The San Diego Unified School District kicked off major campus work Tuesday at 62-year-old Holmes Elementary School, part of a district-wide push for site modernizations.

Students at the two-time California Distinguished School joined Board of Education President Shana Hazan, Vice President Cody Petterson, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria and others Tuesday to mark the groundbreaking on the construction, funded by local school bonds.

“Holmes Elementary staff have been devoted to students and the neighboring community for more than six decades, contributing to high test scores and academic success,” Hazan said. “With local voters approving our bond measures, we can match that success with high-quality, modern facilities, like the ones we will see here.”

Once completed, the project is slated to add an upper-grade classroom facility, a student services facility, a Universal Transitional Kindergarten classroom building, two kindergarten classrooms, a joint-use grass play field and other improvements, according to the district.

Existing upper-grade and kindergarten classrooms will be modernized to include new paint, flooring, finishes and white boards.

“With new housing underway down the street, now is the time to re-invigorate our campus so that it is ready to serve all neighborhood students,” Holmes Principal Jonathan Saipe said.

According to the district, additional improvements include the modernization of three classroom buildings, expansion of the food services kitchen, conversion of the student services facility into educational spaces, creation of a new parking lot with a student drop-off and pick-up area and enhancements to safety, security and exterior hard court areas.

The joint-use grass play field will feature a walking and running track, a drinking fountain, new trees, fencing and gates to separate the field from the main campus. As part of a partnership with the city, the field will be accessible to the community as a neighborhood park after school hours and during school breaks.

Construction on the project is estimated to be completed in late 2026.

City News Service contributed to this article.

As the premier sponsor of the Classroom of the Future Foundation North Island Credit Union Foundation recently presented the organization’s prestigious 2024 Innovation in Education Impact Award to Grossmont Union High School District for its Patient Care Pipeline Program. 

In recognition of the award, North Island Credit Union Foundation provided Grossmont Union High School District with $10,000 to support student participation in its Patient Care Pipeline, a unique program that prepares high school students for a variety of healthcare career opportunities.

By providing access to health pathways, hands-on learning and certification programs, Patient Care Pipeline facilitates social mobility for students, removes barriers for under-represented students and prepares future healthcare workers that are in demand in the region.

Grossmont Union High School District Superintendent Mary Beth Kastan said, “We are honored to receive the Classroom of the Future Foundation’s Innovation in Education Impact Award for the Patient Care Program. This award is a testament to the unyielding efforts of our Career Technical Education leaders and teachers who provide our students with real-world experiences that are preparing them to build the best future.”

The CFF annual Innovation in Education Awards program honors innovative classroom programs, educators, and students in San Diego County schools that model the future of K-12 education. Following an intensive application and selection process, four classroom programs are recognized for their ability to get students excited about learning and enhance outcomes through the effective use of technology. The Impact Award is given to the program that exceeds all others in its ability to impact students and teachers.

In its sixth year as Premier CFF Sponsor, North Island Credit Union and its Foundation have provided $20,000 annually to support the organization’s mission. Since 1997, CFF has united business, community, and educational leaders to create innovative learning environments in San Diego County public schools that prepare students to thrive in a competitive, global society.

Visit ccu.com/foundation to learn more or make a tax-deductible donation, or follow the Foundation on Instagram@northislandcufoundation.

An eighth grader from Twin Peaks Middle School in Poway advanced Tuesday to the quarterfinals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee by correctly spelling two words and answering a vocabulary question.

Benjamin Evans correctly spelled Gondwana, the great southern landmass that formed as a result of the division of a much larger supercontinent known as Pangea about 250 million years ago. He also chose the correct answer to the vocabulary question, “What is a symposium?” by selecting, “a conference in which people give speeches.”

In the third round, Benjamin correctly spelled lycopene, a carotenoid pigment that is the red coloring matter of the tomato.

The 14-year-old qualified for the national bee by winning by the San Diego County Scripps Regional Spelling Bee in March, with two-time defending champion Mihir Konkapaka finishing second.

Benjamin correctly spelled epihippus — an extinct genus of the modern horse family that lived in the Eocene era, 38 million to 46 million years ago — as the winning word.

Benjamin’s hobbies include playing basketball, football and the piano. He enjoys reading books of all kinds and is a fan of Marvel movies. His favorite subject is math because he sees it as a puzzle. His favorite author is Brandon Mull, best known for his children’s fantasy series, “Fablehaven.”

Benjamin’s favorite athletes are Cleveland Cavaliers guard Donovan Mitchell and San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy.

The bee began with a field of 245 spellers from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, Canada, the Bahamas, Germany and Ghana. The field was the largest since 2019.

