Terri Novacek is the executive director of Element Education. / Photo by Adriana Heldiz

If even a small portion of parents choose not to send their kids back to traditional schools this fall, districts could face a massive funding crisis beyond the budget crunches they already confront.

When superintendents of the six largest school districts in the state wrote to lawmakers last month demanding that more money is needed to safely reopen schools, they also asked the state to “authorize school districts to earn average daily attendance using a three-year rolling average of ADA.”

Right now, when a student attends school, districts receive the funding attached to them. When they don’t, districts lose out. With districts warning that online learning may continue in some form for the coming school year, there’s potential for a new online market where providers compete to help parents deliver the best education possible, reports VOSD’s Scott Lewis. Other parents might be too nervous to send their kids back to physical school spaces and seek out charter or homeschool alternatives.

“In that letter, the districts were asking that the state protect them from what could happen to their funding not from the budget cuts but from the loss of students they may experience. It was a subtle acknowledgement of a real nightmare in the works for them,” Lewis writes.

What You Should Know About Curfews

Four cities in the central and eastern parts of San Diego County declared curfews as early as 7 p.m. Monday. It was the third straight day of curfew for La Mesa following a night of looting and arson Saturday night.

State law allows for cities and counties to impose these curfews during a state of emergency “to provide for the protection of life and property.” They limit the right to gather and protest, but could even ban bike rides, dog-walking and grocery shopping.

VOSD contributor Randy Dotinga looked into the history of curfews in San Diego, and what residents can and can’t do when they’re in place.

Weber: There’s a ‘Pandemic of Hate’ Against Black Americans

Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, a statewide police reform leader who last year passed a law changing the legal standards guiding police use of deadly force, gave an impassioned speech in Sacramento Tuesday and joined with other members of the California Legislative Black Caucus to urge their fellow lawmakers to prioritize a number of criminal justice bills.

Weber recalled seeing the National Guard in her Los Angeles neighborhood as a child in 1965 and the subsequent looting and attacks — similar to what we’re seeing today. She urged the public to acknowledge the 400-year history of enslavement and mistreatment of black people in the United States and its ongoing impact.

“This pandemic of hate has spread across the nation to every small city of America,” she said. “We are either going to face it to fight it, or find ourselves in the same position as before.”

Black Americans have fought in every war and contributed to the country’s moral conscience, she said, but they’re always the last through the door: “We are Americans without the privilege of being American.”

Among the bills that the caucus is pushing is ACA 5, which would place a measure on the November ballot to overturn the state’s ban on affirmative action. That effort, as Sara Libby noted in the Sacramento Report last week, was championed in the 1990s by former San Diego mayor Pete Wilson.

The caucus is also pushing SB 1392, which would attempt to rein in the practice of passing rogue police officers around agencies. VOSD was part of a statewide newsroom effort to investigate cops convicted of criminal offenses, and that was one of the takeaways of the series. The Mercury News reported that a small farming town had been home to a significant number of police running from their own criminal pasts. 

In Other News

The Morning Report was written by Megan Wood and Andrew Keatts, and edited by Sara Libby.

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