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Tag: child

  • An ‘invisible’ need: Diapers top the holiday wish list for many LA parents

    An ‘invisible’ need: Diapers top the holiday wish list for many LA parents

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    Maria’s holiday list was more about essentials than wishes. Coats for her children as the weather turns cold. Blankets to keep them warm. A few presents to put under the Christmas tree. And a box of diapers.

    “I just want my kids to be happy,” said Maria, a single mother of three boys, who asked that only her first name be published.

    But providing for her baby has been challenging. She hasn’t been able to afford enough diapers. So she improvised, and learned to stretch her limited supply. She kept them on even when they filled up or left his bottom bare at home. Sometimes she wrapped him in cotton cleaning cloths to keep him dry, washing them by hand.

    But earlier this year, Maria found out about a program through his older brother’s Los Angeles Unified School District campus that helped her. She found a way to receive free diapers, formula and other essential items directly from the school, goods provided by an L.A. nonprofit called Baby2Baby. She received coats, shoes, blankets and for Christmas, bags of presents, wrapped and ready.

    “I don’t have to worry about diapers anymore or the formula or them being hungry or being cold or not having clothes or blankets,” Maria said. “Baby2Baby has made my life so much lighter than it was before.”

    Diapers are a basic need for families with young children like Maria’s, on par with shelter, food and heat. Yet even as diaper prices have soared 22% since 2018, most existing government aid programs — including WIC — do not cover them. And while low-income parents can use their monthly government assistance to pay for diapers, the $75 average monthly cost to diaper an infant can take an outsize portion of their benefit, sometimes up to 40%. Because low-income families tend to purchase diapers in smaller, more expensive quantities rather than in bulk, they often end up paying far more.

    Half of families in the United States report they cannot afford enough diapers to keep their children clean and dry — up from 1 in 3 in 2017, according to recent data from the National Diaper Bank Network. One in 4 families reported missing work or school in the past year because they did not have enough diapers to drop their child off at a childcare program, most of which require a daily supply provided by parents.

    California has been a national leader in helping to make diapers more affordable for families, said Jennifer Randles, a professor of sociology at Fresno State University who studies diaper need. In 2018, many welfare recipients in the state became eligible for an additional $30 monthly voucher for diapers. And in 2020, California joined a wave of states in rescinding the sales taxes on diapers.

    Still, the need persists for many California families, and diaper banks like Baby2Baby provide a lifeline, as well as a symbolic importance.

    “The very existence of food banks sends the message that food is a basic need we should all have access to,” said Randles. “Diaper banks send the message that diapers are an essential need that we should all have access to. For a lot of people its very invisible.”

    Baby2Baby, headquartered in Culver City, is one of the country’s largest nonprofit distributors of diapers and other essential items for families. This year alone, the organization has distributed 40 million diapers across the country, all of which passed through one of its three L.A. warehouses.

    Every day, trucks bearing diapers, wipes, clothing, car seats and toys fan out across L.A., stocking the shelves of more than 500 partner organizations, including shelters, clinics, food pantries, and every school district in the county. For some trucks, it’s the beginning of a much longer journey, to partners who serve needy families in all 50 states.

    Baby2Baby launched 12 years ago in its current form, the brainchild of two women — one a model and one a corporate lawyer — who wanted to fill an essential need in the community. They started asking local social-service nonprofits what they needed most.

    “They all came back to us with the same thing. They said that they needed diapers,” said co-CEO Norah Weinstein, the former lawyer. “It was not what we were expecting.”

    Diapers were crucial to every other service the groups wanted to provide, the nonprofits told her. “They couldn’t get mothers to come to wellness visits, they couldn’t get mothers to have their children attend school, they couldn’t get them to come parenting classes. They couldn’t do any of it when their child was screaming in a dirty diaper.”

    Twelve years later, the organization has distributed 375 million items to children in homeless shelters, domestic violence programs, foster care, hospitals and underserved schools across the country, including 170 million diapers. Last year, the organization raised $70 million in cash and in-kind donations.

    When requests increased by 500% during the pandemic, Baby2Baby started manufacturing its own diapers, which Weinstein said saved 80% over the retail cost and increased distribution fivefold. Still, Weinstein said, they are careful not to congratulate themselves.

    “We feel like we’re just scratching the surface,” she said. This year alone, Baby2Baby received requests for 1.3 billion diapers.

    For the more than 500 L.A. organizations that distribute Baby2Baby items, the service is often a crucial part of their service.

    L.A. Unified, for example, has given out 15 million items donated by Baby2Baby over the past 11 years, including diapers for the young siblings of students.

    “This reflects on one hand a beautiful demonstration of kindness and strategic contribution,” said Supt. Alberto M. Carvalho. “On the other hand, it is a reflection of the challenge and poverty levels that many of our kids and families face.”

    Jimmy Douglas, director of community engagement at LA Family Housing, a nonprofit serving 13,000 people that helps find housing and other services, said that about half of the items it distributes were provided by Baby2Baby.

    Each month, Douglas said , he sends a list of requests to Baby2Baby, including diapers, formula, toys and car seats. The lists can grow long — like the 25 car seats the organization asked for this month. It also stocks Baby2Baby diapers and wipes at each of its housing sites for the families with children who rely on them.

    During the holidays, the donations can take on a special significance for families panicked about how to make the season special for their children, despite a lack of resources.

    “Families are experiencing more challenges and more expectations” at this time of the year, said Douglas. “Kids are in school, and they talk about what their friends are getting.” The added cost of special holiday meals and gifts adds up quickly.

    Earlier this month, Baby2Baby donated 800 toys for LA Family Housing during a “Winter Wonderland’’ event — a fraction of the 330,000 toys Baby2Baby distributed this year. Children from more than 300 families were invited to walk through Santa’s wish site, where they were able to pick out a gift, which was wrapped and given to their parents.

    “It’s challenging for families to provide the things they feel they need, and that’s why we go into high gear at this time of year,” said Douglas. “They can continue to focus on their everyday needs, and we can focus on the special things.”

    This article is part of The Times’ early childhood education initiative, focusing on the learning and development of California children from birth to age 5. For more information about the initiative and its philanthropic funders, go to latimes.com/earlyed.

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    Jenny Gold

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  • Road rage shooting in Lancaster leaves 4-year-old dead

    Road rage shooting in Lancaster leaves 4-year-old dead

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    A 4-year-old boy was killed Friday evening in Lancaster after a man shot into a family’s vehicle during a road rage incident, according to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.

