The Brief

The rest of the country may remember Hollywood legend Rob Reiner for his work in front of and behind the camera, but in California, he leaves behind a political legacy that endures beyond his films and movie and television roles.

Reiner, a longtime Democratic activist, donor and fundraiser, played a critical role in the legalization of same-sex marriage in California, and he was a driving force behind California’s signature early-childhood development program, First 5.

Reiner, 78, was found stabbed to death along with his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, inside their Brentwood home Sunday.

Police investigators announced Monday that their son, Nick Reiner, 32, had been arrested and was being held on suspicion of their murder. Rob and Nick Reiner once worked together on a semi-autobiographical film about Nick Reiner’s lifelong struggles with addiction.

“I can’t believe it,” former California Gov. Gray Davis told CalMatters Monday in a phone interview. “I mean, Rob and Michele have been part of Sharon and I's life for over 30 years.” Sharon Davis is the former governor’s wife.

Davis said he’ll never forget when Rob Reiner in 1991 invited him — then California’s elected controller — to hang out on the set of Reiner’s “A Few Good Men.” Davis got to watch for hours as actors including Tom Cruise, Kevin Bacon, Demi Moore and Jack Nicholson did their scenes.

“I thought: I am so proud to live in a state where quality filmmaking takes place,” Davis said.

But a few years later, the two became something akin to coworkers. Davis was elected governor the same night in 1998 that Reiner’s Proposition 10 ballot initiative passed. The initiative created a new tax on tobacco that funded the programs for children younger than 5 that are now in every California county.

Davis said the two were at the same Election Night party in 1998 as the results came in. Davis said he and his administration later worked with Reiner to ensure the First 5 program got implemented. Davis appointed Reiner to chair the program’s California Children and Families Commission, a position he held until 2006. Reiner resigned amid allegations he was using taxpayer funds to promote his Proposition 82, an unsuccessful ballot initiative that sought to tax the wealthy to fund preschool for all children.

“Rob was not just a talker. He was a doer,” Davis said. “A lot of other people would give a nice speech, they would come to a press conference, and then they thought their job was over, and certainly we appreciate that. I mean, they have other things to do, but the difference was Rob called you up and said, ‘What can I do next?’ ”

Mike Roos, a former California legislator, political strategist and lobbyist, worked closely with Reiner on the Prop. 10 campaign. He said they got to know each other and it was clear to Roos that Reiner loved his children dearly.

“This has been just one of the most horrible things I could ever imagine, knowing him and knowing his love and the investment that he made in every one of those kids in that family,” Roos said, “but particularly how he cared and talked so thoughtfully about the struggles that Nick had in that period of time when I knew him.”

Later, Reiner would help found the American Foundation for Equal Rights. The group paid for the legal fight against Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage in California. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Prop. 8 in 2013.

Kris Perry, the former executive director of First 5 and a lead plaintiff in the case that got Prop. 8 overturned, said Rob and Michele Reiner also stood by her and her wife, Sandy Stier, as they and the other plaintiffs defended their right to marry in the landmark case.

“They continued over a five-year period to champion the cause by speaking out themselves, bringing more support to the case, doing media interviews, and, more importantly, being kind and generous … year after year after year,” Perry said. “They cared about us as people throughout that entire process. They left this indelible impression on all of us of what it means to be a real leader, to not only make something possible, but to stand beside people during the fight.”

She said Reiner wasn’t just a figurehead at First 5, either. He attended Children and Families Commission meetings every month and was deeply involved in discussions of “how to invest, where to get results, how to hold people accountable,” she said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom over the weekend said Reiner’s impressive body of professional work, which included “When Harry Met Sally,” “Stand By Me” and “The Princess Bride,” taught “generations how to see goodness and righteousness in others — and (encouraged) us to dream bigger.”

“That empathy extended well beyond his films,” Newsom said in a statement. “He made California a better place through his good works. Rob will be remembered for his remarkable filmography and for his extraordinary contribution to humanity.”

