The Brief

Some 30 years ago, two students from Bell High School fell for each other while bonding over technology and their shared dreams of starting a youth center on the southeast side of Los Angeles County.

At the time, Emma Hernandez and Cesar Zaldivar-Motts were aspiring engineers, but they struggled with the curriculum because they weren’t properly prepared for the in-depth scientific knowledge needed for college-level courses.

Both eventually switched majors — Hernandez studied computer science while Zaldivar-Motts focused on political science — but once they got their degrees, they returned to the community to give back. Zaldivar-Motts is CEO of a regional nonprofit housing organization, and Hernandez leads the Southeast Community Development Corporation.

Cesar Zaldivar-Motts and Emma Hernandez at the Bell Technology Center.

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Now, the couple is finding creative ways to engage kids in STEM at the Bell Technology Center, just two blocks away from where they first met. That includes launching a new six-week academy where students get to build their own ham radio for free and from scratch.

“We're finally pursuing that dream of providing this after school resource,” Zaldivar-Motts said.

Digital divide

The high school sweethearts want to encourage more local teens to become engineers, scientists or even teachers of STEM programs.

Data show the area is among the hardest hit by California’s digital divide, which is the gap between people who have modern digital skills and easy access to technology, and those who do not.

Kids are learning the very basics of how electricity and circuits work.

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Zaldivar-Motts said the class is a “stepping stone to encourage them to explore robotics, 3D printing, computer coding, and other STEM activities.”

"We've learned you can't just lecture to kids," he explained. "We need to excite them in the beginning so they can stay with us long-term.”

Together, the couple welcomes about a dozen middle school and high school-aged students on Saturday mornings for a crash course on electronics. By the end of the six-week academy, the kids and teens will have the basic skills needed for more advanced courses on robotics and computer programming — an opportunity they might not have otherwise gotten at school or at home on the southeast side.

“Many schools don't have the funding to provide these after school programs, to provide an electronics class or a robotics class,” Zaldivar-Motts said. “So as nonprofits, we come in and fill that gap, and help reduce the digital divide that we face here in the community.”

How the academy works

The academy starts with an introduction to amateur radio, also known as ham radio. It’s a licensed radio service that allows people to communicate with each other over the airwaves without using the internet or cell phones.

Instructor Cesar Zaldivar-Motts said the goal is to pique the kids’ interest in STEM.

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Zaldivar-Motts said while it’s an older technology, the goal is to pique the kids’ interest in electronics. But it does have its uses today — like if the internet goes down in an emergency. In an earthquake-prone L.A., it feels especially relevant.

Once they’re hooked, students learn the basics of how electricity and circuits work. They get hands-on training with soldering machines. It can be dangerous work, according to 10-year-old Santiago Ramirez, who recently burned his finger while soldering a wire to a circuit board.

By the end of the six-week academy, the kids and teens will have the basic skills needed for more advanced courses on robotics and computer programming

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“I thought that part wasn’t hot so I touched it,” he said pointing to the soldering iron. “And when you get burned, trust me, you’re going to get white on your finger.”

Santiago and his 11-year-old brother, Sebastian, have been attending classes at the Bell Tech Center for years. Most of the participants are from around the southeast, including 10-year-old Koda Hall. He said he plans to “show off” his radio at school and hopes to become an engineer one day.

Parent Hector Corzo sat with his daughter, Sofia, while she practiced soldering for the first time. He said he wants her to continue to learn new skills, even if she doesn’t plan on becoming an engineer in the future.

“I've always told her to be open minded,” Corzo said. “Because you never know. It’s better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.”

Parent Hector Corzo helps his daughter, Sofia, practice her soldering skills.

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The students managed to assemble a majority of their mini radios by week four of the academy. Zaldivar-Motts said he will start to introduce more advanced concepts and techniques in the Saturdays to come.

“Next week we're going to wrap up the radio building project and then work on Arduino [software] which can control sensors, motors, lights, and measure temperature and distance,” he said.

When asked what the kids might use their new radios for, many said they would show off the project to their classmates.