    During the incident, the boy was seated in the back and struck by gunfire in the upper body, police said. The child’s parents rushed him to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

    Deputies from the Lancaster sheriff’s station responded to a call of a shooting victim at the 44600 block of Sierra Highway at 7:29 p.m. Investigators began working on the case and found the suspect’s vehicle near the scene.

    A 29-year-old Black man and a 27-year-old white woman, who were not identified, were arrested on suspicion of murder. Police said there were no other suspects.

    Police reported that the suspects abruptly maneuvered in front of the family’s car near Sierra Highway and East Avenue J, initiating a pursuit through several side streets.

    While being followed, the driver of the family’s car slowed his vehicle, prompting the suspects to stop alongside the passenger side of the victim’s car and begin shooting, a Sheriff’s Department official said.

    No one else was hurt during the incident.

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    Anthony De Leon

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  • Man sexually assaulted child after sneaking into Culver City home, police say

    Man sexually assaulted child after sneaking into Culver City home, police say

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    A child was sexually assaulted when police say a man entered a family’s Culver City home in the middle of the night.

    Culver City Police are still searching for the suspect, and are asking for the public’s help identifying the perpetrator. The man was captured on video leaving the area of the child’s Blair Hills home, according to a press release.

    He was described as an average height man, wearing dark colored clothing and a beanie with white shoes.

    Police in Culver City are searching for this man in connection with the Dec. 2 sexual assault of a minor.

    (Culver City Police Dept.)

    Police said the man entered the child’s home around 2 a.m. Dec. 2, and left at around 7 a.m. after sexually assaulting the child. The family reported the crime just before 8 a.m., police said.

    Police did not disclose the age or gender of the victim, but KTLA reported that the child was a 12-year-old girl.

    Parents of the girl spoke to KTLA, saying they learned of the crime when their daughter woke them up wanting to call the police. She told them the man threatened her to stay quiet.

    “She’s been the most protective mother over our kids, but this can happen right under her eyes, while she’s asleep,” the girl’s father said of her mother, in an interview with KTLA.

    “We want to assure the Culver City community that your safety and well-being is our top priority,” police said in a statement. “Culver City Police investigators are utilizing all available resources and are working tirelessly to identify and locate the suspect involved in this crime.”

    Police asked anyone with information about the incident to contact Lt. Ryan Thompson at (310) 253-6302.

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    Grace Toohey

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  • Child arrested in 'swatting' plot that terrorized Orange County synagogues

    Child arrested in 'swatting' plot that terrorized Orange County synagogues

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    The FBI arrested a child Tuesday in connection with dozens of “swatting” incidents targeting synagogues throughout the nation this summer — including two in Orange County.

    The agency did not provide the minor’s age, gender or name. The juvenile was taken into custody at home, said spokesperson Laura Eimiller, but the FBI did not identify the city.

    The practice of “swatting” refers to when an individual or group of people intentionally misinform law enforcement of a fake threat so that authorities respond to a specified location with tactical units or SWAT teams.

    Authorities say the juvenile suspect was arrested on suspicion of two such incidents at Orange County synagogues.

    Congregation B’nai Israel in Tustin was evacuated after being targeted with a swatting call on July 22.

    Police also responded to a fake bomb threat in Fullerton on Aug. 12. Law enforcement could be seen entering Temple Beth Tikvah about 45 minutes into a Saturday morning Shabbat service that was streamed on Facebook.

    About two minutes later, Rabbi Mati Kirschenbaum asked templegoers to evacuate the building.

    Those were just two of the dozens of hoax threats allegedly made against religious, educational and public institutions across the country this summer.

    Authorities allege the minor suspect helped a group suspected of reporting false threats against at least 25 synagogues in 13 states between July and August.

    The FBI says the juvenile created the server that hosted the swatting network. That server, which has since been taken down, was a safe space for extremist activity, including “the glorification of highly publicized mass killers,” according to the agency.

    “The false swatting threats made in this case drained law enforcement resources and caused a negative financial impact on local communities,” an FBI statement said. “Evidence has shown that making false threats can cause significant distress to victims and can cause physical injury to first responders or other victims.”

    The Orange County’s district attorney’s office is expected to bring charges against the suspect, according to the FBI.

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    Andrew J. Campa

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  • Opinion: Same hospital, same injury, same child, same day: Why did one ER visit cost thousands more?

    Opinion: Same hospital, same injury, same child, same day: Why did one ER visit cost thousands more?

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    The Kaiser Family Foundation recently reported that the annual cost of family health insurance jumped to nearly $24,000 this year, the greatest increase in a decade. While insurance executives and employers may cite a plethora of reasons, one of the chief culprits is lack of oversight over the Wild West of healthcare prices.

    My friend encountered a dramatic example of this last year after her 4-year-old daughter had the misfortune of suffering the same injury twice in the same day.

    The girl’s parents were getting her ready for school one morning when, as her hand was pulled through a shirt sleeve, she experienced severe pain. They took her to the children’s emergency department down the road from their home in the Bay Area, where she was diagnosed with “nursemaid’s elbow” or, more technically, a “radial head subluxation.” Common in young children, whose ligaments are looser than adults’, the partial dislocation is straightforward to diagnose and treat. A simple maneuver of the elbow put it back in place in seconds.

    After coming home from school that afternoon, my friend’s daughter was playing with her babysitter when her elbow got out of place again. They went back to the same emergency department and went through the same steps with another doctor.

    My friend, who is fortunate enough to have good insurance and the means to pay her share, knew the bills wouldn’t be cheap. What she wasn’t expecting was such a stark illustration of the arbitrary nature of medical billing.

    While the bill for the first visit was $3,561, the second was $6,056. Same child, same hospital, same insurance, same diagnosis, same procedure, same day — and yet the price was different by not just a few dollars or even a few hundred dollars, but nearly double.

    How do we make sense of this? How can a patient be charged such wildly different prices for the same treatment on the same day?

    Emergency room billing consists of hospital fees and professional services fees. The hospital fees include a “facility fee” that is part of every emergency room visit and coded at one of five levels. Level 1 is the simplest — someone needing a prescription, for example — while Level 5 is the most complicated, for problems such as heart attacks and strokes that require significant hospital resources. And of course there can be additional hospital fees for X-rays, medications and the like, which weren’t necessary in the case of my friend’s daughter.