The Reiners donated about $2.7 million to help Democrats over their lifetime, The New York Times reported, including $100,000 to support then-President Joe Biden’s 2024 re-election. He later joined actor George Clooney in urging Biden to drop out, saying “We need someone younger to fight back.”

Not everyone had nice things to say about Reiner. President Donald Trump, whom Reiner frequently criticized, called Reiner a “tortured and struggling but once very talented movie director and comedy star” in a social media post. He claimed Reiner’s death was linked to a “mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”

Democratic U.S Rep. Laura Friedman, who represents the Hollywood area, said in an interview she “really felt sick over seeing Donald Trump’s post about this terrible murder.”

Friedman, a former film and television producer, said Reiner’s art reflected his politics. She said he advocated for being decent to each other and against bigotry — unlike Trump who she said has a “unique ability to divide Americans and make people angry.”

Reiner, she said, often used humor to “bring us together … and do it in a way that was somehow gentle and loving at the same time.”

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

As firefighters battled catastrophic fires in Los Angeles last January, one question reverberated across the country: Where was the water?

The question came from wealthy developer Rick Caruso and then-President-elect Donald Trump, from reporters and residents. It prompted executive orders and state and federal investigations. Once the fires were more ash than flame, the Trump administration used a water shortage to justify its baffling move to release vital summer irrigation supplies from two reservoirs that do not supply Los Angeles.

“I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA!” Trump posted on social media, referencing Gov. Gavin Newsom, as the fires raged across L.A. “On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not (sic) firefighting planes. A true disaster!”

A team of researchers, led by Gregory Pierce, director of the UCLA Water Resources Group, set out to uncover whether the intense focus on water supply meant that dry hydrants had uniquely hampered the Palisades firefight, or whether this was a common occurrence.

In a policy brief published Monday, the researchers used media reports to confirm that when fires burn urban areas, hydrant flows often sputter out — the result of lost pressure as burnt homes hemorrhage water and too many hoses simultaneously draw on a limited supply.

“Fire hydrant performance in the Palisades seems to represent the rule rather than the exception,” the report says. “The only apparent, factual difference between the Palisades Fire and its comparators is that hydrant performance did not make the headlines of news stories covering the other fires.”

‘The rule rather than the exception’

The policy brief echoes the findings of a recent state investigation into water supply during the Palisades Fire.

“Even though there was plenty of water available in the system,” state investigators wrote, “it was not possible to pump enough water to the fire area all at once to meet the flow rate demand created by the leaking water from already destroyed structures and high water use from hydrants.”

Even if the much-implicated empty Santa Ynez reservoir had been full, “the hydrants could not have maintained pressure,” the state report said.

Firefighters work to put out a fire in the rubble of a home that burned down on Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu, as a result of the Palisades Fire. Jan. 9, 2025.

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Ted Soqui

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CalMatters

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Together, the Eaton and Palisades fires destroyed thousands of structures, caused tens of billions of dollars in damage, killed at least 31 people and likely contributed to hundreds more deaths. 

With smoke still in the air, experts, state officials, reporters and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power raced to fact-check claims that water management resulting in dry hydrants was uniquely responsible for the devastation. The repeated refrain: urban water systems aren’t built to put out wildfires.

But the spark had caught. And as residents reeled from the devastating losses of entire communities and grasped for explanations, a sense of betrayal — that water and their hydrants had failed to save Los Angeles from the flames — set in.

By the end of March, nearly a third of 2,000 Los Angeles County residents surveyed by the USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research blamed poor water management as the biggest contributor to the wildfires. Only slightly more — 36% — said arson.

Another survey by Probolsky Research reported that more than a quarter of 1,000 likely primary election voters in California were surprised to hear — or flat out didn’t believe — that fire hydrants are not designed to fight major wildfires.

“Sometimes all you need is one idea to catch on a little bit and start spreading. And then once it starts to go viral, it gets accepted by lots of people,” said Lisa Fazio, an associate professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University who studies how people learn information.

