanent housing.

How has this changed from 2022?

The mayor’s office provided these numbers on Dec. 6:

• 21,694 people moved into temporary housing in 2023, up from 16,931 the year before
• 7,717 people moved into housing using vouchers in 2023, up from 5,223 the year before
• 3,551 people moved into new permanent housing units in 2023, up from approximately 1,361 the year before

This suggests increases all around, but because there are still potential duplicates between different types of housing across both years, we still don’t know what the actual change is in the overall number of people housed.

Heading into Year 2 of Bass’s term, here are the questions we’ll be asking:

• How many people are being moved from temporary housing into permanent housing, especially in Inside Safe?
• What is the retention rate and how does it compare to retention for 2023?

Are there other questions we should be asking? Let us know by submitting your question below.

Biking on river trails, going on picnics and surfing in the ocean are activities California residents cherish every summer. But headlines about the use of toxic chemicals in flood control channels around Orange County have created anxiety for those looking forward to their favorite activities this summer.

Dozens of environmental activists and Orange County residents packed the Orange County Board of Supervisors meeting this week to urge the county to halt the routine use of toxins they say poison waterways and wash out into the ocean.

But several supervisors said it wasn’t that simple. The chemical prevents overgrowth in flood control channels, and that overgrowth could lead to backups and flooding, affecting neighborhoods and businesses during heavy rains.

Controversy over the chemical use led to an announcement last month by Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley, declaring that chemical usage would be halted for the moment. The issue then came before the board this week for further discussion.

Supervisors decided to study the issue and revisit it in the months ahead, and directed the OC Public Works department to evaluate methods for clearing overgrowth of vegetation that crowd flood channels, and look for alternate methods of doing so.

Brent Linas, founder of the Orange County Creek Team, which has succeeded in bringing the environmental issue to the public’s attention through salty Instagram posts and other social media tactics, blasted what he described as the board’s inaction.

He feels that the board is “deeply dysfunctional” and plans on using the meeting as momentum to spread awareness about the chemicals' negative effects on the environment. “There’s palpable outrage in Orange County right now around this and we fully intend to tap into that,” Linas said.

Foley also plans to reintroduce public noticing requirements at the next meeting June 23. The notices would alert residents to the planned use of any pesticides and herbicides. “Orange County residents deserve transparency to help make informed decisions about where their families recreate,” Foley said in a statement released the after the meeting. “I remain encouraged by the overwhelming public support in exploring nontoxic solutions for our waterways.”

How to watchdog your local government

One of the best things you can do to hold officials accountable is pay attention. Your city council, board of supervisors, school board and more all hold public meetings that anybody can attend. These are times you can talk to your elected officials directly and hear about the policies they’re voting on that affect your community.

• Read tips on how to get involved.
• The Orange County Board of Supervisors meets on alternating Tuesdays at 9:30 a.m. at 400 W. Civic Center Drive, Santa Ana. You can check out the O.C. Board of Supervisors full calendar here.
• Learn how to submit a public comment to the O.C. Board of Supervisors.

A program dedicated to providing low-income California residents with extra money for fruits and vegetables is likely to go under this summer if additional funds are not allocated in this year’s state budget, according to concerned food justice advocates.

The CalFresh Fruit and Vegetable EBT Program provides CalFresh recipients with up to $60 a month of free produce each month, in addition to their benefits. In May alone, the program disbursed over $5 million and “served 95,520 California households,” said Grecia Marquez-Nieblas, senior manager at food policy nonprofit Fullwell, which has backed the program.

“Overwhelmingly, folks have been telling us that they want it to continue, that it’s made a really positive impact on them,” Marquez-Nieblas said. “Their diabetes is better managed; their high blood pressure is better managed.”

Those people are now at risk of losing access to that support as funds whittle down. The state budget is set to be finalized on June 15, and “as far as we know, there is no continued funding that has been proposed,” Marquez-Nieblas said.

“When this program ends, we’ll have less money to spend, [at] a time when groceries are incredibly more expensive. Gas is more expensive. Everything is more expensive,” she said. “It’s just, unfortunately, a compounding effect. There’s lots of stuff that’s impacting the same people.”

The program is simple to use: When customers purchase food at participating markets, like Arteaga’s Food Center in San José, they just swipe their EBT (electronic benefit transfer) card.