    The professional services fees are for the emergency physician and other providers such as radiologists. In this case, there were no fees for professionals other than the emergency room doctor.

    But the itemized charges showed the two visits were billed completely differently. The first was charged a Level 1 facility fee and a Level 3 professional fee. And the bill tacked on additional fees, including hospital and professional charges for taking care of the patient’s injured joint.

    The second visit, meanwhile, was charged a Level 2 facility fee and a Level 4 professional fee, both higher than that morning. But in contrast to the earlier visit, no other charges appeared.

    Why was the same injury coded as more complex and expensive to treat the second time than the first? Why did the coding and billing company decide to charge for additional services for the first visit but not the second?

    I know both of the physicians who treated my daughter’s friend; they work in the same group, use the same billing and coding company, and charge the same rates. So the different doctors don’t explain the discrepancy. In my practice, even treating physicians have no access to information about how billing for our services is determined.

    My friend and I contacted the hospital’s billing department repeatedly, but they proved unable to provide any rational explanation.

    Unfortunately, this isn’t new. About a decade ago, I published a series of studies showing how arbitrary medical billing can be. Hospitals charged fees ranging from $10 to $10,169 for a cholesterol test; $1,529 to $182,995 for an appendicitis hospitalization without complications; and $3,296 to $37,227 for a normal vaginal birth.

    Only uninsured patients are asked to pay these sticker prices. But despite the “discounts” granted to insured patients through their insurance companies, these charges end up sneaking into higher premiums and other costs. Medical bills are responsible for about 59% of U.S. bankruptcies.

    There are few certainties in life, but one of them is that we will all need healthcare at some point. And another, at least for those of us living in America, is that we have no idea what it will cost or why. This would never be tolerated in any other industry.

    What can we do about it? Here’s where we could benefit from a government agency like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which helps regulate banks and other financial entities that perpetrate what have been called “injustices against everyday Americans.” We need someone to regulate the injustices inflicted on Americans every day at the hands of the healthcare system too. Recent efforts by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice to police healthcare mergers and address other anticompetitive behavior in the industry could also help.

    More government regulation and oversight won’t address the more fundamental problem that we keep trying to treat healthcare as a market good, which it clearly isn’t. But it could help ensure that treating a minor injury one afternoon doesn’t cost twice as much as it did that morning.

    Renee Y. Hsia is a professor of emergency medicine and health policy at UC San Francisco as well as a Soros fellow and a Public Voices fellow at the OpEd Project.

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    Renee Y. Hsia

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  • Parents find stickers on their kids. They say a South El Monte teacher was putting “calming patches” on them

    Parents find stickers on their kids. They say a South El Monte teacher was putting “calming patches” on them

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    Preschool students at a head start school in South El Monte thought a teacher was rewarding them with colorful stickers she placed on their bodies, but parents say they were actually mood-calming patches fixed on their children without their consent.

    Parents at Options for Learning head start said they noticed behavioral changes in their children over the last several weeks, including erratic mood swings and changes in their sleep pattern, which they believe are caused by the patches.

    In a statement, Options for Learning said they met with a parent of a student and fired a school employee in response to the incident.

    “The safety and well-being of the children in our programs are at the core of all we do,” the statement said. “Our investigation is ongoing, and an incident report has been submitted to [the California State Community Care Licensing], which will conduct its own investigation. We are reinforcing child safety with all our teachers and classroom staff. We will be meeting with other parents in the class to address their concerns.”

    The controversy began Nov. 15 when a grandfather picked up his grandson from the head start school and noticed something on the boy’s back, according to parents who shared details of the incident in a group chat.

    The boy’s mother noticed a strong herbal aroma on the patch, and shared a picture of it with the other parents.

    Another parent, Stephanie Rodriguez, received the picture in the group chat, and showed the picture to her 4-year-old son Ethan and his face lit up when he recognized it.

    “His face was like an addict’s face,” Rodriguez said. “He said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the sticker. That’s the koala sticker.’”

    He pointed to his foot and said his teacher would put it there and take it off before the end of the school day.

    The California Department of Social Services, the state agency that licenses child care facilities, confirmed they are investigating the South El Monte head start, but could not comment on the ongoing investigation.

    The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said it was aware of the parent’s complaints, which have been compiled in a report and assigned to a detective. In a statement, the department said it cannot comment about the investigation.

    This was not an isolated incident, according to parents. Their children recognized pictures of the patches when the parents would show them on their phones. Some children even grabbed their parent’s phones and tried to smell the picture, according to Rodriguez.

    The specific brand of patch the children recognized, Zen Patch Mood Calming Stickers, are promoted as including essential oils meant to calm children, and the product claims the patches are all-natural. Online advertisement for the patches describe them as “safe, effective and chemical free.” The online reviews are mixed, with some reviewers saying the patches help regulate moods and others calling them a “complete waste of money.”

    Fox 11 News first reported on the incident at Options for Learning.

    But many parents said they noted red flags leading up to this incident.

    Rodriguez said that her son fell at school earlier this year and hit his head, but staff didn’t immediately call her, and instead let him take a nap. When she asked the staff why no one called her they said that a teacher advised against it.

    “I said that was the wrong decision,” Rodriguez said.

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    Nathan Solis

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  • Man and child swept into ocean at Half Moon Bay amid ‘sneaker wave’ warnings

    Man and child swept into ocean at Half Moon Bay amid ‘sneaker wave’ warnings

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    A 54-year-old man was swept into the ocean with a young girl on Saturday afternoon at Half Moon Bay, spurring a search by air and boat crews.

    The 5-year-old girl was recovered at Martin’s Beach by San Mateo County Fire personnel and taken to a nearby hospital, but U.S. Coast Guard crews were still searching for the man as of Sunday morning. The Coast Guard said in a statement that it did not have information about the condition of the rescued girl.

    The National Weather Service warned this weekend that a broad stretch of the California coast from Point Reyes to Big Sur is at risk of “sneaker waves” that can sweep across beaches without warning, pulling people into the sea and moving logs and other heavy objects that can crush people. It urged everyone to stay out of the ocean and warned that people could be yanked into the water from jetties, rocks and beaches.

    The U.S. Coast Guard launched its search on Saturday after receiving a report about the incident at 1:20 p.m., dispatching a 47-foot motor lifeboat and a helicopter to the area, according to the agency. An 87-foot patrol boat was also sent to Half Moon Bay on Saturday night.

