Author Archives: Public Press staff

By Alissa Greenberg, Bay Nature On a Sunday afternoon in midwinter, tendrils of thin afternoon light drift through the branches of the oldest avocado tree in Santa Cruz County, illuminating a courtyard carpeted with deep green grass and framed by walls of centuries-old adobe. At a picnic table under the tree, Bella Kressman leads the […]

By Angela Johnston & Marissa Ortega-Welch, KALW/Crosscurrents In Alameda County, which has some of the highest lead levels in the country, an energetic public health nurse helps families after their child has been lead poisoned. But her work is a stopgap solution. What’s the answer to preventing leading poisoning before it starts? In her job […]

By Angela Johnston & Marissa Ortega-Welch, KALW/Crosscurrents The numbers show the lead poisoning problem in the Bay Area is bad but is what we know just the tip of the iceberg? Lead-poisoned kids make their way into the public health system if their doctors order blood tests. These blood tests typically happen when kids are […]

By Angela Johnston & Marissa Ortega-Welch, KALW/Crosscurrents We meet Souleika Dirieh and Tarek Cherif at the hummus factory they own in San Leandro. Their 3-year-old daughter Kawkeb loves playing outdoors. When we visit, she runs between empty food crates, deep in a game of hide-and-go-seek with her mom. Inside the factory, the Cherifs and their […]

By Marissa Ortega-Welch and Angela Johnston, KALW/Crosscurrents Public health nurse Diep Tran thought she would be out of her job by now. “Our plan was for lead poisoning to be gone, eradicated by 2010, and yet we are still getting too many cases,” she says. This is the woman who manages all the severe lead […]

By Sam Harnett, KQED News/The California Report Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in apology mode over how Facebook profile data was used in the 2016 election. Wednesday night on CNN, Zuckerberg said the company was not on top of data security like it should have been. Here’s what happened. Facebook has tons and tons of […]

By David Washburn, EdSource California in recent years has arguably become the best state in the nation at holding school districts accountable for their suspension rates — but a number of districts are still lagging considerably when it comes to addressing suspension disparities among specific groups of students and supporting alternatives to traditional discipline, according […]

By Craig Miller, KQED News Fix The spotlight will be on a San Francisco courtroom Wednesday, when climate science finally gets its day in court. The cities of Oakland and San Francisco are suing several oil companies for the costs of adapting to climate change impacts, such as rising sea levels that threaten to flood […]

By Lee Romney, EdSource Ever since the Oakland Unified School District launched its African-American Male Achievement office eight years ago people have been asking, “What about the girls?” Among them were community leaders like Nzingha Dugas, who under contract to the district for many years ran academic enrichment programs and a basketball league that she […]

By Farida Jhabvala Romero, KQED/CALmatters Amparo Cid traces her work as an attorney helping recent immigrants and their families in the Central Valley fight injustices and potential deportation to her experience as a child in 1994. That was when California voters passed Proposition 187, an initiative that denied undocumented immigrants access to publicly funded services. […]