"Last time I built [one] I showed it to my fourth grade class," Santiago said. "And I talked about it so I was basically my teacher but... about the radio."

Worker pay at the country’s largest four-year public university is uneven, with some employees earning well below and others above national averages.

The findings from a new compensation report show two truths: Overall, unionized staff and faculty compensation at the California State University is on par with national averages for similar public universities, but about a third of workers’ total salary and benefits are below national averages. Between 13% and 19% of workers earn well above the average. The report also found that workers at Bay Area campuses are generally underpaid after factoring in the higher wages employers tend to pay in the region.

The Cal State chancellor’s office paid the Segal Group, a human resources research firm, a little more than $1 million for the 27-page report, according to a Cal State spokesperson, Amy Bentley-Smith.

The conclusions are likely to factor heavily in ongoing and increasingly charged contract negotiations between Cal State and its largest unions, which are demanding raises that currently far exceed what the Cal State system is willing to pay. Cal State has budgeted for 4% raises this year; unions are seeking roughly double that or more.

A Cal State trustee Wednesday said the report shows the university system is on the right track, but it leaves her with concerns that workers with the lowest salaries struggle to pay for California’s high living costs. Benefits, while generous, cannot alone pay for basic needs or allow workers to live close to campus, said trustee Leslie Gilbert-Lurie.

“We want them to be able to have food, and we want them to be able to have housing,” she said. “And so I want to be sure that our base salaries at these lowest levels align with what it means to live in California.”

Dozens of representatives from four labor groups briefly shut down the Cal State trustees meeting Tuesday after chanting “no contract, no peace” and “if we don’t get it, shut it down” during the public comment period. All trustees and campus presidents left the meeting space during the demonstration. As the system leaders were exiting, one worker yelled, “Don’t walk out on us!”

Adding to the tension is data that shows 91% of the roughly billion dollars the system got in new money from the state and tuition increases between 2021 and 2025 went toward wage raises for union members. Cal State trustee Julia Lopez first cited the figure at the July meeting, suggesting that steering the majority of new funds to wages is why campuses battled deficits — they struggled to handle all their other growing expenses.

“That's why every single campus had to really look at their budgets and figure out how to make the adjustments that they needed to live within the money that we were sending to them, and that's why there's so much pain in the system,” she said. Lopez co-chaired a working group in 2023 that determined the system is shortchanging its students by not spending enough on academic support and student services, such as libraries and counseling.

Cal State received a record amount of extra taxpayer funding this year, something the unions say was at least partly due to their advocating with state lawmakers. Union leaders are angry their efforts aren’t yet translating into higher wage increases. Meanwhile, Cal State campus presidents received raises of 10% to 20% last year, on top of additional potential bonuses — another source of ire for union leaders.

What unions want

In an interview a few hours after the Tuesday worker protest, a senior union official said that her members don’t want to strike. But they will “strike if they have to for what's right because a temporary, you know, economic hardship will solve years and years of economic disparity,” said Jessica Dalton, vice president for representation for CSU Employees Union. The union represents over 36,000 support staff, student assistants, and healthcare, technical, and administrative workers.

The union seeks a 7% raise for all its non-student workers in 2026 plus other increases for some totalling an 11.8% increase and a 5% raise in 2027. Cal State countered with a 1.2% increase in 2026 and 4% in 2027. The union wants every eligible worker to receive automatic 2% raises annually if they stay at their positions, a concept known as step increases. Cal State, Dalton said, has opposed automatic step increases and instead wants to move workers up only after signing new labor contracts.

A third of workers are on lower pay steps than they should be based on their experience levels.

The faculty union representing 29,000 professors, lecturers and other employees wants predictable, annual raises that equal inflation plus two percentage points. Cal State instead proposes 3% increases for this year and next. The union also wants the lowest-paid workers to earn at least 10% of the $795,000 salary that Cal State’s chancellor, Mildred Garcia, receives. Right now the lowest-paid faculty receive around $66,000 annually.