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    Emily Alpert Reyes

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  • Post-affirmative action, Asian American families are more stressed than ever about college admissions

    Post-affirmative action, Asian American families are more stressed than ever about college admissions

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    The admissions consultant described what it takes to get into an elite college: Take 10 to 20 Advanced Placement courses. Create a “showstopper project.”

    Asian American students need to be extremely strategic in how they present themselves, “to avoid anti-Asian discrimination,” the consultant, Sasha Chada of Ivy Scholars, said at the October webinar to an audience of mostly Asian parents and students.

    Edward Yen, who doesn’t consider himself a “tiger parent,” wondered what extreme accomplishments his 11-year-old daughter will need to get into USC — considered a relative shoo-in back in the 1990s, when he attended.

    Parents and students at an annual college and career fair at Temple City High School.

    (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

    “I appreciated the honesty,” Yen said of Chada’s presentation, which was co-hosted by the Los Angeles County Asian American Employees Assn. and the nonprofit Faith and Community Empowerment.

    In the first college application season since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, Asian American students are more stressed out than ever. Race-conscious admissions were widely seen to have disadvantaged them, as borne out by disparities in the test scores of admitted students — but many feel that race will still be a hidden factor and that standards are even more opaque than before.

    At seminars like Chada’s around Southern California this fall, some held in Korean or Mandarin for immigrant parents, consultants reinforced the message — even students with superhuman qualifications are regularly rejected from Harvard and UC Berkeley.

    Parents who didn’t grow up in the American system, and who may have moved to the U.S. in large part for their children’s education, feel desperate and in the dark. Some shell out tens of thousands of dollars for consultants as early as junior high, fearing that anything less than a name-brand school could doom their children to an uncertain future. Sometimes, anxious students are the ones who ask their parents to hire a consultant.

    Some consultants say they try to push schools that fit the student best, not necessarily the top-ranked ones — even as skeptics wonder whether they are scare-mongering in an attempt to drum up business. But especially for parents from countries like South Korea, China and India, where a single exam determines a student’s college choices, the lack of objective standards can be overwhelming.

    “The worst part of stress comes out when kids feel helpless, not when someone sets a high bar for them,” said Chada, whose Indian father grew up in Northern Ireland.

    Yen pointed out that going to a top college is no guarantee for career success, with Asian Americans overrepresented at many campuses yet underrepresented in leadership positions in government and other workplaces.

    A woman stands next to her teenage daughter, who is wearing a mask.

    Julie Lin, left, and her 14-year-old daughter Jasmine Liao visit an annual college and career fair at Temple City High School.

    (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

    “A lot of our Asian parents are thinking it’s a golden ticket if you’re able to get into Harvard or Yale,” said Yen, president of the Los Angeles County Asian American Employees Assn., who lives in San Marino and whose parents immigrated from Taiwan. “I just want my daughter to be healthy, safe, and I want her to be successful in life.”

    Srikanth Nagarajan, a 52-year-old manager at DirecTV and an immigrant from India, has been nudging his daughter to shoot for top schools like Harvard.

    Sam Srikanth, a senior at El Segundo High, has a 4.41 GPA and has taken seven AP courses, which she said was the maximum number offered at her school. She is captain of the varsity swim team and is working on a research project about the role of race in college basketball recruiting.

    After asking teachers and school counselors to read her admissions essays, Srikanth decided to hire a private counselor. But she ended up not using the counselor’s suggestions because they didn’t feel like her voice.

    Srikanth said her “hopes got a little bit higher” after the Supreme Court’s decision.

    But with her last name, she said, “you actually fill out the application and realize there’s no way colleges won’t figure out what race you are.”

    Her older sister, who applied to colleges five years ago with a similar resume, got rejected from 18 of 20 or so schools and ended up at Boston College.

    “I can’t be let down if my expectations are already so low,” Srikanth said.

    When Sunny Lee came to the U.S. from South Korea in 2006 for postdoctoral work at USC, she thought that people could succeed in America even if they didn’t go to college.

    But after moving to San Marino about a decade ago to raise her three sons — the oldest is now in 7th grade — she saw neighbors hiring athletic coaches and academic consultants for kids who were still in elementary school.

    The moms she knows fret about students who seem like slam dunks being denied by top schools.

    “A student known as a genius at San Marino High ended up going to Pasadena City College,” said Lee, 48, a researcher at USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. “Moms were having a mental breakdown.”

    A friend told Lee that she regretted spending only $3,000 for a consultant to go over her child’s admissions essays. For her next child, the friend would spend at least $10,000.

    With both her and her husband working full-time, Lee feels an admission consultant is necessary just to keep up, especially with opaqueness and unpredictability of college admissions.

    “It’s a fight over information,” she said.

    She said she doesn’t think her oldest son needs a consultant yet. But she would like her middle son, a fifth-grader, to start working with one.

    On the outskirts of Koreatown in July, dozens of Korean American students and parents attended a five-hour seminar hosted by Radio Seoul.

    Several admissions consultants said in Korean and English that the end of affirmative action could improve Asian American students’ chances of getting into elite colleges.

    One urged parents to give up their hobbies — no more golfing every weekend — so they can hover over their children.

    Won Jong Kim, director of the college consulting firm Boston Education, described several students who got into elite schools.

    Anna, who got into Harvard, took AP Calculus AB in 7th grade. Ben, who got into Stanford, took 15 AP classes.

    Esther’s academics weren’t “stellar,” Kim said — only a 4.3 GPA, 1520 SAT and nine AP courses. But in her personal statement, she wrote about her mother’s fight with breast cancer. And she was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania.

    “That was her trump card. It was a unique situation that she overcame,” Kim said. “To be frank, she got really lucky.”

    In an interview, Kim said he wanted to show the “common characteristics” of those who get into Ivy League schools.

    “Every year, the bar goes up for students looking to get into top colleges,” he said.

    Chung Lee, the chief consultant at Ivy Dream, said he tries to share information in free seminars hosted by various community organizations.

    Ethan Chen, 17, left, & Audrey Balthazar, 16, Arcadia High students, browse through material at annual college & career fair

    Ethan Chen, 17, left, and Audrey Balthazar, 16, both Arcadia High students, browse through material at a college and career fair at Temple City High School.

    (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

    “The colleges’ lack of transparency has created this sense of fear,” he said.

    In Temple City, Shun Zhang said she doesn’t want to put pressure on her son, Connor Sam.