During disasters, she said, “people are hunting for that understanding and sense of control.”

It’s happened before — many times. 

In fire after fire, the researchers found reports of lost water pressure.

Paul Lowenthal, division chief fire marshal with the Santa Rosa Fire Department, remembers when the Tubbs Fire roared through Santa Rosa in 2017, destroying thousands of homes and killing 22 people.

“When we had the loss of pressure in Fountaingrove, there was this immediate sense of, ‘The firefighters didn't have the water that they needed to fight the fire,’” he said. “And I think we saw some of the same concerns bubble up out of Los Angeles.”

But Lowenthal said the true picture was much more complicated: In the hills, as the fire was pushing into the city, firefighters were too busy getting people out to even use the hydrants.

“It was all just purely saving lives,” he said. By the time the winds had died down on the valley floor enough to fight back the flames, he said, the city’s water system had restored enough pressure to hydrants.

Kevin Phillips, district manager of Paradise Irrigation District, said that some hydrants in the town of Paradise lost pressure during the 2018 Camp Fire, which remains the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history.

When a wildfire destroys a town, like the fires in Paradise or the Palisades, Phillips said, each burned home bleeds water out of the system — sapping its pressure.

“Every one of those homes that gets burned is an open sore to the outside,” Phillips said. “Your system basically is dying as every one of those homes are being destroyed.”

William Sapeta, fire chief of the Lake County Fire Protection District, agreed. “The Eaton and the Palisades fires really drew a lot of attention to the capabilities of water for fire suppression,” he said. “Yet we experienced in the Camp Fire, the Valley Fire, the Carr Fire — all of these fires have exceeded municipalities’ ability to provide water for fire suppression.”

New requirements

Hydrants and water supply have drawn public scrutiny in Ventura County, where two major wildfires in less than a decade spurred reports of hydrant outages and lost water pressure.

The fires in Assemblymember Steve Bennett’s home county, one of which burned homes on his own street, prompted new legislation. Signed into law this year, Bennett’s bill sets new requirements for certain water suppliers in fire-prone parts of Ventura County to harden their systems and obtain enough backup power or alternate water supplies to keep water pumps running for 24 hours.

“You ought to be able to have a system that can at least help you put out the small little ember, the bush that catches on fire — so that you can get it before the house catches on fire,” the Democrat from Oxnard said. Having enough to do that, he added, should be the minimum requirement.

But some water suppliers fear they won’t be able to withstand the financial costs of meeting the law’s requirements, and worry about the potential liability if they can’t.

“You have smaller water systems that don't even have the capacity or funding to deal with all those things,” said Daryl Osby, former Los Angeles County Fire Department chief and now vice president of emergency preparedness, safety & security for California Water Service, an investor-owned water utility.

A new frontier

ASU’s Faith Kearns, a co-author of the policy brief, has chronicled the convergence of fire and water supplies before, and said the growing scale and devastation of these fires are resetting public expectations for urban water systems.

“This feels like the new frontier we're discussing around wildfire, but (it’s) just part and parcel of California’s really complex, ongoing wildfire issues,” Kearns said.

Climate change-fueled, extreme conditions further limit what water and water systems are capable of in response to fire — like in Santa Rosa, where Lowenthal said firefighters were too focused on saving lives to tap the hydrants in the hills.

“You might have the best water system in the world, and you still might not have conditions that are safe for fire personnel to go into,” Kearns said.

The new UCLA policy brief doesn’t interrogate why the hydrants became such a flashpoint in the Palisades Fire, but Pierce has some hypotheses. Preliminary data for a forthcoming study suggests it’s political — that support for Trump drives the belief that water management was to blame for the fires.

“Local influencers, political voices — all the way up to the president and a lot of people in between — quickly seized on the fact that some of the fire hydrants in the Palisades Fire didn’t have water,” Pierce said.

That gained a snowball effect. “The same thing kept getting repeated, and then people just thought it was true.” 

