It’s impossible to ignore San Diego’s homelessness crisis. Between 2019 and 2020 there was a 21 percent increase in people experiencing homelessness in San Diego County, according to the Regional Task Force on Homelessness. 

That was before the pandemic. 

But homelessness – and what causes it – is complex and sometimes our own assumptions about people who experience homelessness keep us from fully understanding it.  

Our latest San Diego 101 episode tackles some of the most common myths we hear about homelessness.  

Hosts Adriana Heldiz and Maya Srikrishnan look at why it’s harder to get housed than people think, explain how most people who are homeless are not suffering from mental illness or substance abuse and how despite what we want to believe, anyone can experience homelessness.  

To do this, Heldiz and Srikrishnan tap VOSD’s resident homelessness expert, Lisa Halverstadt, and Dr. Margot Kushel, who leads UC San Francisco’s Center for Vulnerable Populations. They also interview two people with lived homelessness experience – DeForrest Hancock and Destry Whitney.

Listen Now

Spotify | Apple | RSS

The post San Diego 101: 3 Myths About Homelessness appeared first on Voice of San Diego.

Journalists spend their working lives interviewing other people. But when two members of Tijuana’s press corps were shot dead within a six-day period this month, longtime colleagues found themselves in the unusual position of turning to each other for answers. 

“How do you feel about what is happening?” they asked fellow reporters, diligently recording the responses for the next newscast, news article or website post.  

Angry. Fearful. And for the most part, determined to keep working amid a greater sense of risk. 

“I’m no longer so certain of being safe,” Alberto Sarmiento, editor of the news website Hiptex.com, told Vicente Calderon, editor of Tijuanapress.com, during a demonstration staged outside the Tijuana offices of the Federal Attorney General’s Office. 

It’s unclear why police photographer Margarito Martínez and Lourdes Maldonado, a broadcast and radio journalist, were killed, and authorities have yet to link their deaths to their work as journalists. But both Martínez, 49, and Maldonado, who was to turn 67 next month, were well established veterans of the journalism community, and both had sought government protection in recent months. 

The killings drew me back to Tijuana repeatedly over the past few days. For funeral services, a candlelight vigil and a march to the federal attorney general’s office. Some remembered their friends with tearful tributes, others spoke with indignation and anger as they called for justice. As I listened, two things were clear.  

First, that the slayings have hit painfully close to home. While Mexico has become one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists — and the crimes are rarely solved — it had been nearly 18 years since such an attack occurred on a journalist in the city — and now there were two in less than a week’s time.  “I’ve been here for 30 years, and never seen this level of fear,” one veteran journalist told me.  

And second, they have brought the city’s journalists closer together than I’ve ever seen them in more than two decades of reporting here. 

“I guess the silver lining, if you can even speak of such a thing in this situation, is that Mexican journalists have an extraordinary capacity to channel their anger and frustration in a very positive way,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, Mexico representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists.  

I spoke with him Wednesday, the morning after journalists and supporters staged protests across Mexico to demand justice for the Tijuana journalists and a third journalist killed in Veracruz this month. “What they did was show Mexicans that they are still united.” 

I belong to small and grateful cadre of San Diego journalists who over the years have received much support from their Tijuana counterparts. They share insights, contacts and even news tips. They call us companions, compañeros. If we’re too far back in a crowd encircling a public official, we can count someone’s helping hand reaching back to carry our recorder to the front. 

But I’ve also been acutely aware of the large gap in working conditions. We earn U.S. salaries, often have access to company cars, and we have the option of seeking safety north of the border if something does not feel right. Our houses, families, bank accounts are north of the border. And we’re not the first to show up at crime scenes where we might end up inadvertently angering someone with our photographs. 

Tijuana journalists make up a widely varied group, and within it, I have found many people I’ve come to admire — for their tenacity, their independence, their courageous pursuit of justice. But more than anything, for their demand for dignity in a world that has grown less and less friendly to people who report the news. They have always protected me, and more than anything, this has made me feel helpless about protecting them. 

Being a journalist in Tijuana has never been easy. I had been in the city for three years in 1997, when Jesús Blancornelas, the editor of the Tijuana investigative newsweekly, Zeta, survived an attack by members of the Arellano Felix Cartel, though his bodyguard did not.  In 2004, Zeta’s co-editor Francisco Ortiz Franco, was shot to death in front of his two young children after his name appeared on an article identifying organized crime members with police identification cards. The masterminds of the crime remain unpunished. 

While it is the violence that gets wide coverage, journalists also face other kinds of pressures. Many reporters work for low pay, without benefits such as health care, social security or life insurance. Media outlets have long relied on government-paid publicity — and editors with critical stances risk a loss of revenue and becoming targets of orchestrated attacks on their reputations. 

More recently, journalists have seen a growing threat from “influencers” who pose as journalists yet gain strong followings on Facebook with crime coverage that doesn’t follow journalistic standards. Martínez, who documented homicide scenes, was falsely accused by the owner of one crime-oriented Facebook page of running another page that ran the photos and names of drug traffickers. And Martinez’s colleagues fear that the accusation led to his death. 

All this has not gone unnoticed by the younger generation. During a protest march last week, I ran into Feliciano Castro, a former journalist who now teaches the subject at the Autonomous University of Baja California. “I’ve seen a drastic drop in interest in studying journalism,” he told me, as we stepped down Paseo de los Heroes. “It’s a risky profession and it just doesn’t offer adequate compensation.” 

A lot has been said about the two journalists in the past few days. Martínez had spent nearly two decades covering crime in Tijuana, one of Mexico’s most violent cities, with the Canon camera he called “La Negra Tomasa,” after a popular song. He had worked as a “fixer” for foreign journalists and freelanced for a half dozen news organizations in Tijuana. Several younger reporters told me he had been a mentor to them. 

“He was cautious, in the end what mattered to both of us was getting home safely,” said Gerardo Andrade, a longtime police reporter who now works for Zeta. Martínez, who was married with a 16-year-old daughter, got many of his tips listening to Red Cross radio calls, and raced out to the scene. The job is not only dangerous, but can be tiring and tedious, yet Martínez “was tireless and passionate about his work,” Andrade said. 

Maldonado moved from Mexico City to Tijuana in the 1990s, becoming known to local audiences as a tough-talking reporter for the local affiliate of the Mexican network Televisa.  

For several years, she worked for Primer Sistema and Noticias, PSN, a news channel owned by Baja California’s former governor, Jaime Bonilla. She had been in a nine-year legal battle against Bonilla’s company for illegal dismissal and back wages, and in the days before her death had celebrated a victory. At the time of her death, she was hosting a web-based program, Brebaje.  

Known as Luby to her friends, the journalist had struggled economically, sharing her modest two-story house with several cats and a pitbull mix named Chato. If her public persona could be abrasive, combative and loud, she also had another side.  