    Zhang, a 48-year-old realtor, wants to give him the support structure she didn’t have growing up as an immigrant from China.

    Her only requirement is that he play a sport, to stay active and healthy. Still, Sam, a senior at Temple City High who is on the varsity soccer team and interns for Assemblymember Mike Fong, feels the need to push himself. He wants to double major in sociology and some kind of science at UCLA.

    Hoping to be “more organized and put together,” he asked his parents for a personal admissions counselor to help him reflect on his accomplishments and brainstorm essay topics. He has been working with the counselor for two years and finds it helpful.

    Sam, whose father is a refugee from Vietnam and works as a project manager, said he thinks about how well his parents have provided for him and wants to be as successful.

    Going to a good college would go a long way in securing a good job and “maintain where I am,” he said.

    But for all his hard work and preparation, he views college admissions as a crapshoot.

    “I don’t really know what they are looking for,” he said.

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    Jeong Park

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  • Orange County mother arrested on suspicion of killing 9-year-old daughter

    Orange County mother arrested on suspicion of killing 9-year-old daughter

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    A Westminster woman was arrested Friday on suspicion of killing her 9-year-old daughter, police said.

    Officers were called to a home in the 14100 block of Goldenwest Street shortly after noon to conduct a welfare check after receiving a tip from a concerned family member, Westminster police said in a news release.

    The officers forced themselves into the residence and found the girl dead and alone in the house “with obvious signs of trauma,” police said.

    The child’s mother, 32-year-old Khadiyjah Pendergraph, was identified as a person of interest. She was later located and arrested at a shopping center in Aliso Viejo by Westminster police detectives working with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

    Pendergraph was booked into the county jail on suspicion of murder, police said. There are no additional suspects, and the incident appears to be isolated.

    “While police officers are exposed to tragedies on a daily basis, this murder is particularly disturbing, due to the senseless loss of a child allegedly at the hands of her own mother,” Police Chief Darin Lenyi said in a prepared statement.

    Anyone with additional information is encouraged to call Det. Marcela Lopez at (714) 548-3773. Anonymous calls can be made to Orange County Crime Stoppers at (855) 847-6287 or sent to www.occrimestoppers.org.

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    Dorany Pineda

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  • Woman killed, child seriously injured in South Los Angeles crash

    Woman killed, child seriously injured in South Los Angeles crash

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    Police on Friday were continuing to investigate why a car crashed into two pedestrians in South Los Angeles on Thursday afternoon, leaving a woman dead and a girl seriously injured.

    Around 1:30 p.m. on Thursday, a car was exiting a private property near the intersection of 83rd Street and Western Avenue when it struck a vehicle heading south on Western, said Officer Melissa Ohana, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Police Department.

    The car that had been struck then collided with two pedestrians on the sidewalk, a 26-year-old woman and an 8-year-old girl, Ohana said. The woman died at the scene. The child was taken to a hospital, where she remained Friday in critical condition. Ohana said the relationship between the two victims wasn’t clear.

    The driver of the car that initiated the chain of collisions, a 58-year-old man, was hospitalized in stable condition. Ohana said it wasn’t clear if alcohol or another intoxicant was a factor in the crash, but she added that detectives will take that into account as part of their investigation.

    The driver of the car that struck the woman and child was not hospitalized, Ohana said.

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    Matthew Ormseth

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  • Column: Pedophile panic and coming political violence. What the Paul Pelosi case revealed

    Column: Pedophile panic and coming political violence. What the Paul Pelosi case revealed

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    A unicorn costume, a hammer and a belief that pedophiles are using public schools to destroy democracy: The trial of David DePape for attacking Paul Pelosi was strange and disturbing.

    But take away the costume and the hammer, and the reasoning for DePape’s vicious attack is alarmingly mainstream — pedophile panic.

    By that, I mean the outrageous effort not just by hate-mongering conspiracy theorists to frame LGBTQ+ individuals as deviant and dangerous, lumping them in with criminals who sexually abuse children. But also a cynical bid by some politicians, clergy and grifters to do the same.

    Anti-LGBTQ+ attacks are everywhere, both physical and political. Hysteria about pedophiles, driven by conspiracy theories, has trampled truth.

    As DePape explained it on the stand, he is concerned about “groomer schools,” where teachers are “queering the students, pushing transgenderism to confuse children about their identities to make them more vulnerable to abuse and Marxist indoctrination.”

    Sound familiar? It could have been a quote from a Huntington Beach City Council meeting, a Republican presidential rally or a debate on the floor of the Florida Legislature, where the controversial “don’t say gay” bill last year was described by an aide to Gov. Ron DeSantis as an “anti-grooming” law.

    The quote is, in fact, DePape’s summary of what he learned from right-wing podcaster James Lindsay about one of DePape’s top targets, a professor of feminist theory and queer studies whose house seemed, to DePape, too difficult to break into. So he went to Pelosi’s brick mansion instead.

    When a San Francisco jury came back with a guilty verdict against DePape, it was hardly a bombshell. It is fact that DePape smashed a hammer into Pelosi’s skull, a brutal act caught on camera and uncontested even by his own lawyers.

    What was lost with the quickness of the in-an-out, no-surprises trial — and what should be chilling to any supporter of civil rights — was the defense team’s argument about why DePape created his elaborate plot, which was going to involve donning the unicorn costume while interrogating the victim’s wife, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, about government corruption, and, you guessed it, pedophiles.

    It wasn’t conventional politics. It wasn’t even aimed at Nancy Pelosi. The powerful San Francisco Democrat was somewhere down a list that included the mother of DePape’s two sons, Tom Hanks, George Soros, Hunter Biden and performance artist Marina Abramovic.

    DePape was propelled by the hyper-drive conspiracies that have bled out from internet chat rooms onto streets and into school boards — amped-up paranoia about threats not just to the white Christian values that some perceive as intrinsic to our country’s identity, but to the safety of our children.

    “It’s not just that she’s a pedo-activist. It’s that she wants to turn all the schools into pedophile molestation factories,” DePape said of the queer studies professor he was targeting.

    “She wants to destroy children’s sense of identity because it’s her opinion that this will lead them to grow up dysfunctional and unhappy. And if they’re dysfunctional and unhappy, they will be maladjusted to society, hate society, and want to become communist activists,” he said.

    Those kind of beliefs, ugly and untrue, can no longer be considered extreme, or extremism.