Fazio, the psychology professor at Vanderbilt not involved in the policy brief, said the urge to cling to a culprit may even go deeper: people often seek out simple answers in moments of crisis.

“You could think of all of this as being a part of a causal story — like, 'What caused my house to burn down? Why was it not safe?’” Fazio said. “The really simple model is, ‘The firefighters and the hydrants are supposed to prevent it, and they didn't, therefore they're at fault.’ Whereas I'm sure the actual causal story is much more complicated.”

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

Gin Rummy (Venice)

If your Christmas fantasy involves being stranded on a desert island with a mai tai and a string of lights, then Gin Rummy is your holiday paradise. The soundtrack is holiday-themed, and Thursday to Sunday offers a live DJ spinning the kind of classics you can dance to. Keep an eye out for surfing Santa while you're sipping on a Christmas colada, made with dark rum, coconut, clove, cinnamon and lime (this is also available sans the spirits). Other must-haves include the frozen marshmallow daiquiri and the gingerbread mojito.

Krampus' Cove (Night on Earth, Hollywood Hills)

A naughty list Negroni.

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Courtesy Krampus Cove

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Explore the dark side of Christmas at Krampus’ Cove. This pop-up is making its fourth visit to Los Angeles with a macabre takeover of Night on Earth in the Hollywood Hills during select hours. Libations include a naughty list negroni, grinches need love too, made with vodka, pandan, and peppermint and a bourbon-based merry axe mas, with spiced cider and miso butterscotch.

A.O.C. (West Hollywood)

The changing seasons bring a changing cocktail menu at Chef Suzanne Goin's A.O.C., with seasonal sips curated by head barman Ignacio Murillo. A Kentucky holiday is sure to keep you warm and cozy with flavors of bourbon, persimmon, lemon, and sherry. If you're keeping things alcohol-free this holiday, try the pentire ruby with Seaward free spirit, lemon, cranberry syrup, grapefruit and mint.

Patrick Molloys (Hermosa Beach)

The Christmapolitan

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Courtesy Miracle at Molloy's

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Irish restaurant Patrick Molloys is holding a special Miracle at Molloys in collaboration with Miracle Pop-Up Bars daily from noon to 10 p.m. through Dec. 31. Kitchy-Christmas items include Griswold-style decorations and craft cocktails like the christmapolitan, made with vodka, spiced cranberry sauce, and absinthe mist, as well as the snowball old fashioned with rye whiskey, gingerbread, and wormwood bitters. There are three different non-alcoholic beverages on the menu, including the Silent Night, made with tart cherry, orange acid, and soda.

Firstborn (Chinatown)

Bar Director Kenzo Han of Firstborn has crafted a fresh hot toddy that pairs perfectly with fermented tofu and reflects the restaurant's Chinese-American sensibilities. Flavors include black oolong tea, Imo Shochu, Michter's Rye, lemon juice and zest, spruce tips and Angostura bitters.

The Roger Room (West Hollywood)

The Sugarplum fairy at The Roger Room

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Philip Guerette

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Courtesy The Roger Room

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The Roger Room is camp meets craft cocktails, with garlands, vintage decorations, and way too much mistletoe to miss your magical moment. Signature sips include Santa's apple cider with Jack Daniels and Hennessy, along with a zero-proof apple cider with cinnamon and clove. The sugar plum fairy with Zacapa rum and a lemon-sugar rim is just as beautiful as it sounds.

Big Bar (Los Feliz)

The Oh Snap! at Big Bar

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Eugene Lee

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Courtesy Big Bar

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It's Elf on the Top Shelf with specialty cocktails from this beloved neighborhood watering hole. For the month of December, Big Bar in Los Feliz will be serving six seasonal cocktails, including the Oh snap!, which melds the flavors of an old fashioned and gingersnap rum into something truly special. It comes with a gingerbread man on the side, so you're never drinking alone. The recipe was created by Marina Spidla of MarinaMixes, whose Big Bar debut as guest bartender was delayed following the L.A. wildfires earlier this year. She'll be pouring all month.