Wednesday’s quarterfinals at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland will be streamed on ION Plus, Bounce XL, Grit Xtra, Laff More and spellingbee.com from 5 a.m. to 10 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time.

The bee is limited to students in eighth grade or below and who were born on Sept. 1, 2008 or later. Contestants for the 96th edition of the national bee range in age from 8 to 15.

The bee will conclude Thursday. The winner will receive $50,000 from the Scripps National Spelling Bee, $2,500 and a reference library from the dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster, $400 in reference works from Encyclopedia Britannica and a three-year membership to Britannica Online Premium and a $350 prize package from SugarBee Apple, including a SugarBee Apple gift basket and $250 gift card.

San Diego County has produced two national spelling bee champions — Anurag Kashyap in 2005 and Snigdha Nandipati in 2012.

Updated at 3:54 p.m. May 28, 2024

— City News Service

Grant funding secured by MiraCosta College is supporting 30 students through the new Affordable Housing Management certificate program.

The program was created through a collaboration between the college’s Short-Term Vocational Program, ConAm Management Corporation and the San Diego Housing Federation, the region’s strongest advocate for more affordable housing. 

Thanks to a $80,000 state grant, MiraCosta offered to pay tuition for students from the management classes to complete three real estate exam preparation courses at the college’s Technology Career Institute.

To obtain a certificate from the Affordable Housing Management program, students must complete two four-week courses offered in a hybrid and online format. Each course is limited to 20 students so learners can complete the certificate as a cohort.

Future paid internships are being developed through a collaboration with the housing federation and the San Diego Workforce Partnership.

Since its launch in Fall 2022, the program has graduated 55 students. Adult learners represented 76% of the students, while 69% were people of color and 84% were female. 

Marisol Martinez, a stay-at-home mother to four children, was in the program’s first cohort. When she completed the course, she applied for a temporary job as a leasing agent through a staffing agency. She was placed at Azure Point, a 55-and-older community in Encinitas. The post turned into a permanent job as an assistant manager. 

“It’s ideal,” she said. “I’m definitely learning and I’m preparing myself faster for a property manager position.” 

For more information on the certificate program, contact Erica Duran at eduran@miracosta.edu. Fall registration begins Aug. 19. Students may register online.

Arden Pala, the founder of Sports4Kids, has been honored with the prestigious Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award.

This award is the highest civil volunteerism accolade presented by the President of the United States, recognizing the lifetime achievements of those who complete more than 4,000 hours of service.

Pala is a 15-year-old freshman at Francis Parker and the founder of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization Sports4Kids, which aims to create a brighter future for young individuals in the community facing homelessness.

Through various volunteer opportunities tailored for children of all ages, Sports4Kids actively engages in initiatives dedicated to making a positive impact. These initiatives include feeding the homeless, supplying back-to-school backpacks to financially needy families, and offering support through care packages for individuals without homes. While the organization covers a wide range of community needs, its primary focus is on low-income and homeless youth who lack access to sports opportunities.

Arden has been volunteering since he was 5 years old. His passion for helping the homeless has only increased over the years and has now fueled his nonprofit, Sports4Kids. His journey began with a simple yet powerful idea: to use sports as a tool to bring joy, build teamwork, and foster resilience among kids facing challenging circumstances.

Under Arden’s leadership, Sports4Kids has made significant strides.

The organization has organized numerous community events and provided sports programs in schools with high homeless student populations. Over the past three years, Sports4Kids has raised more than $250,000. With the help of its youth volunteers, the organization has positively impacted the lives of over 7,500 individuals. Additionally, Sports4Kids has introduced 650 homeless children to team sports and has established valuable partnerships with organizations such as the Lucky Duck Foundation, Barnes & Noble, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Starbucks, Target, and Youth Service America, among others.

For more information about Arden Pala and Sports4Kids, please visit www.sports4.org.

The chancellor of the University of California at Los Angeles told a U.S. House panel on Thursday that the school should have been ready to immediately remove an encampment of pro-Palestinian activists that became the site of a violent clash with counter-protesters last month.

UCLA Chancellor Gene Block was one of three U.S. university leaders who testified at a hearing of the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives’ Education Committee into the wave of protests against Israel’s war in Gaza that has unfolded on American campuses over the past two months.

“With the benefit of hindsight, we should have been prepared to immediately remove the encampment if and when the safety of our community was put at risk,” Block told the panel.

UCLA was the site of an April 30 overnight mob attack on pro-Palestinian activists that was one of the most violent scenes of the recent protests. The university on Wednesday removed the head of its campus police for its handling of the protests, which included inaction during the attack and the arrests by state and local police of 210 people the next night.

