WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is expanding a program to feed as many as 34 million schoolchildren during the summer months, using funds from the coronavirus relief package approved in March. The Agriculture Department is announcing Monday that it will continue through the summer a payments program that replaced school...
Newsom’s $2 Billion School Reopening Fund Could Actually Cost Districts Money
In his bid to get California school campuses back open, Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed giving extra money to schools that managed to open by a certain date. But the $2 billion in grant money would come attached with strings that some districts say would mean paying more than if they...
California’s Plan to Bring Many Students Back to School for in-Person Learning in Careful Stages
As one of the most challenging years we have faced in recent history is ushered out, we enter 2021 with trepidation and hope. Amid the darkest moments of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is light at the end of the tunnel, with new vaccines arriving and a renewed sense of purpose...
Walters: Court Slaps Down No-Bid School Contracts in Fresno Case
An alternative view of California’s public school system is that it is a huge industry with six million customers who spend more than $100 billion a year. There’s big money to be made in supplying the goods and services those young customers demand, which translates into political jousting for pieces...
COVID-19 Cases Rising Among Us Children as Schools Reopen
After preying heavily on the elderly in the spring, the coronavirus is increasingly infecting American children and teens in a trend authorities say appears driven by school reopenings and the resumption of sports, playdates and other activities. Children of all ages now make up 10% of all U.S cases, up...
Wildfire Devastates SoCal Edison Community of Big Creek Despite Heroic Efforts
The tiny Sierra community of Big Creek, which is home to Southern California Edison employees, lost many homes in the Creek Fire on Saturday, said Chris Donnelly, chief of the Huntington Lake Volunteer Fire Department. Donnelly's description of the devastation there was confirmed by Toby Wait, a Big Creek resident...
Masks for Kids? Schools Confront the Politics of Reopening
On one side are parents saying, let kids be kids. They object to masks and social distancing in classrooms this fall — arguing both could hurt their children’s well-being — and want schools to reopen full time. On the other side are parents and teachers who call for safeguards that...
Saturday Classes? Schools Mull Ways to Make up Lost Time
When students return to school after a lengthy pandemic-induced absence, the consensus is they will have lost significant academic ground. Still unresolved for governments and educators are the questions of how — or even whether — teachers should try to make up for lost learning. Some have proposed holding evening...
Walters: California’s Stubborn ‘Achievement Gap’
Sooner or later, reality rears its ugly head and that seems to be happening with the state’s very expensive — but apparently failing — efforts to close a yawning “achievement gap” among the state’s nearly 6 million elementary and secondary school students. Early in the decade, as Jerry Brown began his second...
Walters: Will Schools Get More State Aid?
To the denizens of the state Capitol, the onset of the holiday season also marks the beginning of the state budget cycle. Gov. Gavin Newsom and his budget staff will soon decide the hundreds of individual appropriations that will make up the 2020-21 budget he will propose in early January,...