Frosty's Christmas Bar (Hollywood)

If you're searching for your yuletide cheer at the bottom of a glass, consider Frosty's Christmas Bar. This immersive pop-up bar features photo ops, tons of Christmas decorations, and, of course, festive beverages. Timed tickets start at $24, but that price does not include the spirits needed to have you singing karaoke atop a jumbo Christmas ornament.

The London West Hollywood at Beverly Hills (West Hollywood)

Nutcracker afternoon tea

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Courtesy The London West Hollywood at Beverly Hills

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Weekends in December, guests can enter the land of sweets and sips with a Nutcracker afternoon tea at The London West Hollywood at Beverly Hills. The experience begins with tea from Rare Tea Company, including the special Nutcracker holiday blend with toasted hazelnuts and Madagascar vanilla. You can also add champagne by the glass. Themed tea sandwiches, scones, and sweets will also be served, like peppermint meringue tarts and freshly baked gingerbread cookies.

Casa Vega (Sherman Oaks)

The halls are decked at Casa Vega, with golden tinsel shimmering over every spot. This restaurant is like Las Vegas, where you're not sure if it's daylight yet — but that just means more snowball margaritas. They'll also be serving a Mexican coffee in an adorable Santa mug.

Bar Next Door (West Hollywood)

Bar Next Door on the Sunset Strip, from bar director and mixologist Brynn Smith, is your home away from home this festive season. The space has been glammed up in holiday fashion to match the cozy cocktails in your hand. Menu highlights include a BND mulled wine with ginger, whole spices, and Italian red wine, and a butterbeer, which is an adult take on the Harry Potter original, with butter, brown sugar and vodka.

The star of the lineup, though, might be the clarified coquito. This is a Puerto Rican classic made with Santa Teresa 1796 and Bacardí Carta Blanca rum, along with cinnamon, sweetened condensed milk, nutmeg, cardamom, and espresso beans.

Dahlia, Downtown L.A. Proper Hotel (Downtown Los Angeles)

Nothing is merrier than mezcal, and the In Good Spirits Holiday Pop-Up at the Downtown L.A. Proper Hotel has got bites and beats to boost your evening. Think nightly DJs, tarot readings, chain-stitch artists, and small plates from Cabrillo restaurant. Drinks include a sugar plum old fashioned with Illegal Mezcal and a cranberry no-groni.

Andrew and Suze Lopez of Bakersfield welcomed their newborn son Ryu at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on Aug.18, 2025, against some of the highest medical odds that the couple’s doctors had ever seen.

Suze had an abdominal ectopic pregnancy, in which a fertilized egg develops outside the uterus in the abdomen. According to the team that treated her, the odds of a viable pregnancy developing so far away from Suze’s uterus, let alone with few complications for mother and child, are “far less than one in a million.”

The Lopezes are celebrating the extraordinarily unlikely healthy birth of their newest child thanks to the work of a massive team of specialists and, in part, a well-timed visit to L.A. for a Dodgers game.

“ I credit it all to God of course, because he gave us such a miracle,” Suze told LAist.

Discovering the pregnancy

Suze had long been living with an ovarian cyst that made pregnancy very unlikely, especially because she’d already had her other ovary and cyst removed.

At first, Suze didn’t want to have the growing cyst removed for two reasons. Removing it meant that she would have gone through unwanted hormonal changes due to early menopause, and she was holding onto a sliver of hope that her teenage daughter Kaila might not end up an only child.

“ My daughter was always like, ‘Hey, let's have a brother or sister,’” Suze said. “And I was like, ‘Sorry, just not happening.’ And I kind of just accepted it.”

Suze was finally starting to make plans to have the cyst removed, having “almost given up” on having a second child. At that point the cyst weighed 22 pounds. A routine pregnancy test ahead of a scheduled CT scan came back positive. But Suze, an emergency room nurse herself, knew false positives were possible due to a number of factors. Two more pregnancy tests came back positive. Follow up exams revealed a femur behind her cyst and blood flow in what appeared to be a developing fetus.

