Morning Report: The Future of Bilingual Education

With voter approval of Proposition 58 fading into the rear-view mirror, school leaders are now faced with more possibilities when it comes to hosting bilingual education programs at their schools. But Mario Koran reports there is a right way and a lot of wrong ways to go about starting bilingual programs, and leaders will have to be careful they make the right choices. One important mistake to avoid: Don’t rush into it without laying the foundations of success.

That means figuring out how many of a school’s teachers are already capable of bilingual teaching. We don’t even know how many bilingual teachers exist in the state, so schools will have to do the legwork. It also means planning for future needs by building up a pipeline of teachers who are preparing themselves for bilingual futures. One abundant resource springs from our own schools, Koran writes, where 125,000 California students graduated from high school with a special credential indicating they have multilingual abilities.

Kristin Gaspar, Entrance Interview

In a “surreal” race that dragged on for weeks before finally being resolved with mail-in ballots and provisional ballots, former Encinitas Mayor Kristin Gaspar won the race for county supervisor in District 3 and was sworn in on Monday. Gaspar tells Maya Srikrishnan that she began her transition by filling key staff positions, including someone to help operate the county department responsible for troubleshooting homelessness. “There are hundreds of service providers, but there doesn’t seem to be a cohesive effort regionally,” Gaspar says of the county’s current homeless conundrum.

Gaspar also tells Srikrishnan she plans to focus more on the county’s operations, juxtaposed with former Supervisor Dave Roberts who Gaspar says “will probably always excel at being present at every community event possible.”

San Diego’s Big 2017 Stories: San Diego Explained

It’s 2017 and Scott Lewis has some predictions for what stories we are all going to be wrangling in the coming year. Some stories in San Diego rarely change, like the question of the San Diego Chargers and how much money they can take from taxpayers. Other stories are old saws that have suddenly surged to the forefront, to wit: San Diego’s ever-expanding homeless encampments. Lewis runs through these and other predictions in our most recent San Diego Explained.

Fighting Sneaky Restaurant Surcharges

City Attorney Mara Elliott has gotten wind of local restaurateurs who are adding a surcharge to customer bills to make up for the new minimum wage increase.

Elliott said she plans to ensure any restaurant charging such a fee is doing so lawfully, including disclosing the fee to diners before they order and not claiming the surcharge is government-mandated, the Union-Tribune’s David Garrick reports.

School Loses Children

Kids in a Central Elementary School preschool program in City Heights are going unsupervised and in one case were entirely misplaced for 30 minutes, the Union-Tribune’s Jeff McDonald reports. The report goes on to detail a series of children left unsupervised from a manner of minutes all the way up to an “unspecified period of time.” The violations were bad enough that state officials revoked the school’s license to operate, but they also put a stay on that revocation in favor of a three-year probation. A district official told the paper steps have been taken to address the violations.

Lightning Round

• Good news: The drought-stricken area of California is getting smaller. San Diego is still afflicted, though. (NBC  7)

• Drought-stricken San Diego is also still afflicted with rotting water mains that burst and flood entire neighborhoods, like North Park on Thursday. (Times of San Diego)

• Meanwhile, the Otay Water District doesn’t have enough water (where could it all have gone?) so it wants to import a whole bunch of water from Mexico. (News Deeply)

• U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy will step down on Friday to take on her new role as San Diego County Superior Courty Judge. (Union-Tribune)

• KPCC reports on California’s failure to keep mothers with infants off the streets and away from homelessness.

• The San Diego County Grand Jury may not have enough volunteers to draw from this year. (NBC 7)

• The very first female Marines to be officially allowed in infantry combat roles are reporting to North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune this week. (Union-Tribune)

• Noah. Emma. Liam. Sophia (or Sofia). Such are the names that parents most often bestowed upon their offspring in San Diego in 2016. (NBC 7)

Seth Hall is a local writer and technologist. You can email him at voice@s3th.com or follow him on Twitter: @loteck.