For every purchase of fresh fruits and vegetables with that card, customers receive an instant rebate each month, applied to their card. The rebate money can be spent on any food or goods covered by CalFresh, like meat, eggs and dairy — it is not limited to fruits and vegetables.

Marquez-Nieblas explained that the pilot program has been implemented in three phases — the latest of which received a limited, one-time allocation of $36 million from the state budget. That seems like a large number, “until we realize that there are hundreds of thousands of individuals across the state using the program.”

“It’s been proven many times that CalFresh — and programs like this that support people having more money for food — are incredibly impactful for lifting children out of poverty, for supporting seniors with limited incomes, for anybody,” Marquez-Nieblas said. “Foundationally, these programs are good. They’re good for public health.”

Food policy advocates said they are hoping for $100 million for the program to continue to operate year-round. Instead, it was reappropriated around $4.8 million — the remaining funds from last year’s budget cycle, in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “May Revise” proposal, according to H.D. Palmer, spokesperson for the California Department of Finance.

“The program will operate until funds are fully utilized,” Palmer said in an email to KQED.

The program’s end would come at a particularly stressful time for CalFresh recipients. This month, for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began, California has begun enforcing new and expanded federal guidelines that require some CalFresh recipients to work 20 hours a week, or an average of 80 hours a month — with a stark reduction in food benefits for those who don’t.

The changes were prompted by the passing of President Donald Trump’s H.R.1 last year.

“Not only does it add in the onerous work requirement — a lot of people who are already receiving CalFresh are working — but now they have this bureaucratic paperwork to provide,” said Kathy Saile, California director of national nonprofit No Kid Hungry. “There’s some real concern that people could lose benefits just because they couldn’t figure out the paperwork.”

H.R. 1’s impact, which also cuts food benefits for some refugees and asylum seekers, is apparent, according to federal data analyzed by the nonpartisan research group Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The center estimated that nationwide, SNAP participation fell by almost 9% — more than 3.5 million people — between H.R.1’s start in July 2025 and February 2026.

Palmer said the state was taking proactive steps to maintain residents’ enrollment in the program.

“This includes leveraging existing data to determine possible exemptions from the new SNAP work requirements, implementing automation, and conducting client outreach,” he said.

He added that the latest budget revision has “a total of $38 million for the CalFood program — which funds food banks for the purchase, storage, and transportation of food grown and/or produced in California.”

In a time of rising bureaucratic barriers implemented by H.R. 1, Marquez-Nieblas said the CalFresh Fruit and Vegetable EBT Program is part of the state’s food safety net.

“This is not just about backfill,” she said. “It’s not just about responding to the impacts (of H.R. 1), which are incredibly awful. It’s also about setting ourselves up for success in the future, knowing we have to invest proactively.”

Marquez-Nieblas said CalFresh recipients should keep their eyes on the California Department of Social Services website for any possible updates and changes in the future.

While implementation of California’s high school ethnic studies mandate has stalled, districts across the state are rolling out classes that encourage students to explore the lesser-told histories of their communities.

Freshmen at Duarte High School this year unearthed the history of a San Gabriel Valley community that was all but erased by commercial development and the construction of the 210 and 605 freeways.

Newspaper headlines often focused on incidents of violence and segregation in the majority Black and Mexican American community of Rocktown, but when the students interviewed former residents, they heard a different story.

“It was a great community for us,” said Alfred Hernandez Zamora. “We just don't want to be forgotten.”

The study of Rocktown was a central theme in the school's first ethnic studies course.

“Ethnic studies is providing space to hear from communities and from points of view that are not traditionally covered in our history classes,” said Casey Ramirez, who teaches the class at Duarte High in addition to government, economics, world and U.S. history.

California legislators passed a law in 2021 that required all schools to offer the course by the 2025-26 school year, but have yet to provide the funding needed to enact the mandate. Duarte Unified, like many other districts, passed its own one-semester ethnic studies graduation requirement ahead of the expected state deadline.

Duarte High School’s curriculum is the result of a collaboration between educators, research into the region’s history and the students’ own interests.

“I've only seen one part of Duarte, and that's the Duarte that I was raised in,” said Leslie Martinez, a rising sophomore. “There's a lot of things that Ms. Ramirez is teaching me, and that's making me more curious to dig deeper [into] my city and where I grew up.”

An opportunity to create an ‘engaging class’

California’s model ethnic studies curriculum describes the field as an “interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and Indigeneity, with an emphasis on the experiences of people of color in the United States.” Districts could develop their course based on this framework or from scratch.

