Weekly CA-COVID Update 10/4/22

California

Young adults in California experience mental health challenges at alarming rates, with more than three-quarters reporting anxiety in the last year, more than half reporting depression, 31 percent experiencing suicidal thinking and 16 percent self-harm, according to the results of a survey commissioned by the California Endowment…

California governor Gavin Newsom signed multiple pieces of legislation Friday, 9/30, to improve higher education in the state for certain underserved student populations…

California’s most vexing budget problem of the summer was how to spend a record surplus…

Deputy Schools Superintendent Malia Vella's pledge that the department will release the scores next month comes in the wake of a report last week that raised the possibility state officials might not release the data until after the November election…

After its driest three-year stretch on record, California braces for another year with below-average snow and rain…

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law Friday, 9/30, a bill to further reform remedial education at California community colleges…

Gov. Newsom is calling for California regulators to speed up the transition to cheaper winter-blend gasoline as prices at the pump keep rising…

The San Joaquin Valley could see the greatest impact from a law meant to make it easier for farmworkers to vote in union elections, a regional labor expert said…

The killing sparked outrage as yet another example of unwarranted deadly force by US law enforcement…

Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Sen. Brian Dahle, will face off at KQED on 10/23, after Dahle yesterday, 10/3,  accepted an invitation to debate the incumbent Democrat…

Coronavirus

Yesterday, 10/3, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it had ended its COVID-19 country travel health notices as fewer countries reported enough data for accurate assessments…

Weekly Federal Update 10/3/22

President and Administration

The President’s Advisory Commission on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics will provide advice to the President on matters pertaining to educational equity and economic opportunity for the Hispanic and Latino community… 

The House and Senate are out for the month…

This guide offers information and tips to disaster responders and first responders to help them manage stress during crisis response…

Last week the White House released its five-pillar strategy to end hunger by 2030 in advance of the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health…

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC+) is set to consider Wednesday, 10/5, its most drastic reduction of production since the pandemic in order to help prop up falling oil prices, a move that could put pressure on global economic growth…

Education

The 2023-24 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) launched on Saturday, 10/1 at 1:00 A.M. ET…

A new study suggests that students choose to stop out of college and others choose not to enroll in the first place because of a range of “psychographics…”

Fewer than half of Hispanic students said they were excited about the start of the semester…

LGBTQ students whose college or university provides mental health services had 84 percent lower odds of attempting suicide in the past year than those who had no access, according to a new brief from The Trevor Project…

Charter advocates were partially successful three months ago in getting the U.S. Department of Education to ease what they saw as onerous new rules for a program that provides start-up funds to new schools…

On Wednesday, 9/28, the Office of Educational Technology (OET) launched the “Advancing Digital Equity for All: Community-based Recommendations for Developing Effective Digital Equity Plans to Close the Digital Divide and Enable Technology-Empowered Learning…”

When students or others don’t know how to report or aren’t willing to do so, important opportunities to protect students may be missed…

Student Loans

President Biden struck a defiant note against Republican attacks of his student debt relief plan over the weekend — after a week where the proposal faced a wave of legal challenges and his administration scaled back part of the policy…

The Biden administration’s student debt-relief plan will cost about $30 billion a year over the next ten years, according to an estimate from the U.S. Department of Education…

Weekly CA-COVID Update 9/27/22

Federal Update

House and Senate appropriators late yesterday night, 9/26, unveiled a short-term government funding bill to keep federal agencies open until December 16…

California

California’s task force on reparations has begun putting dollar figures to potential compensation for the various forms of racial discrimination, generational pain and suffering Black Americans experienced in the state….

Working with state departments, SEIU Local 1000 has built apprentice programs outside the traditional trades — in nursing, financial services, cybersecurity and maintaining one of the state’s outdated computer systems… 

In a significant departure, the California Department of Education is withholding the release of the results of the Smarter Balanced tests that students took last spring until an undetermined date later this year…

 Some data indicates that older Americans of color wind up in nursing homes at a higher rate than their white counterparts…

Article 34, passed by a statewide ballot initiative in 1950, has blocked affordable housing for decades while creating costly hurdles for developers and local officials who want to build homes for low-income residents…

