The Morning Report
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A pot of bond money used to fund facilities for charter school is gone.
That means we can likely expect to see more shared campuses, schools inside strip malls and other awkward homes for charters that are struggling to keep up with increased student demand.
Voters approved Prop. Z, a $2.8 billion construction bond, in 2012. Charter schools lobbied hard for its passage and were allocated a $350 million share of the bond money, but it’s all been spent or is already allocated, Mario Koran reports.
Only about $6 million overall Prop. Z dollars for charters is still up for grabs, even though between Props. S and Z, the district still has a whopping $3 billion it can spend on traditional district schools. Charter school backers believe some of the overall bond money should be redirected by charters, and point to a clause in the bond language that says the amount could be revisited.
The San Diego Unified school board ultimately decides how the rest of the bond money is spent, and it doesn’t sound like they’re willing to move more to charters just yet.
Chargers Spox Beats Back Stadium Criticisms
Chargers spokesman Fred Maas responded to criticisms of the team’s downtown stadium plan laid out by the “No Downtown Stadium” coalition.
The Union-Tribune asked Maas about each facet of the coalition’s anti-stadium argument and, not surprisingly, he had a harsh response to everything.
On the point that the Chargers’ convadium plan would increase the risk of losing Comic-Con, for example, Maas said the possibility of a contiguous expansion of the Convention Center had been blocked in court, something city leaders have failed to communicate to the public. He also said that the convention center expansion that’s part of the team’s new downtown stadium proposal isn’t as far away from the existing Convention Center as critics are portraying.
“The notion that somehow this off-campus facility, which is really on-campus, is going to have deleterious effects is unfair,” Maas told the Union-Tribune.
• Hear what David Glanzer, marketing and public relations director of Comic-Con, had to say about a Convention Center expansion that’s across the street or just a few blocks away (fast-forward to about the 30-minute mark). He was a guest on the VOSD podcast in March.
Students Are Hungry for More Than Education
The college struggle is real, y’all.
When I was a freshman at San Diego State University, my dorm roommate and I had the bottom-of-the-barrel food plan, which meant we got three full meals during the week but nada on the weekends.
We often found ourselves searching out blue-coat-wearing folks who wandered campus on Friday and Saturday nights conducting a survey about student alcohol consumption habits. We’d answer the same questions every weekend in exchange for the free pizza coupons they offered.
But one slice of free pizza wasn’t nearly enough, and we often found ourselves starving until Monday rolled around again.
It looks like my sad little story and the 15 pounds I lost freshman year are not uncommon.
VOSD contributor Barbara Davenport paints a picture of the hunger problem at Cal State campuses, where a study found that about 24 percent of students experienced food insecurity in the previous year. What’s worse, several CSU campuses have stepped up their efforts to meet the needs to vulnerable students who don’t have enough food. San Diego State is not one of them.
Weekend News Roundup
• Energy storage is the Holy Grail for utility companies. Kinda. The Union-Tribune takes a long, hard look at current technological advancements in the field. The need for energy storage is growing as California and other places add more renewable energy sources to the grid.
• Boosting the immune system’s natural ability to detect and kill abnormal cells is another weapon in the fight against cancer, and it’s a promising one. That was the basic message that came out of a UCSD forum about immunotherapy over the weekend. (U-T)
• The North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, hasn’t gotten this much play since it first went into effect in the mid-1990s. Of course, now NAFTA and other trade agreements like it are one of the main tenets of presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign, which is why the U-T did an explainer on the deal.
• More than 100 people were willing to walk more than 100 miles in order to make a point about the country’s messed-up immigration system. (CBS8)
• Cell phone tower data played a major role in a local murder case. (U-T)
• Wow. San Diego is not very creative when it comes to naming pets. (Fox 5)
San Diego Social Media Moments
Tikiphiles long for days of yore, they love Polynesian art and culture, they often wear Hawaiian shirts, listen to exotica music and drink fruity rum drinks in ceramic tiki mugs. Once a year, the subculture flocks to San Diego. Here’s proof that I’m not making any of this up.