“The recent images from UCLA are appalling. What is more appalling is that it was completely preventable,” said Ilhan Omar, a Democratic congresswoman on the panel. “You, the UCLA leadership and law enforcement stood by for hours as the mob of agitators gathered near the encampment with the clear intention to cause violence.”

Block disputed that assertion.

On dozens of campuses throughout the country, students set up tents and held rallies to call on President Joe Biden to do more to end the fighting in Gaza and to demand that their universities divest from companies that back Israel’s government. Some protesters have adopted antisemitic rhetoric, leading some Jewish students to fear for their safety.

The heads of Northwestern University in Illinois and Rutgers University of New Jersey also testified at the sixth event the committee and its subcommittees have held on schools’ responses to tensions that have flared since Hamas militants attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 and taking more than 250 hostages.

Nearly 36,000 Palestinians have been killed and 80,000 injured in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Israel’s military says 286 Israeli soldiers have also been killed.

Democrats Divided

Biden’s handling of the war and the protests over it have deeply divided Democrats, a Reuters/Ipsos poll this month found, fraying the coalition that he relied on four years ago to defeat Republican Donald Trump.

House Education Committee Chair Virginia Foxx said that each university had failed to enforce its own rules, preserve campus safety and protect Jewish students.

“Today’s hearing is the beginning, not the end, of the committee’s investigation of your institutions,” Foxx told the university presidents.

Some of the most contentious questioning was aimed at Michael Schill, the president of Northwestern, which reached an agreement with protesters to end their demonstration. The Anti-Defamation League, a group dedicated to fighting antisemitism, has criticized the university for that agreement.

“President Schill, we’ve heard accounts of horrific violence and harassment of Jewish students on your campus, but you admitted you have not suspended a single student since Oct. 7 for antisemitic conduct,” said Foxx. “You’ve refused to answer basic questions on topics.”

The presidents of Harvard and University of Pennsylvania resigned after backlash over their testimony in front of the panel in December about antisemitism on campus.

“No one should be intimidated, harassed or assaulted just simply for who they are or who they worship,” said Bobby Scott, the top Democrat on the committee.

Jewish students at UC San Diego have called on university administration to take steps to stem what they characterized as a “blatantly antisemitic” environment on the campus in the aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

In a lengthy email sent to dozens of administrators and faculty members on Monday, eight campus groups, including Hillel of San Diego, called on the university to “unequivocally condemn and take disciplinary action” to stop harassment and violence against Jewish students.

“We ask you to hear our pleas and acknowledge that what we’re experiencing is blatantly antisemitic,” according to the letter. “Why is such Jew hatred acceptable and normalized in a way that no other form of hate or racism would be tolerated on campus?”

The letter said growing antisemitism on campus has forced Jewish students to move out of residence halls, drop courses, avoid speaking in class, and take alternate routes on campus.

“The last seven months on campus have been filled with harassment and discrimination for Jews at UC San Diego,” the student groups said.

The letter cited multiple incidents where protesters at the since-cleared encampment called for murdering Jews and eliminating Israel. “Calling for the death of innocent Jews because of their heritage is undoubtedly antisemitic, no matter your opinion on the ongoing war,” the students wrote.

Times of San Diego has reached out to UC San Diego for comment on the letter.

 A push to out queer, trans, and non-binary students following a flurry of far right disinformation campaigns about LGBTQ students and teachers has gone largely unchallenged — until now.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic first upended school policies across the country in 2020, extremists and allies of the far right have leveraged uncertainty and fear to take over school boards en masse, including in California.

This has contributed to a recent and growing trend of California school boards enacting forced outing policies. Since 2023, more than a dozen school districts have either proposed or passed policies requiring teachers to notify parents if their child identifies as transgender or asks to be identified by different names or pronouns while at school.

These policies lead to rises in bullying and discrimination across the board, which have measurable effects on the mental health of LGBTQ students.

San Diego Assemblymember Chris Ward (D) has introduced the Support Academic Futures and Educators for Today’s Youth Act, also called the SAFETY Act, along with the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus. Their stated goal is to ensure that all students have a safe and supportive environment to learn, regardless of their identity.

“Teachers should not be the gender police and violate the trust and safety of the students in their classrooms,” said Ward in a statement about AB 1955.

“Parents should be talking to their children, and the decision for a student to come out to their family members should be on their own terms. The SAFETY Act simply ensures that conversations about gender identity and sexuality happen at home without interference from others outside of the family unit.”

The act will prohibit school districts from implementing forced outing policies, provide resources for parents and students to navigate conversations around gender and identity on their own terms, and ensure teachers or school staff are not retaliated against for refusing to forcibly out a student. It would also make California the first state to explicitly prohibit forced outing policies in schools.

“School campuses should be safe places for students to learn and grow as their authentic selves,” said Sen. Susan Talamantes Eggman, the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus chair.