Almost two million of California’s poorest and most medically fragile residents may have to switch health insurers as a result of a new strategy by the state to improve care in its Medicaid program…

The University of California is going to create a new path for admission to the system. The path is for students who met the 3.0 grade point average in high school but didn’t complete the required 15 college preparatory courses… 

Smoke from wildfires has worsened over the past decade, potentially reversing decades of improvements in Western air quality made under the Clean Air Act, according to research published Thursday, 9/22, from Stanford University…

Despite a tenure that has focused on early education, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill Sunday, 9/25, that would have made kindergarten mandatory in California…

California will soon be the only state in the nation to have a governmental office committed to preventing gun violence, state officials said last week…

Coronavirus

The federal government is releasing millions of Moderna booster shots that were delayed by the Food and Drug Administration as a result of a safety inspection at an Indiana packaging plant, even as states report shortages and encourage people to get Pfizer boosters instead…

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) expects COVID-19 vaccine boosters targeting circulating variants of the virus to be available for children aged 5-11 years by mid-October…

Health authorities encouraging retooled COVID-19 boosters are facing resistance from an unlikely corner: people who had embraced vaccines earlier in the pandemic…

Public Safety Update 9/21/22

 Legislation to increase funding for local police departments has stalled amid deep Democratic divisions over concerns about steering more money to police, while moderates advocate for action that could impact Republicans’ arguments that moderates are soft on crime ahead of the midterm elections…

The prosecutor investigating efforts by former president Donald Trump and his allies to challenge the 2020 election results in Georgia said her team has heard credible allegations that serious crimes committed may lead to jail time…

The Justice Department has asked a federal appeals court to lift a judge’s order blocking criminal investigators from accessing about 100 documents with national security classification recovered from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound last month…

More subpoenas were issued last week by the Justice Department seeking more information as part of its inquiry into the origins, fundraising, and motives of the effort to block President Biden from being certified as president in January 2021…

More than 30,000 Americans have died from firearms in 2022, and another 27,000 have been wounded. Among developed economies, the US suffers more gun-related deaths per capita than the following eight countries combined…

In a recent report produced jointly by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Institute of Education Sciences, in the Department of Education, over the last decade, several crime and safety issues have become less prevalent at elementary and secondary schools…

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) has released two research reports on investigating the effectiveness of school resource officers (SROs)...

Last month, nearly two dozen school leaders released a guide with lessons they wish they had known before their schools became school shooting crime scenes…

Since the Supreme Court ruled that California’s concealed gun laws go against the Second Amendment this summer, lawmakers have tried and failed to pass an alternative. 

California law allows police, family members, housemates, employers, co-workers and school officials to seek a gun violence restraining order for someone they believe poses a danger to themselves or others, but nearly all cases in the state are initiated by law enforcement…

California officials failed in expanding state hospitals or other community-based care options for their communities despite the surging numbers of incompetent criminal detainees, along with a string of court orders mandating the state transfer such defendants out of jails faster…

A Vallejo High School football coach is in stable condition after being shot last week while helping break up a fight outside the school…

New records show officials responsible for safeguarding Sophia Mason repeatedly chose not to intervene…

The documents must be released under a California law to enable public scrutiny of government agencies charged with keeping children safe…

Officials said that a sheriff’s deputy was taken into custody earlier this month after he fatally shot a married couple, prompting a search across suburban Northern California and a nearly hour-long phone conversation ending with his surrender… 

Weekly CA-COVID Update 9/20/22

California

Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment (CARE) Court bill into law, a sweeping proposal to order mental health and addiction treatment for thousands of Californians…

Gov. Newsom recently signed six air pollution reduction measures, bringing the total of climate-related bills enacted this legislative session to 40… 

Proposition 27, which offers to both legalize online sports gambling in California and deliver millions of dollars for homeless services, is on life support…

Two years after Gov. Newsom signed into law a ban on the sale of most flavored tobacco products, Californians will get their say in a referendum vote this November…

Coronavirus

A recent study of more than six million people 65 and older found that seniors who had COVID-19 had a substantially higher risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease within a year…

A new survey conducted by the American College Health Association found that students were far more likely than the general adult population to get vaccinated against COVID-19…

President Biden's declaration that "the pandemic is over" could complicate the administration's effort to battle COVID-19, public health experts say…