“To her being a journalist meant being biting, asking questions, and if the public official didn’t respond, she’d say, ‘You don’t know anything’,” said Odilón García, a longtime friend and radio host. “But she was affectionate with her friends, and in the world of cats she was extraordinarily kind.” 

Their violent deaths have made them national symbols for a members profession demanding protection and justice. But as the days pass and the Tijuana’s busy news cycle relentlessly moves on, the absence of the two journalists has felt all too real—and extraordinarily painful. 

Also Notable

Fourth journalist killed: Another Mexican journalist was killed Monday – making it the fourth death in less than a month. Roverto Toledo worked for the website Monitor Michoacán. The newsroom’s director said the website had received threats for reporting on corruption. (AP, San Diego Union-Tribune)  

New municipality: The port town of San Felipe, on the Upper Gulf of California, formally became Baja California’s ninth municipality this month. Located about 120 miles south of the state capital of Mexicali, it has a population of 22,000, and covers a land area of over 4,000 square miles. In recent decades, the small fishing community has been at the center of efforts to save the vaquita marina. (La Jornada) 

San Diego journalists stage vigil: The San Diego-Tijuana chapter of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists staged a vigil in Little Italy outside the Mexican Consulate on Friday night to honor slain Mexican colleagues and call for justice. (San Diego Union-Tribune, Fox5 San Diego) 

San Diego workers move south: Tijuana’s El Sol newspaper reported on the growing numbers of San Diego workers who are moving to Tijuana because they can’t afford rising San Diego housing costs.

Migrating whales: The annual gray whale migration to Mexico is now in full swing as the giant marine mammals arrive from their Artic feeding grounds to winter and give birth in shallow lagoons off the Baja California peninsula. The whales, which weigh up to 90,000 pounds and measure up to 49 feet, also draw thousands of human visitors each year to the lagoons to observe and sometimes touch whales. (La Jornada, CONANP, The Log, NOAA) 

The post Border Report: Journalist Slayings Hit Close to Home appeared first on Voice of San Diego.

The idea that California counties would be divided up into many small school districts is as old as California itself. But that idea – like pennies that now cost more than they are worth to mint – may have outlived its usefulness. 

San Diego County is divided into 42 school districts. The largest has nearly 100,000 students. The smallest, Spencer Valley, had just 32 last year, according to state Department of Education records. Several districts, including Spencer Valley, manage only one school. 

The reasons this might not be a good idea are both moral and fiscal. 

Each district requires an administrative machine to get it through the year. Each has its own elected board of education; its own superintendent; its own attendance coordinator. Each district has to maintain copious paperwork to comply with state requirements. 

Consolidating districts would cut down on this overhead – but more importantly it would spread money around more evenly. That’s because small districts end up getting much more per pupil funding than larger districts. 

Out of San Diego’s 42 districts, 11 have fewer than one thousand students. Those districts bring in, on average, $23,192 per student. Average per pupil funding for the other 31 districts is almost half as much: $13,246, according to figures compiled by WalletHub. 

Given the financial benefits, it’s not hard to see why small districts don’t consolidate. As a 2014 report by the Legislative Analyst’s Office put it, “the state not only allows but also encourages both districts and schools to remain small by providing them substantial funding advantages.” 

The report recommended getting rid of these incentives – and forcing districts with less than 100 students to consolidate. State legislators haven’t acted on the recommendations. 

The smallest school districts may be inefficient, but do they perform better academically? No, according to the report. Small districts “have slightly lower student achievement” compared to middle-sized districts, the report concluded. 

There’s another major reason for consolidating districts that might not be immediately apparent: integration. 

A hundred years ago, when school districts were being created, the people drawing the lines frequently carved out communities they considered undesirable. The district boundaries we are left with today, in other words, tend to reinforce segregation. 

Consolidating districts was one of the major strategies for achieving integration in the South. Small districts were frequently combined into one large county district, as they were in Wake County, North Carolina. 

Wake County implemented a diversity policy that strove through the years to achieve racial and income balance within its schools. In other words, the district would try to avoid having any high-poverty schools or packing any one racial group into a given school. Such integration has been shown to improve academic outcomes – and in the early 2000’s, after years of working to balance the demographics of its schools, Wake County was recognized nationally for its academic achievement. 

Since de jure segregation in the South ended, de facto segregation in the West and Northeast has been allowed to flourish. Latinos in the western United States are more segregated than anywhere else in the country, according to one report. And that segregation has been increasing steadily since 1965. 

San Diego schools are also segregated for Black students, according to a report by Governing. The report showed that San Diego schools ranked near the middle in terms of all major US metropolitan areas for segregation among Black students. 

Reducing the number of districts in San Diego, and the rest of California, could make schools more efficient, improve student performance and increase interactions among children who don’t look the same. But efforts to consolidate in San Diego have been limited in the past few decades. 

Valley Center-Pauma Unified became a unified school district in 2000. Escondido Union Elementary and Escondido Union High School Districts considered consolidating in the early 2000’s but decided against it. And despite a push by some in 2014, a large South Bay consolidation never happened either. 

The state, however, has successfully pushed districts to consolidate in the past. Between 1935 and 1970, the number of districts shrunk from roughly 3,000 to roughly 1,000, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. The state encouraged these consolidations with carrots and sticks related to funding. But the incentives stopped and since 1970, the number of districts statewide has remained roughly the same. 

The last time Californians seriously considered consolidation as a statewide policy was during the Great Recession – when saving money became a top political priority. But the greatest benefits of consolidation aren’t related to efficiency; they have the power to make school systems better and more accountable. 

The post The Learning Curve: San Diego Has 42 School Districts. Is that Too Many?  appeared first on Voice of San Diego.

In San Diego’s often overlooked underground hip-hop scene, few voices standout like Tulengua, a bilingual, binational and multiracial group composed of recording artists Amari Jordan, Alan Lilienthal, and Jaime Mora. 

Members of the group claim residency on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, with roots tethering the trio to San Diego and Tijuana. For the past several years, Tulengua has made a name for themselves in the underground hip-hop scene of the San Diego border region. Producing their own brand of music, the trio has crafted a sonic tapestry composed of different cultures, languages, and sounds that transcend borders and genres.

Since the group’s formation in 2018, Tulengua has been anything but predictable. Tulengua’s music features live instrumentation and sampling from a variety of genres such as hip-hop, psychedelic, progressive rock, soul, Spanish-language music and even obscure movie soundtracks. Their lyrics are bilingual and often carry a strong social commentary by regularly touching on topics of immigration, racism and the struggles of undocumented immigrants. 

Their unique sound has brought them success and support from those who relate to the stories they tell, but the last two years have been difficult. The pandemic wreaked havoc for the performing artists. Music venues closed around the same time they released a new album. Then the border closed and separated the bandmates.

But now, Tulengua is in the middle of a rebirth. The group is exploring the concept of crowdfunding. 