“It was our opportunity to create a really engaging class that really speaks to our student body,” said Luis Haro, Duarte High’s principal for the last eight years.

The majority of Duarte High School’s population is Latino, but there are also Filipino, Asian, white, Black and multiracial students. Most students qualify for free-and reduced price lunches, a proxy for being low-income in public schools.

“In my experience, our students don't know our history, and they don't really have a true understanding of their own identity,” Haro said.

Haro joined a committee of administrators and teachers, including Ramirez, that collaborated with the UCLA History-Geography Project to develop the new course.

UCLA staff guided Duarte educators through reams of local history research and helped the team develop goals for the class, including a student-led civics project.

“Getting to learn and feel like a college student again,” Ramirez said. “It really did make me excited to teach the class.”

They also developed units on students’ personal identity, Indigenous, Latino, Black and Asian American Pacific Islander history. The committee also met with parents and presented their work to the district’s board.

“[Ethnic studies] gave us a path to this project to see people in our community that aren't really talked about,” Ramirez said.

Uncovering the history of the ‘Davis Addition’

The region is the original home of the Gabrielino/Tongva Nation. The then-governor of Alta California granted former soldier Andres Avelino Duarte nearly 7,000 acres in 1841, including what became the city that shared his name. The area was eventually subdivided into farms and eventually, homes.

From the late 19th century through the 1970s, Black and Mexican American families settled in the “Davis Addition,” a subdivision of the land grant that became better known as Rocktown.

Ramirez first read about Rocktown in the research UCLA gathered for the curriculum development process, but couldn’t find much else about the community online.

She started downloading news articles from Newspapers.com and sharing them with the class. Many of the stories often focused on crime and violence in the community, from police raids on drinking and gambling establishments, to fires.

The articles also alluded to the segregation of the early 20th century.

A 1928 article from the Monrovia Daily News described the schedule for a new municipal pool. Mondays were “reserved for the use of colored people.”

“ Why are we not allowing people to do things simply because of the color of their skin or like their origin?” said Khloe Carter, a rising sophomore who took the ethnic studies class.

Carter said it felt important to her, as a person of color, to learn about people’s experiences with discrimination in the past.

“I'd say that has made me smarter and more aware of other people's struggles and what other people have to deal with and other people's cultures and other people's traditions,” Carter said.

The first wave of Rocktown displacement preceded the construction of the 210 and 605 freeways in the 1960s. The last several dozen families were moved to make way for a business complex in the 1970s. Stories referred to the area as blighted and “depressed.”

“ We took it as our job to dig further, deeper, to find out if it was true or not,” Martinez said.

With Ramirez’s help — and several volunteers from the Facebook group Rocktown Oldies Club — the students started to schedule interviews with former residents. The school’s film class volunteered to record the conversations.

The students heard stories about everyday life that were absent from the news coverage of time — Sunday barbecues, roller skating, fishing, picnicking and swimming near the Santa Fe Dam.

Zamora, who was born in Rocktown in 1949, offered a first-person history that isn’t available elsewhere — down to the community’s name: “ You could not even dig a, a foot into the ground without running into rocks,” he said. “ You could throw water on the ground and a rock would grow, you know?”

Many of the residents raised goats, pigs, pigeons and chickens in their backyards. Zamora said a routine car repair could quickly become a community gathering with neighbors joining in to help.

“That made it … so great to live there, 'cause everybody was like family,” Zamora said. “Even people that weren't related to you, it was really close friendships there.”

A typical gathering of Alfred Hernandez Zamora's family in an undated photo from their Rocktown days. Everyone gathered for Sunday dinners at his grandmother's house.

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Courtesy Alfred Hernandez Zamora

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Zamora's relatives Rayno Hernandez and Christina Hernandez Padilla as kids riding their bikes through Rocktown.

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Courtesy Alfred Hernandez Zamora

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Zamora said Rocktown offered a reprieve from the discrimination against Black and Latino residents in other parts of the San Gabriel Valley at the time.

“We played ball together. We swam together. We ate together,” Zamora said. “Even though there was different cultures there, we still were able to get along with everybody.”

These interviews gave the students new perspectives to consider.

“ People make a lot of stereotypes and a lot of guesses … like, ‘Oh, this community can be so ghetto,’" Martinez said. “But honestly, like I think if you haven't been in the community, you can't really say anything.”