    Take, for example, this commentary from earlier this year by Jonathan Butcher, a fellow at the ultraconservative and ultra-influential Heritage Foundation:

    “For parents, rejecting radical gender theory is a matter of protecting their children. The rest of us, though, should reject queer theory’s attempt to gain control of the next generation,” he wrote.

    Or the mugshot meme Donald Trump posted not too long ago insinuating that pedophiles were out to get him.

    Or Trump’s recent sit-down interview with conservative activists Moms for America, in which he lamented that the “indoctrination programs” at public schools are “out of control” and promised quickly to end them if elected.

    Jared Dmello, an expert on extremism and an incoming senior lecturer at University of Adelaide in Australia, told me that mainstream politics is “driving an anti-LGBTQ ideology.”

    Where once conspiracy was relegated to dark corners, it now has a symbiotic relationship with the mainstream, he said, each building off whatever “evidence” or current events play into the narrative with such speed and force that the sheer amount of information makes it seem like it must be true.

    “The whole goal is to introduce so much chaos into the atmosphere that it’s hard to distinguish what is fact from fiction,” he said.

    Mission accomplished.

    A recent Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) poll on threats to American democracy found 59% of Republicans think that what children are learning in school is a critical issue facing the United States. A 2022 poll by USC found that while roughly 60% of Democrats support teaching high school students about gender identity, gay and transgender rights or sexual orientation, only about 30% of Republicans feel the same.

    Of course, parents have good reasons to be concerned about public schools, especially in the wake of the pandemic when teachers are burned out, budgets are tight and students are coping with sky-high levels of mental health challenges.

    But Joan Donovan, an expert in disinformation and a professor at Boston University, told me that while violence remains rare, vigilantes such DePape aren’t the lone wolves we like to believe. She said violence, whether by individuals or groups, is going to increase as the 2024 election nears.

    “I wish it were the case that they were fringe, but they do seem to represent a larger sentiment online,” she said. “Of course taking action in the form of assaulting or attempting to murder people is in and of itself horrendous, but if you look at the kind of discourse that emboldens these people, it’s the natural outcome.”

    Support for political violence has increased over the past two years, with nearly a quarter of Americans now agreeing that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” That comes from the recent PRRI poll on threats to American democracy.

    That percentage has increased from 15% in 2021.

    But get ready for it: 41% of Republicans who like Trump agreed violence may be necessary, and 46% of Trump supporters who believe the election was stolen also believe violence may be an answer. That’s nearly half.

    By all accounts, DePape was just a lonesome loser, unremarkable and peaceful, until he started delving into conspiracy theories during the pandemic. Living in a Bay Area garage that didn’t even have a bathroom, he spent his free time — hours every day — playing video games while listening to conspiracy podcasters pushing what we were then calling QAnon.

    I won’t go so far as to say he was a victim, but he was a vessel for a fire hose flow of propaganda, holding it all in until doing nothing seemed unconscionable. He is accountable for his violence, but it is clear he has lost the ability to parse truth from that swamp of what he calls research.

    Somewhere along his journey, DePape began believing that a secret cabal of so-called elites was ruling the world and participating in a cult that sexually abused children.

    That’s how DePape came up with his list of targets — most of those on it are somewhere in QAnon lore — a set of conspiracies that QAnon expert and Michigan State University professor Laura Dilley told me “absolutely are endemic now.”

    At its core, the political turmoil caused by these falsehoods is not much different from the satanic panic that ruled in the 1980s, driven by discomfort with more women joining the workforce and leaving their children in day care. Then, too, conservatives vilified the LGBTQ+ community to fuel fear that children were in danger and American society was on the brink of collapse.

    And Donovan points out that even the KKK focused on children and education in the 1920s, with the same arguments about American values.

    So none of this is new.

    But we are capable of not repeating the past. Hate and conspiracy aren’t normal. They aren’t American values, to be debated as valid political positions.

    David DePape was fighting an enemy conjured by lies. That enemy may not be real, but the danger of those lies is.

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    Anita Chabria

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  • They claimed their high school coach sexually abused them years ago. Now he’s in custody

    They claimed their high school coach sexually abused them years ago. Now he’s in custody

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    Michael Guzman was a popular teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School in El Sereno around the turn of the century.

    He taught history and coached the girls’ basketball team.

    But more than two decades later — after he had moved on to different schools in different districts — Guzman, an assistant principal at Gabrielino High in San Gabriel, was arrested this month and charged with four counts of lewd acts on a child stemming from allegations from about 20 years ago, according to court documents and interviews with two of the alleged victims.

    Though so much time has passed, the victims — Maria Barajas and Clarissa Vizcaino — who went to the Los Angeles Police Department decades after the alleged abuse said that the memories of their treatment at the hands of Guzman stuck with them, scarred them and sometimes caused ruptures in their adult relationships.

    “I just kind of put it in this box and put it away for a long time,” said Barajas, who’s 42.

    Guzman, 57, has denied in court papers having any sexual relationship with Barajas and Clarissa Vizcaino, 38, when they were underage. Neither Guzman nor his attorney in the civil suit immediately responded to a request for comment.

    Barajas and Vizcaino said they were not close friends at Woodrow Wilson. They were different ages. Barajas was a senior on the varsity team coached by Guzman, while Vizcaino was a freshman on the junior varsity team, also coached by Guzman.

    What they had in common was that they both played basketball and were allegedly favorites of Guzman. Barajas and Vizcaino claim that Guzman began to groom them when they were freshmen in high school, Barajas in 1995 and Vizcaino in 1998, eventually moving on from his relationship with Barajas and beginning a new one with Vizcaino.

    Vizcaino said Guzman would have her come close to him in his office and put his cheek to her cheek or tell her how good she smelled even before they allegedly ever had sex.

    “At that time, I had never had anyone be that affectionate with me. I had never had an actual real boyfriend or kissed anyone,” Vizcaino said.

    Barajas said it was more than a year into them knowing each other before her relationship with Guzman allegedly turned sexual. One day in a car her sophomore year, he allegedly began rubbing her leg, she said. The two then began a sexual relationship that lasted through her senior year, Barajas claimed.

    Barajas and Vizcaino both claim that Guzman began having sexually inappropriate interactions with them when they were between 14 and 15 years old, according to a lawsuit the duo filed in Los Angeles Superior Court in 2022.

    Guzman was around 35 at the time of the misconduct, according to the lawsuit.

