News & Commentary

School just got back in session, but one school district in Northern California already needs a lesson in how to create a welcoming and safe environment for Black students with disabilities.A 5-year-old Black student with autism and speech and language impairments suffered for months, including suffering injuries that needed to be treated by a hospital, all because of the inadequate oversight of Hayward Unified School District’s staff. In a time when Black students are regularly pushed out of classrooms for discipline and other subjective criteria, being Black with disabilities creates a unique and even more troubling set of problems that many school districts fail to adequately address.As outlined in our letter to the school district, in April 2018, E.E. moved with his mother from Inglewood and started at Helen Turner Children’s Center in the Hayward Unified School District. Within a month of E.E. arriving, it became clear that E.E.’s teacher was not creating a safe environment for E.E., which would ultimately lead to physical injury and missed class time for E.E. — the only Black student in a classroom with other students with disabilities.

California’s 2018 legislative session has ended, and we have some huge victories to celebrate!

Water is life. But tens of thousands of Californians can't read their annual water quality report because it is written almost exclusively in English.

The bus company says it's 'caught in the middle,' but this is an epic fail.

Schools should be safe learning environments, not arenas for immigration crackdowns. Yet many of the components of the school-to-prison pipeline that cast students of color into the criminal justice system pose a particular threat to immigrant students.

Sammy A. Nuñez grew up in deep poverty in an abusive household. Today, he is a source of hope fighting for justice for his community, where there is a clear link between trauma and incarceration.

Prosecutors and judges can stop harmful "generational incarceration" by looking at public safety with a trauma-informed eye on alternatives.

Frankie Guzman was 15 years old the first time he committed a crime. Even though it was his first offense, the prosecutor pushed for harsh punishment, ignoring an alternative path to rehabilitation.

The federal government has long targeted people using information collected at the state and local level. A new California law offers new opportunities to curtail the flow of sensitive data that fuels Trump's deportation machine.