“Just like streaming changed the music industry, there’s a new wave of web3 technology bringing more freedom to musicians,” Lilienthal said. Web3 is an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web based on the blockchain, which incorporates concepts including decentralization and token-based economics. Lilienthal hopes that by using this technology the group can be transformed into a digitally tradable asset amongst fans via-tokens through the same block-chain technology utilized with NFT’s and cryptocurrency. 

“We’re trying to imagine a world where our biggest supporters can in a sense be like our shareholders – where the binational community around us can grow as we grow,” he said. 

A Desire to Connect Communities

The humble origins of the group trace back as the brainchild of Tulengua frontman Alan Lilienthal. Lilienthal and his family moved from Mexico City to San Diego when he was 8 years old. 

Lilienthal was an avid musician from a young age and played in a number of local bands in various cities. He also maintained a revolutionary spirit. At the age of 21, at the suggestion of his brother, Lilienthal took a Greyhound bus out to New York City to take part in the Occupy Wall Street movement, a protest against economic inequality and the influence of corporate money in politics that began in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City’s Wall Street financial district, in 2011. Following New York, Lilienthal spent some time traveling abroad until he felt compelled to return home to San Diego. 

By the time Lilienthal returned to the States, vitriol regarding the border and immigration had reached a zenith, propelled by the incendiary rhetoric of then Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. In the days and months following Trump’s election in 2016, Lilienthal and fellow rapper Slack Barrett began work on a cross-border musical collective. Although the collective didn’t have a solidified lineup, let alone a name, Lilienthal and Barrett were laying the foundations for what would eventually become Tulengua. 

“At that point it wasn’t even a solid group, it was more like a loose collective of people from both sides of the border,” said Lilienthal, who at the time was doing cross border work. “I was seeing so much cooperation, fluidity and collaboration between both sides, but that wasn’t really being spoken about in the media. So we wanted to create something that showed the unity and community between both sides, and could represent the beauty that’s created when people come together despite their differences.”

Lilienthal and Barrett quickly began working on songs together, with the two emcees trading bars, going back and forth in both English and Spanish. “The first five or six songs were just us kind of processing our feelings about the political climate that was going on in America. You hear that because it was such a shit show, and we just wanted to write about what was going on,” Lilienthal recalled.  

It was around the same time Lilienthal also met Amari Jordan, a local artist who had grown up in San Diego and was working on her solo career as an emcee in San Diego’s local hip-hop scene as well. The two met in a chance encounter at a Wu-Tang-themed rap battle in Barrio Logan, after Jordan battled local battle rap heavy weight Ric Scales. After witnessing Jordan go head to head against one of San Diego’s most versatile battle rappers, Lilienthal was compelled to introduce himself and eventually asked Jordan if she wanted to join the group. Jordan found the idea of joining a group (especially one regularly addressing topics of social justice) appealing and agreed to join Lilienthal and Barrett. 

Shortly afterward, Lilienthal discovered Jaime Mora’s music on the music-streaming platform Soundcloud. “At the time the idea for Tulengua was for it to be a cross-border collective, so I wanted to find someone in Tijuana that also made beats. With Mora added to the line-up the group began work on the remainder of the project.

The group’s debut album, “Baja Funk,” received praise from both fans and local music critics upon its release in 2018. Tulengua received even more attention after the members decided to donate all profits from the project to Border Angels, a San Diego-based migrant’s rights nonprofit organization that serves the county’s immigrant community through various migrant outreach programs, including day laborer outreach and legal assistance. The group even collaborated with the org on a music video for their single, “Selva”. After “Baja Funk” completed recording, Slack Barrett moved to the East Coast, effectively leaving the group and solidifying Tulengua’s lineup as Lilienthal, Jordan, and Mora. 

‘Music Is This Great Kind of Weapon’

Almost immediately Tulengua was hailed for both outspokenness on border issues and also for the group’s ability to break down language barriers as well as ethnic and racial stereotypes. 

“Music is this great kind of weapon or tool that is so much more than entertainment. It’s this amazing vessel to inspire change and bring people together, so I always knew that whatever I did musically I wanted that element to be very present,” Lilienthal said. “The group was born from this political tension and all this bullshit that was being spewed from Washington, so from the very beginning I wanted to make it very clear what Tulengua stood for. Yes, it’s entertainment and it’s Hip-Hop, it’s fun, it’s a party, and it’s lit. But, it’s also being put at the service of something else that’s beyond just ego.” 

Jordan also expressed the important role the group plays touching upon topics seldom discussed among most hip-hop artists.

“There’s so many people out there that don’t have a voice, so why not put forth a voice that they can attach themselves to whether they speak our language or not,” Jordan said.

Following a six song EP entitled “Feelins”, Tulengua released their sophomore effort in the spring of 2020. The group’s follow-up album “LOWKEYBANGERSVILLE” was a stark break from the group’s more old-school hip-hop oriented sound cultivated on “Baja Funk,” veering into more modern territory with more trap inspired and experimental production. 

Lilienthal acknowledged that the group’s change of direction might turn some fans off, but stressed that pushing boundaries has always been a major component of the group’s dynamics

 “We don’t ever want to just be in the ‘conscious rap’ box or the ‘underground’ box,” Lilienthal said. “We make music that we love. I think that the fact that we’re from both sides of the border, erasing boundaries, and bringing people together, that infuses anything we do with this weight that it’s more than only music.” Jordan agrees and believes that the group’s fluidity is what sets them apart. “We found a way to bridge not just hip-hop,” Jordan said.  

Promotion for “LOWKEYBANGERSVILLE” was short lived however, three weeks after its release the country shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which effectively shut down all musical venues and placed any chance of doing live shows on hold. 

When it became clear that the pandemic was not ending anytime soon Mora returned to his home in Rosarito before the border was closed. For almost a year the group was unable to gather.

Those obstacles, though, encouraged the group to embark on a new path with web3 technology. Soon, the group will be launching a crowdfund around the LENGUA token, which will essentially give fans who are holders access to unreleased music, shows, community events, and even allow fans the chance to vote on the direction of Tulengua’s musical and creative direction. Proving that even in the midst of a still uncertain climate surrounding the border, Tulengua is still inspired to continue the mission they embarked on back in 2018. 

“We’ve all let go of a lot these past few years. This whole trip has always been about more than music for us. It’s about community, family, borderless dreams, and visions of a more united region.”

The post Binational Hip-Hop Group Tulengua Is Looking to Secure Its Freedom appeared first on Voice of San Diego.

The city started the year with more than 1,900 vacancies in its libraries, recreation centers and various city departments. That’s the equivalent of nearly 16 percent of city positions with standard working hours.  

The city is taking some steps to try to make its hundreds of openings more competitive so it can deliver the services residents expect, but longstanding issues complicate its hiring push. 