    Michael Guzman, center, stands with the Woodrow Wilson High School girls’ basketball team. Standing in front of him is Clarissa Vizcaino.

    (Ashley Pileika)

    Vizcaino even kept a diary from 2000, when she was about 15 and in the midst of her alleged relationship with Guzman. She wrote about playing basketball with “Guzman” or “Guz” as she sometimes called him. One time, when she went to get water during practice, he followed her out and allegedly kissed her near the gym. She also took down sexually inappropriate comments that Guzman allegedly made to her at school.

    A key part of the claims the women have made against the Los Angeles Unified School District in their lawsuit is that other staff at Woodrow Wilson knew or should have known about the alleged abuse that was taking place, but that they failed to do anything about it.

    Guzman gave the girls rides alone in his car, which other teachers knew, according to the suit. He also once told Vizcaino that the principal at Woodrow Wilson knew about their sexual relationship but would not say anything because the principal had also had inappropriate sexual relationships on campus, the suit claims. The lawsuit also says that other coaches on the basketball team should have known what was going on.

    “While we take all student matters seriously, Los Angeles Unified does not comment on pending or ongoing litigation,” said Elvia Perez Cano, an LAUSD spokesperson.

    The exterior of a cream-colored school building with the words Woodrow Wilson High School on a wall

    Woodrow Wilson High School in April 2022.

    (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

    After Barajas and Vizcaino graduated, Guzman moved on and worked at other schools.

    “An overarching objective of Maria and Clarissa in coming forward is to ensure what happened to them does not happen to others. The grooming, the trauma — the lifelong impact of child sexual abuse is real, and victims deserve justice,” said Ashley Pileika, an attorney for Barajas and Vizcaino. “We are grateful to the LAPD and [the L.A. County district attorney’s] office for prioritizing this case and the safety of children in the greater Los Angeles community.”

    Before he ended up at Gabrielino, a public school in the San Gabriel Unified School District, Guzman worked in two other districts and at numerous different schools, according to an article about him in the Gabrielino school newspaper. Guzman worked in education for 30 years leading up to his arrest and had just started at Gabrielino this year.

    “I am having a great time, learning the ins-and-outs of the school’s culture,” Guzman told a student reporter at Gabrielino this year.

    The San Gabriel Unified School District said that Guzman was placed on unpaid administrative leave after the news of his arrest. The district said in a statement that it had no information suggesting that Guzman committed any misconduct while at Gabrielino.

    “Hearing that a person entrusted to work with students may have committed a crime such as this is, of course, deeply troubling and disturbing, and our thoughts are with the alleged victim or victims in this case,” San Gabriel Unified School District Supt. Jim Symonds said in a statement shared with The Times.

    Barajas and Vizcaino both said that their alleged experiences with Guzman have shaped who they are, especially in their romantic relationships.

    “I feel like all my life I wanted to be a mom and to be married and I’m a 42-year-old single woman without children,” Barajas said. “I came to that realization, knowing how it’s because that history of mine has affected every decision I’ve ever made.”

    Vizcaino also said that she struggled in romantic relationships and believes it has to do with Guzman.

    “I wasn’t in a real relationship until my mid-20s because I was still waiting for him. Every relationship has been some sort of abusive or toxic,” she said.

    It was not until May, seven months after they filed the lawsuit, that Vizcaino and Barajas went to the police.

    When the police realized that Vizcaino still was able to contact Guzman, they set up a call where they hoped the former coach would admit to the conduct he was accused of, Vizcaino said. They called Guzman from the precinct and put him on speaker phone, Vizcaino said.

    She said she asked pointed questions like, “Why did you have sex with me at school when I was 15?”

    She said she told him she was angry. She asked him about specific incidents.

    And while Guzman allegedly apologized repeatedly on the call, Vizcaino said it was not enough for the detective to make an immediate arrest.

    “It was a clear confession to me. But the detective wanted more information,” she said.

    It took six more months before Guzman was finally arrested Nov. 13. Three days later, he was released on bond.

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    Noah Goldberg

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  • What you need to know about the new RSV shot for babies

    What you need to know about the new RSV shot for babies

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    Ahead of the winter respiratory virus season, many parents were relieved the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a shot to combat respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, for infants and toddlers this summer.

    But the shot is hard to come by.

    RSV is a common respiratory virus that usually causes mild, cold-like symptoms in most adults who recover in a week or two, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But that’s not the case for infants and toddlers, who are at higher risk of the virus becoming severe or life-threatening.

    The first vaccine for RSV was approved in May and was targeted for older adults.

    Two months later, federal regulators approved the first long-lasting shot for infants younger than 8 months who are entering their first RSV season. According to the CDC, Nirsevimab, which is made by AstraZeneca and sold under the brand name Beyfortus, reduces the risk of severe RSV by 80%. One dose lasts about five months, the length of the average RSV season.

    The shot does not activate the immune system the way a vaccine would, but instead introduces antibodies to protect against RSV. Health officials with the CDC say once the antibodies are out of a baby’s system, the immunity is also gone.

    Amid the peak of RSV season, there has been unprecedented demand for the shot and not enough supplies to go around.

    The CDC recently announced the release of more than 77,000 additional doses to be distributed immediately to physicians and hospitals through the Vaccines for Children Program. The CDC and FDA are working with drug manufacturers to ensure availability through early next year.

    What preventive measures can parents can take?

    Children at high risk include those 6 months and younger, infants born prematurely, those younger than 2 with congenital heart disease and those with weakened immune systems who have neuromuscular disorders, according to the American Lung Assn.

    Previously, the only immunization against severe RSV for babies was a shot women could get during weeks 32 through 36 of pregnancy. That shot is still available and recommended September through January.

    There also are everyday preventive measures to help reduce the spread of RSV and other respiratory illnesses, according to health agencies such as the CDC, American Lung Assn. and the California Department of Public Health:

    • Stay home if you’re feeling sick.
    • If you need to leave your home, consider wearing a mask in crowded or indoor areas.
    • Wash your hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds.
    • Avoid touching your face with unwashed hands.
    • Cover your mouth and nose when you cough and sneeze.
    • Avoid close contact with others, such as kissing, shaking hands and sharing cups and utensils.
    • Clean frequently touched surfaces, including doorknobs and mobile devices.

    What are the signs of RSV?

    RSV affects both the upper respiratory system, which includes the nose and throat, and the lower respiratory system, which includes the lungs.