At that moment, Suze knew she had a viable pregnancy.

The Dodgers game

Suze broke the good news to Andrew at a Dodgers game. Andrew was just about to start his final semester as a nursing student, and the couple was there to celebrate. (Andrew said it was Aug. 15 — Demon Slayer hat night, for the record.) With Suze’s news, the couple had one more thing to commemorate.

But on that same trip, Suze started to feel abdominal pain — unbeknownst to her at the time, the baby she was carrying was already full term, mostly hidden behind the large cyst.

The couple quickly decided to go to Cedars-Sinai Hospital.

Cedars-Sinai earlier this year became the first hospital in California to be considered a Level IV Maternal Care hospital, the highest level of obstetric and maternal care given by the Joint Commission. And with a case this rare, specialists across several departments were needed to deliver the baby successfully.

The gravity of the situation

Dr. John Ozimek, Cedars-Sinai’s director of labor and delivery, was on call when Suze came into the hospital.

In addition to her abdominal pain, Suze had abnormally high blood pressure as an additional complicating factor. Knowing of Suze’s positive pregnancy test, Ozimek soon set out to get to the bottom of the issues.

“ Finally, I put the probe back way far away, somewhere where you would never see a baby,” said Ozimek. “And I started to see parts of a baby.”

Ozimek first noticed a femur, then the baby’s cranium. He measured the size — and only then did he realize how complicated the situation was about to become.

“I looked at her and I looked at her husband, Andrew, and I said, ‘Guys, you're full term. This is a full term pregnancy,’” he said.

In fact, Ozimek said that Ryu would’ve been well past the due date doctors would’ve given Suze if she had exhibited any symptoms of pregnancy.

Ozimek credited the Lopezes’ trusting attitude, and their knowledge of the medical profession, with helping the doctors conduct each test and procedure smoothly.

“ I am extremely grateful to her and to Andrew for putting their trust in us, not knowing who we were and essentially recommending this really risky and extreme surgery in less than 24 hours of meeting her,” Ozimek said.

With the extremely precarious surgery on the books, neonatal intensive care unit experts, anesthesiologists, and nurse practitioners, among others, then jumped into action.

The birth

Delivering a full-term abdominal ectopic pregnancy is exceedingly rare, and the team at Cedars-Sinai and the Lopezes had to think through all the contingencies before the operation.

“If we saw distress, we would do an emergency delivery and get the baby out,” Ozimek said. “Under most circumstances, that's OK. But in this circumstance, that would put her life in extreme danger.”

Because of the complexity of the procedure, doctors made the decision to put Suze under general anesthesia, which is generally not recommended. And so the work began.

First, Suze’s cyst was removed to allow doctors to access the baby. And even though Ozimek knew roughly what to expect beneath the cyst, he was still floored.

“ What we saw in there was just something you will never see in your life as a maternal fetal medicine specialist or as an obstetrician,” Ozimek said. “It's this eight pound baby — more than 8 pounds — laying directly in her abdomen. The head was up directly underneath the spleen. His little bottom was resting on top of her very tiny unpregnant uterus.”

Doctors quickly lifted Ryu out and began taking care of other tasks, like removing the placenta from Suze’s abdomen.

Suze started to hemorrhage blood during the intensive procedure, which Ozimek said the team had anticipated. Surgeons worked to control the bleeding, and anesthesiologists jumped in to give her blood transfusions to keep Suze stable. She lost 4.7 liters of blood all told, according to Ozimek, almost her whole blood volume.

Since Ryu was born without fluid in his amniotic sac, his lung development was a major concern. As the effects of the anesthesia wore off, Ryu proved to be a feisty, vocal baby. Doctors removed his breathing tube less than 24 hours after putting it in, and he continued to exhibit promising signs throughout the whole time he was in the ICU.