For one, the city can’t move as swiftly as businesses can to increase pay or institute sign-on bonuses. The city’s hiring process can drag on for months for even high-demand positions. And the city is also confronting the aftershocks of a 2012 pension reform measure that halted across-the-board raises and pensions for new employees for years. The latter for years put the city at a competitive disadvantage with other local governments that did offer pensions and raises. 

Now the city is trying to make up for those past decisions during a pandemic that has only added to its hiring challenges.  

For example, it resumed offering pensions to new hires last July following a court ruling that overturned the pension initiative.  

Mayor Todd Gloria has also pledged to make the city a more competitive employer. He halted a hiring freeze instituted at the start of the pandemic, baked salary increases for city workers into his budget and allowed the city to pursue sign-on bonuses for at least one set of openings. The City Council also unanimously voted Tuesday on the city’s first-evercompensation philosophy. The resolution urges – but doesn’t require – the city to continually adjust salaries to reflect cost-of-living increases and to try to ensure the city’s total compensation for its thousands of jobs match up with at least the market median. 

Yet hundreds of open positions remain on the books and San Diego’s growing cost of living is only exacerbating the city’s staffing woes. 

To put the region’s cost of living in perspective, the University of Washington’s Center for Women’s Welfare found last year that a single adult needed to make at least $18.43 an hour or $38,919 annually in a full-time gig to live in San Diego County without public assistance. Not all city positions pay those rates – and working parents need to make more to make ends meet. For example, a single parent with a school-age child need to make at least $32.45 an hour or nearly $68,600 annually. 

Michael Zucchet, who leads the Municipal Employees Association, said the city has a lot more work to do to hold onto the employees it has and fill its many open positions. After all, pay for many city jobs will remain behind other jurisdictions even with the latest pay hikes. 

“The only way this changes is to fundamentally make these jobs competitive and to effectively recruit, and in broad terms right now, neither one of those is happening at the city,” Zucchet said. “The city’s own compensation survey still shows in general the jobs are not competitive and we have recruitment challenges in terms of the mechanics of it, how long it takes.” 

Indeed, the city’s Personnel Department reports it took an average of 114 days to bring on a new employee last fiscal year – a clock that starts when a department requests to fill a position and ends on the new worker’s start date. That’s up from 98 days pre-pandemic.  

City spokeswoman Nicole Darling said the Personnel Department got approval in Gloria’s budget to fill three vacancies of its own that may help speed hiring and has also resumed predictive recruiting for in-demand jobs with expected openings, a process that paused during the pandemic. 

For now, the city has lots of hiring to do, and it’s taken some immediate steps to make those jobs more attractive 

Sanitation Drivers

As of late last year, the city had 58 openings for waste collection drivers as it tried to staff up to comply with a new state law requiring it to begin collecting food waste and fill openings that emerged during the pandemic. 

Of those openings, 40 were for experienced drivers who can operate side-loading trash trucks. 

To bolster hiring at a time when businesses and cities nationwide are struggling to hire drivers, the City Council last month voted to institute sign-on bonuses, a tactic the city of St. Louis already successfully tried. 

New sanitation driver hires now get $1,250 in their first paycheck and another $1,250 if they remain on the job for a year. And other employees who refer a driver who ends up working at the city get $625 upfront and another $625 if the person remains on the job.  

Conrad Wear, an interim deputy director in the city’s Environmental Services Department, said the department is also pursuing a so-called special salary adjustment through the city’s Civil Service Commission in hopes of increasing wages to make the position more competitive.  

The city’s experienced sanitation drivers now make between $50,000 and about $59,000 while trainees make between roughly $37,000 and $44,000. 

“At the end of the day, it’s really about compensation,” Wear said. “Whatever we can do to get more dollars in the pockets of our employees and make these jobs a bit more competitive is good for all of us.” 

Leticia Munguia of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents the city’s blue-collar workers, said the city should have taken action sooner to aid existing workers who have faced increased burdens amid COVID-related staffing shortages and sick time. 

“It’s definitely been long overdue,” Munguia said. 

Pool Guards

As of late October, nearly half of the city’s pool guard positions were vacant and the result was dramatically reduced hours at the city’s 13 pools. 

“What happened is we didn’t have enough pool guards to open up enough pools safely,” Park and Recreation Director Andy Field told Voice of San Diego last fall. “If we don’t have enough pool guards to do that, we have to make the difficult decision to close the pool until we have adequate staff available to work.” 

At that time, pool guards made roughly $14.60 to $17.60 an hour. 

The City Council boosted hiring efforts last month by giving pool guards special assignment pay that equals 10 percent of their base pay. The move followed the city’s Civil Service Commission’s conclusion that the position faced recruitment challenges. 

MEA cheered the hourly pay hike last month and urged the city to look at other positions in need too. 

The city is now advertising pool guard jobs that pay roughly $15.30 to $17.60 an hour. 

Library Assistants

Last spring, Gloria shocked library lovers with a budget proposal that called for reduced library hours and a plan to lay off dozens of employees, many of whom were hourly and part-time. Gloria later revised those plans and restored budgeted library hours. 

But the initial proposal exposed a longtime challenge that city officials wanted to address. 

Library Department Director Misty Jones told the City Council last May that a third of library workers in the city were hourly and that the city has long struggled to fill those positions – and keep people in them. 

Library managers also told the Independent Budget Analyst’s Office that low pay and the lack of benefits tied to hourly positions contributed to rejected job offers and an attrition rate of about 25 percent. 

A salary study completed last year ahead of city labor negotiations showed total compensation for the city’s experienced library assistants – who perform clerical duties and assist library visitors – ranked eleventh out of 11 other jurisdictions that consultants used as benchmarks. The total compensation was also nearly 22 percent below the median. 

Gloria’s final budget replaced dozens of hourly positions with new part-time city library positions that come with standard hours and benefits to try to make the jobs more attractive.  

As of early December, the city had about 195 open half-time library positions and another 20 full-time positions it hoped to fill in coming months. 

Most of those positions were library assistants who make roughly $15 to $26 an hour and can now receive city benefits such as healthcare, life insurance and subsidized transit passes.  

Grounds Maintenance Workers

As of last fall, the city was short nearly three dozen grounds maintenance workers responsible for tasks at city parks such as removing weeds, cleaning bathrooms and performing routine fixes. It showed. 

At the time, experienced grounds maintenance workers made $35,235 to $41,933 annually – close to the roughly $39,000 that the University of Washington’s Center for Women’s Welfare found a single person needs to make to pay the bills in the region without public assistance.  

City grounds maintenance workers got a raise on Jan. 1. Per the city’s salary table, experienced grounds maintenance workers now make between roughly $37,000 and $44,000 thanks to a 5 percent pay bump included in the city’s latest agreement with AFSCME Local 127. 

Munguia of AFSCME has said the raises are appreciated but more are needed.  

“We have folks who work a grounds maintenance worker job who have to go and work another job after they finish our job to go and make ends meet,” she told VOSD last year. 