The report states that median Cal State salaries for unionized workers are actually 1% below the national average, but the system’s health and retirement benefits are generally more generous than those at other schools, making the overall compensation of workers about 3% above the national average.

Unions and university officials disagree over whether Cal State’s proposals will make health benefits more expensive. For CSU Employees Union, Cal State negotiators want to impose a new $5 monthly fee to workers that would grow to $20 for an additional two dependents in 2029. Dalton already pays $100 a month for her health insurance, she said. The extra charges would eat into the raises Cal State is offering, she added. But Cal State notes that employees on the most popular plan, through Kaiser Permanente, will see their health insurance costs drop by $13 to about $150 per month between 2026 and 2027.

Amanda Harrison, a lecturer of English and queer studies at Cal State Northridge, said her health insurance is almost $1,000 a month for herself and her partner — 14% of her salary. In 2018 it was $138 for the same plan, she said. The current rate should be much lower, she contends. Harrison is a cancer survivor and wants the more expensive PPO to access hospitals with research centers. She taught at Santa Monica College and knows faculty there with identical plans who pay nothing.

For the faculty union, Cal State wants to propose a working group to re-evaluate how much the system pays for health benefits. Cal State officials say this group will have no authority to change how much workers will pay for their benefits. But the union is alarmed.

“This would be an unfathomable take-back, causing a reduction in buying power and eroding already low wages,” wrote faculty negotiator Kevin Wehr in an email. He leads the bargaining team for the faculty union and is a sociology professor at Sacramento State. The union is in a dispute with the system over its contract. The next stage of negotiations would permit strikes.

Cal State calculates that its health benefits spending will rise by $81 million between 2026 and 2027.

Union criticism of report

The faculty union is critical of the compensation report because it didn’t consider the much higher cost of living in California compared to other states. The report only considered the higher cost of labor in the state. The differences can be extreme. The report states workers in San Francisco should earn 18% more than workers in Bakersfield. But public calculators show that the cost of living is 50% higher in San Francisco than in Bakersfield.

In a written statement, a spokesperson for Cal State’s Office of the Chancellor, Jason Maymon, defended using cost of labor rather than cost of living. “Cost of living can vary significantly between locations and is an important consideration for employees, but it addresses affordability rather than the market competitiveness of compensation,” he wrote. “Because the purpose of this study was to compare CSU compensation with the external labor market, cost of labor was the appropriate measure for the analysis.”

Another report on non-unionized staff is due by the end of the year. Cal State published a similar report on executive compensation in 2025.

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

When kids start attending school, the youngest tend to get sick their first year. Some may have a tough time adjusting to a new school routine. Some parents may believe missing the day’s lesson isn’t that big of a deal, so their student stays home.

But when young students miss school, the days absent can quickly add up and impact student learning. About 24% of California’s youngest students were chronically absent in 2024-25, higher than the 19% chronic absenteeism rate for all students.

In October, the state will release data on chronic absenteeism from the 2025-26 school year, the first school year transitional kindergarten, or TK, was widely available for all families. Education experts and administrators will be zeroing in on attendance rates among the very youngest.

Down from a COVID-19 peak

California’s expanded TK: What’s working and what isn’t

Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10% or more days in one school year. The overall rate has improved since the percentage of students in that category hit a peak of 30% of all students in the 2021-22 school year in California.

But the rate has remained high among TK and kindergarten students. That matters, early education researchers say, because the effects of not attending school regularly in the earliest years can show up in lower academic achievement years later.

“If they are missing school, they are missing out on the building blocks and it will impact them for the rest of their lives,” said Jessica Hull, executive director of communication and community engagement at Roseville City School District near Sacramento.

In many ways, it makes sense that the youngest students have spotty attendance. They tend to get sick more often so higher rates of absenteeism are largely expected, say school administrators. This can be especially true for students who did not attend preschool or other early learning programs prior to TK.

“When your child starts school, that’s usually a year of sickness,” said Kara Stern, director of education at SchoolStatus, an education technology company that works with 123 California school districts on chronic absenteeism.