Against all odds, the delivery went off as planned without any major complications. Even Suze bounced back quickly from her procedure so she could focus on spending time with her surprise.

“ People use the word miracle and all the time for different things, and I don't — I mean, it's just who I am, I don't,” Ozimek said. “This is as close to it as I can imagine it, it really is. I think about it all the time.”

Post operation

The Lopezes named their baby Ryu for two reasons. The name pays tribute to former Dodgers pitcher Hyun-jin Ryu — a nod to where Andrew found out about the pregnancy — and also the Street Fighter character Ryu, a nod to the spirit and tenacity that his parents felt he had demonstrated.

“He fought through all these odds and it's just unbelievable,” Andrew said. “ We thought it was very fitting for him to have a fighter name and to also match where I found out we were gonna have this wonderful miracle.”

Ryu stayed in the care of neonatologists at Cedars-Sinai for about two weeks then recovered with Suze at the nearby Ronald McDonald House. After making the drive back and forth from Bakersfield in order to complete his last semester, Andrew celebrated his graduation from nursing school last week.

In the months since Ryu’s birth on Aug. 18, Suze, Andrew, Ryu and Kaila have been able to fall into a new rhythm as a family of four as they get ready to celebrate their first holidays together.

“ I think of life so differently,” Suze said. “I just appreciate everything — everything. Even if it's the baby crying, because that just means that his lungs work, they function, they can breathe.”

Marguerita Elementary School teacher Claudia Ralston spends most of her day on the floor, guiding her transitional kindergarten students through play. She said if it weren’t for TK, the Alhambra educator would be considering retirement.

“Yes, I am exhausted,” Ralston said. “But just being here for the children and doing all the different activities … their curiosity, them wanting to learn just gives you that extra energy.”

This school year is the first where every 4-year-old in the state can enroll in the universal preschool program, also called TK, at their local public school. Schools need to hire an estimated 12,000 teachers to staff the program. Some may come from child care settings and preschool programs, but others are veteran educators who’ve gone back to school to get the credential required to teach TK.

And once they get into the TK classroom, many educators told us, they’ve found new joy in the work.

Lauren Bush started teaching transitional kindergarten three years ago after more than two decades coaching other educators and teaching every grade from kindergarten through sixth.

Her classroom at Lucille J. Smith Elementary in Lawndale is broken into different “centers,” where students can play with colorful magnetic tiles, practice painting their name or construct a ramp to roll a ball from one end of the room to the other.

“It was just so joyful to be with the kids again,” Bush said. “That's when I just, like, got back to myself as an educator, and now I'm gonna die here. That's my plan. I love it here.”

Education research shows that teachers who like their jobs are more likely to stay, and that stability can be good for long-term learning outcomes.

So we wanted to understand what makes TK so joyful for educators and how that can shape how and what students learn.

Lauren Bush and her students practice saying the sounds associated with the letter 'A' at Lucille J. Smith Elementary in Lawndale.

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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Welcoming students with joy

Broadly, the goal of transitional kindergarten is to prepare students for kindergarten and beyond.

“I wanna make sure that their first experience in a public school setting is one that is joyful, where they feel loved, where they feel welcomed, where they get to really transition nicely into like the rigor of the school,” Bush said.

California’s learning foundations for preschool and transitional kindergarten include academic concepts, like the alphabet and writing, but also learning about emotions and developing kids’ muscles.

“The progress in academics in the lower grades is so satisfying because it's such a huge, huge jump,” Bush said. “You don't necessarily see that in the upper grades. It's so gradual… They come into me not knowing how to hold a pencil, and they leave writing their name and drawing.”

That’s why Bush has her students tear paper, to hone the fine motor skills that will be useful to one day using a pencil.

“Yes, they're playing all day, but it's very intentional play,” Bush said.

Teachers also told us without the pressure of standardized testing, there was flexibility to tailor their instruction to students’ interests.

“I can take something that they're curious about and go from there and do little mini lessons with that,” said Alhambra TK teacher Claudia Ralston.