The post Past Decisions Complicate Efforts to Fill City Jobs Amid Pandemic Crunch  appeared first on Voice of San Diego.

A surge in coronavirus cases that clobbered San Diego during the holidays also hit a few of the city’s homeless shelters, setting off a scramble last week to isolate residents who had been staying in packed shelters.

Dozens of residents of shelters operated by Alpha Project and Father Joe’s Villages have for days stayed in party tents used as stopgap shelters, which providers have struggled to keep warm amid cold weather and a shortage of county-backed hotel rooms meant to provide a safe refuge.

The county says it added 40 hotel rooms to address rising demand for isolation spaces on Monday, days after 50 positive cases emerged at Alpha Project’s Barrio Logan and East Village tents and at two downtown shelters run by Father Joe’s Villages.

Yet, as of Wednesday, the city and Alpha Project said only two shelter residents who tested positive had moved into of one of the 137 county hotel rooms set aside for people who have tested positive or been exposed to COVID and lack a safe place to isolate.  Nearly 40 shelter residents remained in makeshift isolation spaces late Wednesday as part of a required 10-day isolation period before they can return to city-funded shelters.

County spokesman Tim McClain wrote in an email that many are expected to complete their isolation periods in the improvised shelters with regular communication between providers, the Housing Commission and the county “to ensure those in isolation are receiving proper treatment.”

City shelter providers have received training on how to safely isolate people who test positive and “are responding accordingly during this surge in cases,” McClain wrote.

The county began contacting hotel operators last week to try to expand its offerings, McClain said. He added that increased tourism has made it less desirable for hotel operators to serve as isolation hotels, complicating the county’s efforts to add rooms along with ongoing staffing challenges.

The county efforts to add rooms came more than a week after UC San Diego researchers on Dec. 18 warned a surge in COVID cases could be coming to San Diego following a spike in coronavirus detected in wastewater.

Results from this week’s round of testing at city shelters are expected soon. For now, the city has paused intakes at the Alpha Project and Father Joe’s shelters dealing with outbreaks while it conducts additional testing.

Shelters nationwide are grappling with the more transmissible omicron variant in congregate settings particularly vulnerable to outbreaks and where to move those who get COVID.

In San Diego and elsewhere, coronavirus surges have only increased longstanding calls by advocates and some medical experts to proactively move more vulnerable homeless people into hotel rooms during the pandemic – and to expand offerings for those who test positive for coronavirus. San Diego County for now expects to wind down its hotel program by March 31 and has already stopped moving in homeless San Diegans with underlying conditions who have not tested positive for coronavirus.

The city, county and shelter providers have hurried to address outbreaks before and in some cases, have struggled with hotel access.

The Convention Center shelter the city and county stood up in 2020 was hit with more than 200 cases last December. In late August 2021, nearly 100 homeless San Diegans staying in two Father Joe’s Villages shelters tested positive.

Father Joe’s reported after its August outbreak that it took as long as four days for some shelter residents who received positive test results to move from the temporary isolation areas.

Months later during a holiday surge, Father Joe’s said none of its shelter residents have moved from a makeshift isolation space into hotel rooms a week after many received positive results.

During the August outbreak, Father Joe’s put up an open-air outdoor isolation tent in a gated area outside its Paul Mirabile Center shelter in East Village that in recent days welcomed both Alpha Project and Father Joe’s residents who tested positive.

But by last Wednesday, Alpha Project program manager Jesse Miller said 22 Alpha Project clients were confirmed positive and Father Joe’s said it needed the space for its own residents after receiving a wave of its own positive test results that eventually totaled 28.

There also wasn’t availability in county hotel rooms.

So that night, Alpha Project and the Housing Commission turned to the shuttered indoor skydiving facility turned city-owned Homelessness Response Center steps away from the Father Joe’s isolation tent for overnight accommodations. Nearly two dozen Alpha Project clients who had tested positive spent the night in the former skydiving center on sleeping mats provided by Father Joe’s.

Miller said Alpha Project and the city’s Housing Commission hurried to find other options, eventually settling on a plan for the nonprofit to pay upfront for a party tent similar to the one use by Father Joe’s that could be placed in one of the city’s safe parking lots for homeless people living in cars.

In the days since, Miller and Alpha Project CEO Bob McElroy said the nonprofit has ferried those isolating back to its city shelters for showers, and hurried to ramp up meal service and heating at its new tent in the Aero Drive safe parking lot.

Housing Commission Executive Vice President Lisa Jones wrote in an email that the agency has agreed to reimburse Alpha Project for any purchases it’s rushed to make to “provide a supportive environment in the temporary spaces.”

Jones wrote that the city, Alpha Project and fellow nonprofit Jewish Family Service settled on the safe parking site because it offered access to restrooms, handwashing stations and controlled entry. Jones also said people living in vehicles who had been spending the night at the Aero Drive lot have been referred to open spaces at the city’s Mission Valley and Balboa Avenue safe parking locations.

Jones and leaders at Alpha Project and Father Joe’s Villages commended shelter staff tasked with responding to the surge in cases during the holidays and a time of already short staffing, a dynamic that the county has said has also throttled its hotel program. McElroy also praised the Housing Commission and shelter residents – including those who contracted COVID – who he said also stepped up during a crisis.

McElroy said he wished the city and county had better prepared for an expected holiday surge associated with the more transmissible omicron variant at a time when many nonprofit and local government employees take time off, exacerbating the staff shortages all have faced during the pandemic.

Instead, providers and the Housing Commission scrambled last week, he said.

“We knew that there was going to be a tsunami here and then we didn’t have any resources,” McElroy said.

John Brady, who once lived on the street and now serves on the leadership council overseeing the city’s progress on its homelessness plan, said he reached out to city and county officials before Christmas to inquire about their plans to protect shelter residents and address an expected increase in positive cases associated with the omicron variant.

Brady said he appreciated the responses he received from Jones and Hafsa Kaka, director of the city’s Homeless Strategies and Solutions Department, but that he was disappointed that that the city and county’s later response to the spike in cases seemed to reflect a lack of advance planning.

“We should have been ahead of the game,” Brady said. “We’ve been through this rodeo before.”

Kaka wrote in an email to VOSD that the city and county partnered to provide additional COVID testing starting after Thanksgiving and have activated protocols since then to ensure safety for shelter residents and those who test positive. Transportation to a county-operated hotel room has traditionally been part of that plan.

But Kaka and the county have said staffing challenges complicated matters.

“The rise in positive cases being seen throughout the San Diego region greatly impacts already limited staffing resources, both on the service provider and county public health teams. This has presented some challenges in transportation to and availability of county public health rooms,” Kaka wrote. “The city and (the Housing Commission) have worked around-the-clock with the service providers to ensure that there are options for isolation in the interim until county public health rooms are made available.”