Remembering Rocktown

The Duarte Historical Museum hosted a pop-up exhibition of the students’ capstone project.

“I was very impressed with the job that they did, being able to get all this history and the information and the interviews with people,” said Liz Reilly, president of the Duarte Historical Society and Museum and former mayor. "I thought that was really fabulous.”

Reilly, who moved to Duarte in 1987, had heard of Rocktown, but knew little about the neighborhood.

Izzy Guzman, another student who took ethnic studies at Duarte High, said the account she heard from the three women she interviewed differed from these Rocktown headlines.   "They've all seemed really nice and really genuine," Guzman said. "I just feel like people should understand, even if they don't know what Rocktown is, they should understand that, it was just a basic community, and that they should be treated with the same respect as everyone else."

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Mariana Dale

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The exhibition included a map of Rocktown (still the subject of some debate) and dozens of historical photos, often provided by the people they interviewed.

“ I found it so amazing how much people showed up for our project and how much the community of Rocktown has shown up for our project,” Carter said.

Former residents, including Zamora, were among the dozens of people who attended the exhibition’s grand opening in mid-May.

“For them to recognize places that were forgotten, that meant a lot,” Zamora said. “ Nobody seems to remember it. I mean, except the people that lived there.”

Ethnic studies faces growing challenges

While the school’s principal, students and former Rocktown residents have embraced the ethnic studies class, Ramirez said she’s also heard criticism.

During Duarte High’s open house, Ramirez said a parent voiced her disagreement with the class and threatened to file a grievance even though her child had yet to enroll at the school.

“ I'm a parent, so I understand, especially if it's something that you're not familiar with and your kids are learning something different from what you learned, it can be scary,” Ramirez said. “My approach is never to impose my viewpoints. It's to provide alternative perspectives.”

Some lawmakers have also criticized school offerings that intersect with race and ethnicity.

In the last five years, 20 states have banned or restricted teaching critical race theory, an academic concept that race is a social construct and that racism is embedded in specific societal structures.

Teacher Casey Ramirez said teaching students to view history from multiple points of view and form their own opinions is a key feature of the ethnic studies class.

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Courtesy Oscar Ramirez

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California school districts from Los Alamitos to San Francisco have faced pushback over their ethnic studies curriculum despite passage of the state mandate.

State lawmakers’ decision to withhold money for teacher training and materials has delayed the ethnic studies graduation requirement.

Daniel Diaz, director of the UCLA History-Geography Project, said there was a flood of interest when the ethnic studies mandate was first passed, but now fewer districts are paying for related professional development.

“Which in turn then impacts what happens to our project and … who we're able to support in terms of staffing,” Diaz said.

In June, UCLA laid off one of the educators instrumental in helping Duarte develop its ethnic studies curriculum.

In a statement, John McDonald, director of media relations at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies, said the History-Geography Project has laid off four staff members total after funded projects ended in the last year.

“UCLA Center X is committed to the work and actively seeking new funding for similar efforts,” McDonald said.

What that means for other districts looking for assistance with ethnic studies programs remains to be seen.

Ramirez said her UCLA collaborator was “phenomenal” and continued to support the project even after the contract with the district formally ended.

“ I don't think that this year and this project would've been what it was without having that support,” Ramirez said.

A business center now stands south of the 210 and west of the 605 where part of Rocktown once was. Some of the street names, including Evergreen and Flower, remain the same.

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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The Rocktown Project’s future

Duarte High School will continue the ethnic studies class.

More former residents have already contacted Ramirez hoping to be interviewed by next year’s students. She also plans to publish the students’ work on a website and a future goal is to memorialize Rocktown with a physical marker in Duarte.

“You need to know whose land you're on and who was there,” said Sylvia Gonzales Youngblood, who was born in Duarte in 1967 and grew up visiting the home her maternal grandfather built in Rocktown.

She said when she was a student there wasn’t an opportunity to learn about her family’s  Ohlone Mission Indian and Mexican heritage and she was discouraged from speaking Spanish.

“Now as I'm older, I realize just how much history and of ourselves we lose,” Youngblood said.

Carter, the rising sophomore, said after taking ethnic studies, she feels more connected to the city she moved to about a year ago.

“It's important that we know this side of history so a community like Rocktown doesn't get lost again,” Carter said. “Every voice should be heard, including Rocktown's.”