Illnesses such as colds — sometimes even monthly, according to SchoolStatus data — are often part of the TK and kindergarten experience because “it’s a first exposure to all these other kids,” said Stern.

Long lasting effects of missing school

Some families are unaware of the foundational learning that happens every day in TK and kindergarten classrooms, said Hull.

“It doesn’t feel like it’s a requirement to attend each day,” she said. And since the COVID-19 pandemic, parents have had difficulty discerning when a child might be sick enough to keep home from school, she said.

“It’s hard to send a 4-year-old to school if they have a runny nose,” said Hull.

Recent research shows that students who are chronically absent in TK and kindergarten are about twice as likely to transfer school districts and that kindergarteners’ ability to read and do basic math can be predictive of academic achievement by third grade and beyond. Part of that may be that students and families build routines in TK and kindergarten — establishing a wake up time, getting to school on time, socializing with classmates — which helps with attendance as students grow older.

‘Absences sneak up on families’

A student who is chronically absent, and attends a typical 180-day school year, has missed about 3.5 weeks of school.

In 2021-22 when schools began reopening after COVID-related closures, nearly 2 million of the state’s TK-12 students were chronically absent. California districts launched a years-long campaign to get students back into the classroom.

One of them was Roseville City, a 12,000-student district in Placer County. The district mailed letters to families explaining the importance of attendance, created graphics detailing how quickly absences can add up, and called families whose children were often absent.

In communications with parents, the district said it’s fine to keep a sick child home, but they can send them to school “if they are a little under the weather.”

The messaging worked. In three years, the district’s overall chronic absence rates dropped from nearly 26% in 2021-22 to 10.5% in 2024-25 despite an increase in total enrollment, according to state data.

But the district’s TK and kindergarten students were still missing class at alarming rates — at its peak in 2022-23 their chronic absence rate was 11 percentage points higher than the rest of the district, state data shows.

Last year, Roseville City focused its attendance communications on TK and kindergarten. The letters to those families described what their children were learning each day in class and how those lessons were the building blocks to reading, math, writing and science.

On the district’s website, staff has also listed the building blocks children learn in early grades: hand-eye coordination in TK turns to learning sight words in kindergarten, writing sentences in first grade and writing short paragraphs in second grade. This is all part of educating parents on the value of their youngest children being in class, Hull said.

District staff have learned that “absences sneak up on families,” Hull said. Families are not keeping track of the number of days, so the schools need to point out the amount of time a student is missing. “That’s on our part to reach out and explain,” she said.

This school year, Roseville City’s communication to families about absenteeism are more tailored to the individual student.

Hull said that a letter might say “it’s been two months of the school year and you’ve already missed 5 days. You’re on track to be chronically absent. What can we do?” The most important part of that message, she said, is showing families the district is ready to help.

That early intervention is critical, said Stern of SchoolStatus, which works with Roseville City. Once students become chronically absent, her team has found that re-engaging them becomes much more difficult, especially as they grow older.

“Our data suggests that reaching out in the window of three to five absences is a lot more effective in returning them to school and not needing further intervention than waiting until it’s more set in stone,” said Stern.

SchoolStatus’ internal data for the 2025-26 school year seems promising. In 97 of the California districts they work with, the TK chronic absenteeism rate dropped under 22% from nearly 29% in 2023-24. Among kindergarteners it dropped to about 20% from nearly 25% during the same two-year timeframe.

“It’s a lot of extra work, but our entire system is so determined and focused on this because they do see that end result,” said Hull of Roseville City. “They see the kids who return to school are doing better both academically and socially.”

The average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage leaped to 7.03% on Thursday, according to the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp., which also goes by Freddie Mac.
This is the first time the rate has passed the 7% mark in 20 months, or since January 2025. While the 7% mortgage rate milestone holds no literal significance beyond the psychological effect of the round number, the sharp rise in rates since March risks further squeezing the budgets of homebuyers. And it's bound to deepen the freeze on a housing market held stagnant for years by the high cost of homeownership.