Nathan Fletcher, chair of the county Board of Supervisors, said at a Monday press conference that the county recognized the need for more isolation rooms amid the spike in COVID cases in shelters and was hurrying to add more. But he said the county has continued to struggle to make sure they can properly serve residents staying in them.

“The challenge on those is not only getting the rooms, but getting them staffed,” Fletcher said.

The post Homeless Shelter Outbreaks Test Isolation Efforts appeared first on Voice of San Diego.

A new California law is forcing cities to cut down on food waste in landfills. To meet the requirement, San Diego cities are increasing costs on residents and businesses to launch a new waste collection program on the fly. 

The law, SB 1383, aims to cut down on the powerful planet-warming methane gas that largely comes from rotting food in the airtight domain of a landfill. While the San Diego region is woefully behind on meeting the Jan. 1 deadline to provide organic waste collection to all homes and businesses, a handful of cities raised rates in anticipation of the new, costly waste stream. 

Carlsbad just inked a new contract with franchise hauler Republic Services to take over waste collection services. Come this summer, residents will pay an extra $3.82 per month, a 15 percent increase, from $24.20 in 2021 to $28.02 in 2022. Carlsbad residents automatically get a trash cart and up to three recycling and green waste bins, the cost of which is lumped into one monthly rate. The majority of that cost increase is to process all this new organic material, said Jamie Wood, Carlsbad’s environmental management director. 

Now commercial businesses must stop throwing food waste into the trash too and instead throw it in with green waste and yard trimmings the city already collects. But Carlsbad is lowering the rate of that organic recycling program 20 percent from last year, and instead increasing rates on trash 16 percent. “We want to incentivize people to do the right thing by charging more for trash. It’s kind of like putting a (tax) on gasoline,” Wood said. “If we make organics recycling cheaper, then they’ll do it.” 

Chula Vista, which also contracts with Republic Services, is raising rates on homes by almost $3 on the smallest trash cart (32 gallons) and an extra dollar on the two other larger cart options. Encinitas, which contracts with private hauler EDCO, raised residential rates by $3.88 per month for organics recycling, a 25 percent increase.  

The League of California Cities, a statewide lobbying group for local governments, estimates 92 percent of California cities will raise solid waste and recycling rates between one and 20 percent in the next three years to comply with SB 1383.  

Not only does each city have to negotiate new rates to cover a new waste stream, but the region also needs infrastructure that can handle all that food waste, like the giant composting facility atop a mesa of the Otay Landfill launched by franchise hauler Republic Services. Local governments or private haulers, depending on the terms of the contract, have to provide countertop bins and large, green curbside carts for every apartment, home, restaurant, hotel and grocery store. And both cities and private haulers must hire new staff to audit every address and figure out who actually needs those extra bins, plus educate everyone on how to correctly recycle food waste in the first place.  

The new organics recycling law will cost the state almost $21 billion through 2030, according to a report by CalRecycle, a bit more than the $17 billion expected economic return. Republic Services estimated the rollout of the food waste recycling program in Chula Vista alone would cost the city $11 million, according to reporting by the San Diego Union Tribune. 

For residents in cities contracting with Republic Services, diverting food waste should be easy: throw food waste into the green, formerly yard waste-only, bin. The company will haul that waste to its compost facility at Otay Landfill where workers hand-pick out any stray trash.  

Then food waste mixed with mulch is laid out in long piles. Pipes run through each pile, pumping air via solar power into the food waste that’s capped with a camping tent-like substance called GORE-TEX. That GOR-TEX layer traps in all the good bacteria and controls food waste temperature and juices. Once fully built, Republic Services’ new composting facility will turn 60,000 tons of food waste into rich, organic plant food per year. 

Four days after the deadline to begin, the city is still planning the rollout of its full food waste recycling program. In responses to emailed questions, Ken Prue, deputy director for city of San Diego’s Environmental Services Department, said the city is working on a plan to implement the new organics recycling program to qualifying residences this summer, which includes doubling the frequency of collection and expanding the city’s foot print. The city has already ordered 43 new sanitation vehicles, hundreds of thousands of green organic waste carts and hire 40 more sanitation workers. Supply chain woes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic delayed shipments of those orders, however, Prue told ABC 10 News. The waste will end up at Miramar Landfill’s composting facility where yard waste and food scraps are already processed.

“It’s complicated but we’re charting new territory,” said Risa Baron, a spokesperson for Republic Services. “This is happening everywhere in the state. But the saving grace for all of us is that we have … a two year window to design and put these programs in place before fines get imposed.” 

CalRecycle, the state’s department of resources recycling and recovery, won’t start cracking down on local governments until 2024. It’s up to those same local governments to enforce the law on local businesses that generate edible food, like restaurants and supermarkets. That’s also when home and property owners could start facing fines if families and tenants are throwing too much food in the trash. 

“We really want to focus on behavior change in homes and businesses… That’s really what the state legislation is all about,” said Jessica Toth, who leads the Solana Center for Environmental Innovation, which contracts with cities for composting education and outreach. 

Jurisdictions knew about the demands of SB 1383 since its passage in 2016. Yet, the San Diego region seems to be scrambling. Toth surveyed the top five largest cities in California in 2019 and found San Diego households were left in the dust without food waste collection of any kind. Los Angeles and San Francisco had a separate waste stream; San Jose offered municipal waste sorting and Fresno allowed food waste to combine with yard trimmings.  

“It’s a tremendous amount of infrastructure that’s needed because we generate 1.66 million tons of organic material a year,” Toth said. “There’s definitely not a financial incentive … with the landfill being so cheap.” 

The new law requires jurisdictions to create a marketplace for the compost trash haulers create with collected and processed food waste. Cities will be required to purchase a portion of the compost their citizens create for landscaping and golf course application.    

Not only are residents now paying more for someone to dispose of their waste, they’re paying to buy a portion of it back. Put another way, tossing food into the trash is like burning cash. The best way to save on food waste is to not create it in the first place, Toth said.  

Corrections: This story has been updated with the correct name of the statewide lobbying group, the League of California Cities. 

This story has been updated to include information on the city of San Diego’s ongoing planning efforts to comply with SB 1383.

The post Cities Now Have to Collect Our Food Waste. The San Diego Region is Scrambling to Comply.  appeared first on Voice of San Diego.

Romelia Turner grew up in a house on 43rd and Market Street – a Mt. Hope home her parents purchased in 1972. 

But now she lives in Hemet because for years – since she moved out of her parents’ home – she couldn’t afford to live in the neighborhood in which she grew up. Before moving to Hemet, she lived in Spring Valley, El Cajon, La Mesa, and other parts of the county.  

While Turner has long been priced out of southeastern San Diego, her heart remains there. She returns several times a week to attend service at the same church she grew up attending and to organize in the community through her job at Pillars of the Community.  

In 2016, Turner helped organize and rally the community to elect City Councilwoman Monica Montgomery Steppe. But she couldn’t cast her own vote for Montgomery Steppe because she no longer lived in the city’s District 4. 