For example, when she noticed a group of students was ready to practice writing, she set up the materials for them to make signs. The subject of the signs, pumpkin pies and pumpkin drinks, was a topic they’d previously expressed interest in.

And while every school is different, she said in her experience, there are also fewer worksheets used in TK than other grades.

“Before, we used to have to run off a lot of copies,” Ralston said. “We're not doing that. It's all hands on.”

Samantha Elliott, a first-year TK teacher at Price Elementary School in Downey, said she starts the year focused on friendship and manners.  "If [the students] don't feel safe or welcome, then there's really no learning going on there," Elliott said.

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Julia Barajas

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LAist

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Pacific Oaks College professor Jorge Ramirez said this approach is a key part of effective early childhood education.

“ We're not dictating what they should learn, how they should learn in or in the manner that they should learn it,” Ramirez said. “It's more of us really understanding what the child wants and what they need.”

At Price Elementary in Downey, Samantha Elliot’s TK classroom features “wiggle breaks” between lessons, and students learn a physical action with each letter of the alphabet.

“It's incorporating instruction and kind of the movement to help bridge the gap a little bit and get them moving, but also still learning,” Elliot said.

And classes are also smaller. Kindergarten classes can have up to 33 students, but California requires that a school’s average TK class have no more than 24 students, and there must be one adult for every 10, which means teachers also have help from aides.

In Bush’s class, teacher assistant Maria Estrada often sets up activities and works 1-on-1 with students, including those learning English.

“ My goal is to help those students that need that extra support, so they can catch up at the end of the day,” Estrada said.

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All four-year-olds in the state of California now have access to a free preschool program in their local school district. So what does transitional kindergarten offer kids and what are the challenges in its implementation? In this episode of Imperfect Paradise, we break it down with the LAist education team.

California's new public preschool program for 4-year-olds: Exploring transitional kindergarten

All four-year-olds in the state of California now have access to a free preschool program in their local school district. So what does transitional kindergarten offer kids and what are the challenges in its implementation? In this episode of Imperfect Paradise, we break it down with the LAist education team.

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Does the joy of TK last?

Susan Moore Johnson has studied teaching for decades and leads the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project on the Next Generation of Teachers.

One frequently cited study she led found that teachers’ satisfaction with their working conditions predicted how long they’d stay in the classroom and their students’ performance on standardized tests.

Three main factors teachers mentioned were the opportunity to collaborate with skilled colleagues, a safe and orderly school and a supportive principal who understands teaching.

“ The idea of working with kids who really need good teachers is very attractive to people,” Johnson said. “But they can't do it in a place that's disjointed and chaotic and doesn't have curriculum materials.”

Marissa Mateo started teaching TK in the 2010s in the San Fernando Valley. Early on, her principal supported her participation in an L.A. County program where a substitute covered her class about once a month so that she could attend in-person training, meetings and observe educators in other districts.

 ”I still talk to several of the teachers that were in my group,” Mateo said.

Lucille J. Smith Elementary School Principal Cristal Moore said it's not uncommon for her to end a stressful day in one of the school's TK classrooms. "It's a very joyful place to be," she said. "It almost grounds you. Restores you in a very positive way."

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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Students learn how to balance and run during their second recess at Marguerita Elementary School in Alhambra.

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Elly Yu

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LAist

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She’s continued to refine her craft. This year, for example, she’s incorporating more “loose parts” into her classroom. The idea is to let students create with random odds-and-ends like corks, gems and wooden shapes rather than instructing them to build a specific object.

While Mateo’s instruction at Noble Avenue Elementary may evolve, she says her students’ enthusiasm is a constant.

“For the most part, nobody's coming in with a negative experience in school because they're just starting,” Mateo said.  “They may be having a negative feeling like crying because they miss their parents. But other than that, they haven't developed any kind of bad feelings about school.”

That’s why every year, she has the same message on her classroom bulletin board: “Welcome to TK, the happiest place to learn.”