“The SAFETY Act is a critical piece of legislation that seeks to protect everyone on school campuses, especially LGBTQ+ students,” she added.

“When and how a person comes out is a conversation that should be reserved for a student and a parent, not arbitrarily forced on unsuspecting youth by a school administration.”

AB 1955 is expected to be heard in the Senate Education Committee next week. 

Chalk it up to California dreaming: Not even three years ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom promised California’s public universities five years of annual growth in state support totaling more than $2 billion.

But the governor’s updated budget plan for next year instead aims to cut the University of California and California State University by a combined $200 million in response to the state’s project multi-billion-dollar budget deficit.

The five-year compact is at risk of turning into a humbler two-year vow, underscoring the difficulty of projecting multiple years of support for California’s top generators of bachelor’s degree recipients — a state particularly at the mercy of large revenue swings.

The UC would see a $125 million base funding cut in 2024-25, with plans to restore that dip in 2025-26. For Cal State, the governor’s May budget revision includes a $75 million cut that’ll be restored in 2025-26.

The numbers were shared with CalMatters after it sought more detail from the California Department of Finance about its higher-education plans that are part of the annual May Revise process. It’s an update to the governor’s initial January proposal and sets the stage for intense budget negotiations with the Legislature to finalize a state budget by late June. The 2024-25 budget year begins July 1.

The fiscal outlook gets modestly rosier later for the two systems, which combined run 33 universities that enroll around 750,000 students.

Each system would receive a modest bump of 2.05% in 2025-26 — a far cry from the 10% the governor projected in his January budget proposal. That 10% itself was a compromise. Each system was supposed to see a 5% bump in 2024-25 and the same in 2025-26. But in January, Newsom called for no bump in year one and to double-up in year two as a way to manage the state deficit.

That 10% for the two systems would have meant $1 billion combined in 2025-26, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. A mere 2% increase would total roughly $200 million.

The analyst’s office basically presaged the change of fortune for the universities. When Newsom unveiled his compact plan in 2022, a promise of increased spending in exchange for improvements in student academics, the office wrote: “We caution the Legislature against putting too much stake in the Governor’s outyear commitments to the universities.” Previous governors have rarely “been able to sustain their compacts over time,” the office noted.

One reason? “In some cases, changing economic and fiscal conditions in the state have led governors to suspend their compacts,” the office wrote then.

Whether lawmakers fight to restore these cuts is an open question. More money for campuses means they can pay to hire more faculty and offer more classes students need to graduate. The additional state support is also a particular lifeline for Cal State, which agreed to 5% raises for its roughly 60,000 unionized workers, including the nearly 30,000 faculty who went on strike late last year and early this year demanding wage and benefits gains.

But a dollar spent one place means it’s not spent elsewhere, and the governor is also proposing to swing his budgetary scythe at student financial aid. Under his May revision, the Middle Class Scholarship would shrink by more than $500 million to $100 million each of  the next two years.

Around 300,000 students received that award this year, with average amounts between $2,000 and $3,000. If the governor’s plan becomes law, those amounts could shrink by 80%, on average.

One higher-education watchdog worries the cuts and limited growth will affect low-income students most.

“With this funding being cut, I think it’s going to require a real concerted effort over multiple years to make sure that those students are brought back into higher education and have the supports that they need over multiple years to actually make it to graduation,” said Joshua Hagen, director of policy and advocacy at the Campaign for College Opportunity, a nonprofit advocacy group.

CalMatters is a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how California’s state Capitol works and why it matters.

California State University system Chancellor Mildred García has accepted the retirement of Sonoma State’s president, who was put on administrative leave for agreeing to the demands of pro-Palestine protesters.

”President Ming-Tung ‘Mike’ Lee has informed me of his decision to retire from his role at Sonoma State University,” said García in a statement on Thursday. “I thank President Lee for his years of service to the California State University.”

On Tuesday, Lee sent a campus-wide message agreeing to meet the demands from students protesting the war in Gaza.

He reportedly agreed to declare an academic boycott on Israeli universities, establish a Palestinian curriculum and review the school’s investments in companies supporting Israel. The agreement was declared a win by pro-Palestine protesters.

García said Wednesday the message was sent “without the appropriate approvals” and that “because of this insubordination and consequences it has brought upon the system” Lee was placed on leave.

Sonoma State, located in Rohnert Park in Sonoma County, is one of the smallest institutions in the Cal State system with under 10,000 students.

Colleges and universities throughout California have faced protests and encampments by students opposing the destruction caused by Israel’s was against the Hamas terrorist group in Gaza. Police have been called to multiple campuses to end the protests, and some of the students involved have been arrested and suspended.