“That broke my heart,” Turner said. “I’m not even voting with my people. My ballot doesn’t look like your ballot. These aren’t my people.” 

Turner isn’t the only former resident of southeastern San Diego and District 4 who has found herself in that situation. 

Southeastern San Diego has long been the cultural and political heart of the Black community in San Diego. But several forces, like housing costs, over-policing and a chronic underinvestment in the community, have made it increasingly difficult for Black people, especially, to remain there. Over the past several decades, Black people with roots in District 4 have up and left, moving east to places like Spring Valley, Lemon Grove, El Cajon and La Mesa, or leaving the county or state entirely.  

The city council district that once consolidated Black political power has seen decreasing numbers of Black voters over the past few decades, as the population has dispersed and Black voters found themselves in east county. There, many feel disenfranchised – that their vote wouldn’t help them elect someone who cared about the issues important to them.  

Mychal Odom, a Black studies professor at several local colleges, is an organizer with the International People’s Democratic Uhurr Movement, a group based in southeastern San Diego, but he lives in Spring Valley. Odom also organized for Montgomery Steppe, but couldn’t vote for her because he lives outside the city.  

“It’s a real issue that the Black population has been pushed out of the district to some places where they overwhelmingly don’t have representation, like Spring Valley,” Odom said. The only place he feels represented where he can vote is on the La Mesa-Spring Valley School Board, he said. 

But that may change soon. On Saturday, the San Diego County Independent Redistricting Commission voted to move forward with two draft maps that would allow many Black voters who have been forced out of the city’s District 4 to at least be able to vote with a higher concentration of Black voters at the county level. 

The proposals would increase the Black population in a supervisorial district to more than 9 percent, higher than any of the current districts. The new district would also include significant numbers of Asian American and Pacific Islanders, Latinos and immigrant and refugee populations that have similar values and voting patterns as Black people. The precise layout of the district varies slightly between the draft maps, but it would broadly bring neighborhoods in District 4 together with City Heights, Lemon Grove, Spring Valley, Rancho San Diego, La Mesa and El Cajon. 

“We’re never going to have the numbers of population where we’re actually the highest population,” said Laila Aziz, director of operations for Pillars of the Community, one of the organizations that proposed the new supervisorial district. “What we need is to have trusting, meaningful relationships with other folks. We need our allies.” 

‘People are Being Pushed Out’

The city’s historical center of Black culture and politics, District 4, has been undergoing a demographic shift for decades that has meant fewer Black people have been able to stay in the district – and in the city of San Diego as a whole.  

Abdul Raqeeb, who was born and raised in San Diego, said when he returned to San Diego four years ago after spending 10 years in prison, his community had changed dramatically. 

“When I go to the streets, I’m still looking for people I know, but they’re not here anymore,” Raqeeb said. 

Raqeeb’s mom left San Diego to buy a house in Atlanta.  

“You just get to a point in life where you want to own something, not be renting,” he said. Raqeeb is still living in San Diego, but he said it’s a struggle. He has two jobs, but money is tight.  

“San Diego looks all beautiful, but it’s not,” he said. 

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The population of San Diego County has shifted and changed over the past 30 years. This map showcases the distribution of Black residents throughout the county by Census tract between 1990 and 2020, with data sourced from IPUMS/NHGIS and Census population reports. / Graphic by Cam Rodriguez

Housing costs have been a major factor. A recent study by online real estate marketplace company Zillow found that San Diego is the worst place in the country for Black renters.  

Up until the 1970s, the city’s Black population had been growing for decades, Odom said. Many people came for the economic opportunities that existed in shipyards, the aircraft industry and other forms of government and military employment. But as housing prices have increased over the past few decades, there was less opportunity. 

“San Diego is a very hard place to live if you are a working-class Black person,” Odom said.  

Odom has lived in San Diego since 1997, but he left for a few years to attend school and for work.  

“We came back to a much smaller place to live and a much higher cost of living than when we left,” he said. Odom moved to Spring Valley, because it was more affordable and still close to southeastern San Diego. 

And as other parts of the city become increasingly unaffordable, southeastern San Diego has also started to undergo gentrification, where a lower-income neighborhood’s character changes as wealthier people move into the area. 

Longtime southeastern resident and activist Robert Tambuzi said that cultural displacement stems from inequitable economic opportunities and lending practices making it more difficult for Black residents to afford housing in the neighborhood.  

“There’s a conscientious effort to get rid of and dismantle Black enclaves of power,” Tambuzi said. “It’s a violence that doesn’t shed blood, but creates the same problem, where you don’t have ownership, you don’t have equity.” 

But there are other issues that have been driving people from the neighborhood. Chronic underinvestment in infrastructure, schools and more in the area means neighborhoods like Mountain View and Emerald Hills, home for decades to Black doctors, dentists and other professionals of high socioeconomic status, are no longer appealing.  

Policing and incarceration have also factored into Black people leaving southeastern San Diego, said Malcolme Morgan, who now lives in La Mesa.  

Morgan shifts in policing in the 1990s and early 2000s, put many Black men from certain generations in jail, removing them from neighborhoods with many homes owned by Black and Brown people. It made it difficult for parents and grandparents to pass on homes, causing further financial struggles and often resulting in Black homeowners selling homes instead of passing them on to the next generation.  

After Morgan was incarcerated, he struggled to find housing because of his records. Morgan eventually got into low-income housing in La Mesa, but he too feels more connected to the community and politics in southeastern San Diego.  

LaWana Richmond, a former resident of the Skyline and Paradise hills area, who also ran for the San Diego Unified School Board, moved to La Mesa in January. 

“There are a lot of people who have moved from San Diego to La Mesa, to El Cajon because of affordability,” Richmond said. “And there are a lot of people who have left San Diego altogether during the pandemic because it was expensive.” 

Richmond said the pandemic exacerbated the issue, since so many people in hospitality and tourism – an industry where many Black and Latino people work – was hit so hard. 

The result of all these factors, Tambuzi said, is that he’s noticed a lot more people walking their dogs in the neighborhood – a classic sign that more middle- and upper-income White people have moved in.  

A New Voice at the County

After seeing the changing demographics in the region, several community organizations – including Pillars of the Community, Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, the Majdal Center and the Asian Solidarity Collective – advocated for the county’s redistricting commission to create a new county supervisorial district.  

They envisioned a district that encompassed the areas as far east as the city of El Cajon, Lemon Grove, La Mesa and Spring Valley. The proposed district would go south to include District 4 communities like Paradise Hills, Skyline and Encanto and west to include City Heights and some neighboring areas. 

“The hope really is this new district will be a refugee, immigrant, people of color, working class district that for the first time has those folks at the forefront,” said Jeanine Erikat, policy associate with PANA. “What we’re proposing is something that you’ve never seen before. 

