Good morning. It’s Wednesday, Aug. 9.
- Rural California faces dire shortage of teachers.
- UC Santa Cruz opens its doors to more students.
- Sacramento prosecutor threatens city over homelessness.
Statewide
1.
The shortage of teachers in rural California has become so dire that local administrators have attended hiring fairs as far away as Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, and Oregon. In Alturas, a tiny town in California’s Shasta Cascade region, the elementary school has six vacancies — a quarter of the teaching staff. “One thing has become clear in our search for employees: no one is coming to our rescue,” district superintendent Tom O’Malley told parents. “Let’s be honest. Our geography is not attractive to many folks.” L.A. Times
2.
It got a little easier to gain admission to the country’s best public university system this year. The fall 2023 acceptance rate across the University of California rose to nearly 67%, up from 64% in 2022, as campuses responded to pressure from lawmakers to enroll more Californians. The system owes much of the improvement to Santa Cruz, which accepted about 60% of applicants, a whopping 17 percentage points higher than last year. That amounts to roughly 10,000 more first-year admissions. L.A. Times | Mercury News
- See data for all nine undergraduate campuses. 👉 UCOP.edu
- UC Santa Cruz, nestled in coastal redwoods overlooking the sea, could be confused for a nature retreat. The filmmaker Shubham Modi captured a bird’s-eye view. 👉 YouTube (~6:30 mins)
3.
After eight of its teams were poached by rival conferences, the storied Pac-12 has been reduced to rubble, with just four teams remaining beyond this academic year — Stanford, California, Oregon State, and Washington State. Sports columnists had thoughts:
- It makes no practical sense, wrote the Washington Post’s Jerry Brewer. “But the TV money is really good — for now, until some team or conference decides it can generate more revenue by creating more chaos.”
- Something about it just feels wrong, said the Seattle Times’ Larry Stone: “The new setup will surely be more lucrative, but I can’t help but wonder if it will ever be as fulfilling.”
- The noble pretense of college sports as a brotherhood is gone, wrote the San Francisco Chronicle’s Scott Ostler. “The ridiculous new conference alignments will ruin the great regional flavor of college sports, and convert all student-athletes into frequent flyer-athletes.
4.
The Mammoth Mountain ski area officially closed Sunday after its second-longest season ever — 275 days. It was only the third time in the resort’s history that winter operations stayed open into August. Daniel Duane wrote about the strange experience of seeing people ski so deep into summer: “Unpredictable change is the new status quo. On an emotional level, there’s something undeniably frightening about that — where’s it all going? — but it can also, in a rare instance like the chance to ski in the dog days of summer, bring a disorienting joy.” N.Y. Times
Northern California
5.
Sacramento County’s top prosecutor on Monday threatened to press criminal charges against city officials over their handling of the homelessness crisis, saying they are too lenient in their approach. In a letter, District Attorney Thien Ho gave city leaders 30 days to clear all 16 encampments within city’s limits and establish more emergency shelters. “Our community is caught between compassion and chaos as we reach a breaking point that require saction,” he wrote. Mayor Darrell Steinberg reacted angrily. “I won’t dignify [the letter] with a response,” he said. CapRadio | A.P.
6.
Even Zoom is making its employees return to the office. The San Jose company that powered the shift to remote work is now requiring all employees within 50 miles of an office to start showing up, a move that has angered workers. Many of the tech companies that once championed the work-from-home movement have had a change of heart as much of American life returned to its prepandemic habits. Anders Jones, CEO of the financial-planning company Facet, said he regretted going fully remote. “It’s so much harder to get that togetherness,” he said. Wall Street Journal | A.P.
7.
“Give me a ride. I want a ride.”
When a video appeared online last October showing a scantily clad woman exiting a fire truck and walking toward a strip club in San Jose, the fire department spent months investigating the incident then informed city leaders that no explanation would be forthcoming. On Monday, the Mercury News obtained the full investigative report after suing for its release. It revealed that firefighters had driven to the Pink Poodle to collect a flash drive from a club photographer who had done some work for them, then relented when one of the dancers insisted on getting a ride. Mercury News | KRON
8.
Da’vian Kimbrough, a 13-year-old soccer phenom from Vacaville, just became the youngest professional athlete in American team sports history. The youngster signed a contract with Sacramento Republic FC on Tuesday, smiling for the cameras with a mouth full of braces. Team officials insisted it was not a publicity stunt. “He’s different,” said General Manager Todd Dunivant. “He’s somebody we immediately recognized as a special talent.” Sacramento Bee | ABC10
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Southern California
9.
More than 11,000 municipal employees walked off the job in Los Angeles on Tuesday, joining actors, writers, and hotel workers in what has become a summer of strikes across the city. The one-day action caused minor disruptions for trash collection, airport, postal, and port services. Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center, said the unrest has been fueled in part by widening inequality: “You have communities of Bel Air, Brentwood, Beverly Hills, Malibu, where every single house is worth millions of dollars. And yet on the other side of town, you have conditions that rival some of the poorest parts of the developing world.” Bloomberg | L.A. Times
10.
A Los Angeles County judge sentenced Tory Lanez, a Canadian rapper, to 10 years in prison on Tuesday for shooting Megan Thee Stallion in the Hollywood Hills in 2020. Megan testified that Lanez fired a gun at the back of her feet and shouted for her to dance as she walked away from an SUV in which they had been riding. Judge David Herriford acknowledged testimony that portrayed Lanez as a charitable person and good father. “Sometimes good people do bad things,” he said. “Actions have consequences, and there are no winners in this case.” L.A. Times | A.P.
11.
In California, many cities allow electric bike riders to travel up to 28 miles an hour on roads where cars may be going twice that speed. As the e-bike industry has boomed, the summer of 2023 has heightened doubts about their safety, especially among teenagers. Jeremy Collis, a sheriff’s sergeant in San Diego County, is investigating the e-bike death of a 15-year-old in June. “The speed they are going is too fast for sidewalks, but it’s too slow to be in traffic,” he said. N.Y. Times
12.
After a run of more than 150 years, the Santa Barbara News-Press abruptly filed for bankruptcy and fired its staff in July. But it had been dying a slow death since 2000, when Wendy McCaw used the proceeds of her divorce from a cellphone billionaire to buy the newspaper and use it as a forum for her libertarian politics and private crusades. The local journalist Nick Welsh called the paper’s demise “the loudest and most self-inflicted death rattle in journalistic history.” Washington Post
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