Mortgage rates tend to follow the 10-year Treasury note, which has risen sharply over the summer amid concerns about high inflation as well as the size of the federal debt.

The Federal Reserve last week raised its benchmark interest rate by a quarter percentage point — its first move this year — and many policymakers projected it may raise it one more time before year's end. Investors are bracing for potentially even more rate hikes to help fight inflation.

The housing market is hurting

High mortgage rates contributed to a 2% decline in existing home sales in August from the previous month, according to the National Association of Realtors.

The median sale for an existing home was about $429,000. At that price, a single percentage point increase in the mortgage rate can cost buyers hundreds of additional dollars a month and tens of thousands over the life of the loan.

Housing researchers had hoped 2026 would provide a break for buyers and sellers waiting for cheaper rates and those savings. For a brief moment, that seemed to happen as mortgage rates fell below 6% by the end of February.

But they quickly shot back up with the war with Iran, which has led to volatility in the bond markets. Continued fighting has also prolonged worries about inflation, further helping push up mortgage rates.
Copyright 2026 NPR

A new report from the ACLU and Amnesty International USA says universities like the University of California, Los Angeles violated free speech laws and imposed severe punishments on students, faculty and staff who expressed support for Palestinian rights. The universities’ responses “made it easier for the Trump administration to crack down on student activism, causing long-term damage to higher education.”

In 2024, a wave of activism overtook college campuses — including the USC and UCLA — as students erected tents and set up encampments to protest Israel’s war in Gaza and calling to cut ties with Israel.

The universities’ response and the Trump administration’s subsequent actions, according to the report, have “profoundly chilled student speech and advocacy, resulting in a steep decline in protests and a less visible protest movement on campuses across the country.”

What happened at UCLA?

Students set up an encampment in Dickson Court in spring 2024 to protest UCLA’s financial connections to arms manufacturers, as well as Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Five days later, around 100 masked counter-protesters attacked the encampment overnight. At the time, LAist reported how students were attacked with sticks, mace spray and fireworks.

The lack of police response to the attacks was heavily criticized; UCLA promised an independent investigation.

But soon after the attack, university officials called the encampment unlawful; law enforcement personnel from several departments tore it down overnight.

That police response drew widespread criticism and lawsuits. A UCLA Task Force reported, “We have documented multiple injuries from rubber bullets and police batons … We have seen the injuries to the face, head, legs, and chest. Some students were shot at close range. The police shot regular volleys of stun grenades, beat protesters with batons.”

A push against student activism

Soon after UCLA’s encampment was disbanded, the University of California enacted a new policy mandating disciplinary proceedings for anyone arrested. UCLA said this new policy would be implemented — retroactively — for those arrested in the encampment breakup. UCLA also banned encampments for four months.

The increased police presence on the Westwood campus following the disbanding of the encampment was “akin to a police state,” with students and faculty saying they were on high alert.

According to the report, UCLA’s response to the encampment was “particularly problematic” and “exemplified the heavy-handed and excessive responses by universities and colleges to campus protests, as well as the ongoing suppression and retaliation against pro-Palestine speech and expression on campus.” Other schools singled out for their responses include Columbia University, Tulane University, the University of Michigan and the University of Texas at Austin.

The report says UCLA's response also made it easier for the Trump administration to take further action as well, such as by:

• Withholding federal research grants from universities
• Coercing universities into "accepting broad-ranging agreements to restore federal funding in exchange for making institutional changes in programs, curricula, admissions, and hiring, curtailing the free speech rights of students and faculty."
• Targeting noncitizen students for arrest and deportation "in direct retaliation for their advocacy for Palestinian rights."

UCLA did not respond to LAist's request for comment.

How student activism changed

According to the report, the number of protests fell by 64% in the fall 2024 semester compared to the previous year, with protests declining through to the current academic year.

That was despite sympathy growing for Palestinians and support for Israel declining.

“The decline in protests was the direct result of crackdowns on protesters, university policies restricting protests, and the Trump administration’s attacks on universities,” according to the report.

You can read the full report here.