Erikat said she saw similar trends among refugee communities – that even if they lived in El Cajon, major parts of their lives remained in City Heights. But right now those areas are divided between county districts.  

And while the refugee and immigrant communities have some unique issues at the county, like language access and how the county spends refugee resettlement funds, there’s also overlap between communities on the issues important to them, Erikat said.  

Housing affordability impacts the refugee population just as it has communities in the city’s District 4. Refugees who once settled in City Heights have been pushed into La Mesa and El Cajon.  

Policing, too, is a concern for the different communities, especially East African refugees and their children.  

“We’re still in an anti-Black society.” Erikat said.  

Ramah Awad, a program manager with the Majdal Center, an adovcacy group for San Diego’s Arab population, told the county’s redistricting commission Saturday that she identified her Arab community as a subset of a broader community, that included Black communities and other immigrant and non-White communities. 

“El Cajon should not be linked with rural areas,” Awad told commissioners. “It has different demographics. El Cajon has historically seen high levels of refugee resettlement.” 

Morgan also noted that there is a religious connection with Muslim refugees, in particular. Black Muslims account for about a fifth of all U.S. Muslims, according to Pew Research Center. And nearly half of Black Muslims are converts to Islam, which means they have some of the highest conversion rates to the religion in the country.  

But especially for the children and grandchildren of East African refugees, Morgan said, the alignment is a no-brainer. 

“They are aware of their Blackness,” he said. “America won’t let them forget that.” 

While the county’s redistricting commission has decided to move forward for now with maps that include the new district, not everyone is happy with the shift.  

El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells, for example, said at Saturday’s hearing that he had “some concerns” about the map because it separated El Cajon from its neighbors, like Santee and Alpine.  

While many Black people in the proposed district think its creation would be important, some caution it wouldn’t ensure Black people in the county can have true representation on their priority issues. 

Tambuzi said expanding the number of county districts would allow for more representation for all the communities in the coalition. Richmond also encouraged people to reach out to other elected officials who may be sympathetic to their concerns, and not just count on their representative. 

“They need to be working to change the entire system, not just working to change a district,” Tambuzi said. “The reality of the situation is you can spend all your time focusing on whether this map is good, but unless we change the overall system, those in power will just keep us fighting over the crumbs that fall off the political table.” 

The post Pushed Out of San Diego by Housing Costs, Black Voters Fight for County Representation   appeared first on Voice of San Diego.

The local Catholic diocese, as well as other dioceses across the state, will allow students at parochial schools to use personal belief exemptions to avoid COVID vaccinations, despite a recent vaccine mandate put in place by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Back in October, Newsom issued a mandate that students at all public and private schools would have to be vaccinated for COVID-19. It appeared, at the time, that personal belief exemptions would not be allowed ­– since they are not allowed for other mandatory vaccines in California.

But upon a close reading of the law, Catholic leaders discovered the prohibition on personal belief exemptions does not apply to Newsom’s mandate, said Kevin Eckery, a spokesman for the local diocese.

“The list of required vaccinations can be expanded by the Governor and State (sic) health authorities, but if the list is expanded without legislative approval, the law requires that any mandate include a medical exemption and a personal belief exemption,” Catholic leaders wrote in a memo to local diocese schools, obtained by Voice of San Diego.

Church officials appear to be right. The state’s Health and Safety Code says public health officials can add vaccines to the state’s mandatory list, but “only if exemptions are allowed for both medical reasons and personal beliefs.”

Catholic leaders could prohibit personal belief exemptions for students, Eckery acknowledged, as San Diego Unified and many other school districts and private schools have done.

“Sure. Because we’re a private school we could say, ‘in order to attend our schools you have to do these things.’ But we’re not going to,” he said.

Instead, church leaders are walking a line between promoting COVID safety measures and keeping parents happy.

“The question of Covid mandates divides our parent communities as it divides our societies,” church leaders wrote in the memo. “We hope that this course of action by the diocese balances the need to protect the health of our students, teachers and staffs with the rights of parents to decide issues vital to their children.”

Some 15,000 students attend Catholic schools in San Diego County, Eckery said, and there are roughly 225,000 Catholic school students statewide.

Eckery said bishops across the state are aware of the law surrounding personal belief exemptions. He is aware of several other dioceses that have issued guidance to their schools that personal belief exemptions will be allowed, he said.

After Newsom announced the mandate, many Catholic school parents were anxious to learn what the church would do.

“We as parents believe it’s our sacred right – and we think the Catholic Church should back this up – to make health decisions for our children,” one parent told KUSI News.

Pope Francis has urged Catholics worldwide to get vaccinated, but many remain hesitant because research that led to the vaccine used cells derived from aborted fetuses.

“It appears that severe illness due to COVID-19 is uncommon among children,” the website for the American Academy of Pediatrics Reads. However, as more adults have been vaccinated, children are beginning to make up a higher percentage of those who contract the virus. And they are still able to pass it on to adults, who may have not been vaccinated or may be immunocompromised.

If the legislature does vote to add the COVID-19 vaccine to its list of mandatory vaccines, then Catholic schools would no longer be able to allow families to receive personal belief exemptions. But church leaders think that’s unlikely.

“The consensus among legislative analysts with whom we have spoken is that it is unlikely that the legislature will give legislative approval for a mandate without a personal belief exemption,” the memo reads. “Thus any parent would be able to seek a personal belief exemption for the Covid mandate.”

Newsom’s office neither confirmed nor refuted the local diocese’s interpretation of the law.

“Vaccines are how we end this pandemic, and we’re treating the COVID-19 vaccine just like other vaccines that students are required to get to go to school,” wrote Newsom spokesman Alex Stack in an email. “As we head into the winter months, it’s more important than ever for our children to get protected against this deadly virus.”

The post Local Catholic Diocese: Students Can Evade COVID-19 Vaccine With Personal Belief Exemption appeared first on Voice of San Diego.

Over the last couple of weeks, the Sherman Heights Community Center has hosted several events in honor of Diá de Los Muertos, or Day of the Dead.

The holiday, which runs from Nov. 1 to Nov. 2 every year, celebrates the lives of those who have passed away. Families build altars with photos of their loved ones decorated with candles, sugar skulls, marigold flowers and food. It is a beloved tradition in Mexican culture.

At the community center, different local groups and organizations set up their own altars, but residents can also contribute by adding photos or personal notes to a community altar displayed at the space.

“Honoring the tradition year after year and having the space to create altars is very meaningful for people,” said Daniela Kelly, executive director of the Sherman Heights Community Center.

The center began hosting its Diá de Los Muertos celebration in 1994 and has since grown to include a number of events such as craft workshops, food tasting and more.

I attended Tuesday’s Muertos Candlelight Procession hosted by the community center and visited some of the altars displayed by residents outside of their homes.

The post Photos: Sherman Heights Residents, Community Celebrate Diá De Los Muertos appeared first on Voice of San Diego.