    The virus is highly transmissible. You can catch it if the droplets from an infected person’s cough or sneeze get in your eyes, nose or mouth; if you touch a surface (such as a doorknob) that has the virus on it and then touch your face before washing your hands; or if you have direct contact with the virus (for example, by kissing the face of a child with RSV). Being in crowded places with people who may be infected or having exposure to other children or siblings who may be infected are common ways to pick up the virus.

    RSV can survive for many hours on hard surfaces such as tables and crib rails; it has a shorter life span on softer surfaces such as tissues and hands.

    A person infected with RSV is usually contagious for three to eight days. However, some infants and people with weakened immune systems can continue to spread the virus for as long as four weeks, even after their symptoms go away, according to the CDC.

    Virtually all children get an RSV infection by the time they are 2, but the virus can cause complications, the CDC said.

    Health agencies recommend parents reach out to their healthcare provider if their child is showing signs of infection.

    According to health officials at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the most common symptoms are runny nose; fever; cough; short periods without breathing; trouble eating, drinking or swallowing; wheezing, flaring of nostrils or straining of the chest or stomach while breathing; breathing faster than usual or trouble breathing; and turning blue around the lips and fingers.

    These symptoms can seem like other health conditions, so the hospital advises parents to have their child see a healthcare provider for a diagnosis.

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    Karen Garcia

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  • Former Costa Mesa nanny sentenced to 700-plus years for molesting boys under his care

    Former Costa Mesa nanny sentenced to 700-plus years for molesting boys under his care

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    A Costa Mesa man and former nanny convicted of molesting or showing pornography to 17 young boys under his care was sentenced Friday to more than 700 years in prison, according to the Orange County district attorney’s office.

    Matthew Antonio Zakrzewski, 34, was found guilty last month of 34 felonies — including 27 counts of lewd and lascivious acts with a minor under the age of 14, two counts of oral copulation by a child under 10, two counts of distributing pornography to a minor, one count of possessing child pornography, one count of using a minor for sex acts and one count of an attempted lewd or lascivious act with a minor.

    The victims ranged from 2 to 12 years old.

    Zakrewski’s total sentence was 705 years to life, plus two years and eight months, prosecutors said.

    Zakrzewski worked as a professional nanny, branding himself as “the original Sitter Buddy” on his website. Between Jan 1, 2014, and May 17, 2019, Zakrzewski would sexually assault the children he was hired to watch, often filming the abuse, according to prosecutors. He would instruct the children not to tell their parents of his actions.

    Zakrzewski was first reported to authorities in May 2019, when a Laguna Beach family told police he had inappropriately touched their 8-year-old son. Over the course of the investigation, 16 additional victims would come forward.

    Prosecutors said Zakrzewski molested 16 of the boys and showed pornography to the 17th.

    In a statement, Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer said Zakrzewski’s actions robbed 17 children of their innocence.

    “Children are not born knowing how to lie, but this master manipulator taught these very young children to lie — and to keep secrets from their own parents,” Spitzer said. “The sexual exploitation of children is meant to destroy the smallest of souls.”

    In a statement read during sentencing, Zakrzewski did not apologize for his actions, according to the district attorney’s office.

    “I prided myself on bringing smiles to your children and all the good times we shared were 100% genuine,” he said, according to the office’s statement.

    Prosecutors said multiple parents cried and covered their ears as he spoke.

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    Jeremy Childs

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  • Column: What kind of terrible parent pays their child to get an A? (Well, me)

    Column: What kind of terrible parent pays their child to get an A? (Well, me)

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    Is it OK to pay a child to do well in school?

    I’m currently grappling with this question. Five years ago, my then-8-year-old niece moved in with me. Overnight, I became a single “mom” to a wonderful, if emotionally fragile, third-grader.

    She had been through a lot — four schools in two years — and so I wasn’t sure what to expect from her academically. But she thrived in our local elementary school. And now she’s finding her passions as an eighth-grade middle schooler in mostly honors classes. With the exception of math. A struggle I understand.

    Opinion Columnist

    Robin Abcarian

    In elementary and middle school, I did well enough in other classes, but I was a solid C math student. In 10th grade, however, something just clicked. At Cleveland High School, in Reseda, I had a fabulous geometry teacher. His name was Mr. Maung. I have no idea what became of him, but he was one of the best teachers I ever had. I earned an A in his class, and I never took another math course.

    When my niece was in sixth grade and began struggling with numbers, we signed up for one of those costly math tutoring programs. She went for an hour after school a couple of times a week. After nearly a year with no change in her grades, I discovered that the place wasn’t really working with her on her school curriculum, which I’d assumed was the whole point. They had their own methodology for teaching the subject, and if they had time at the end of her session, they might help her with her homework. Ugh.

    The next year, in seventh grade, she again struggled with low grades in math. I conferred frequently with her teacher. She did after-school “interventions” in the library. Things didn’t improve. Well, I thought, she has lots of other skills and talents.

    This year, however, when she floundered on her first few math tests, I became alarmed. High school is just around the corner, and I suspected she was capable of doing well in math class but just wasn’t that interested. And maybe she was even a little invested in acting like she didn’t care.

    Two weeks ago, I had a brainstorm: money. Couldn’t hurt, right? So I texted her: “I will give you 20 bucks if you get a B. [Smiley face emoji]”

    “OMG,” she replied. “40 for an A!”

    “Done!”

    I admit: As a parent, this was not my finest hour.

    Also, I was pretty sure she’d never get an A.

    Amy McCready, a parenting coach who founded the online education site Positive Parenting Solutions, did not judge me when I told her about my deal with my niece. She disapproved but in the nicest possible way.

    “Parents will say, ‘I get paid to work,’ and my kid’s job is school, so why not pay them?’ But there are some unintended consequences to that,” said the Raleigh, N.C.-based McCready, who wrote the 2015 book “The Me, Me, Me Epidemic: A Step-by-Step Guide to Raising Capable, Grateful Kids in an Over-Entitled World.”

    The first problem, supported by lots of research, is that external rewards tend to decrease intrinsic motivation — you know, the feeling that good grades and mastery of a subject are their own reward.

    Something more concrete, said McCready, “can provide a quick hit, but we need to think about the long-term goal — the love of learning, intellectual curiosity, an interest in math.”

    She pointed me to the book “Punished by Rewards: The Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes” by the prolific education writer Alfie Kohn, first published in 1993, now revised for its 25th anniversary. Kohn addresses the failures of “behaviorism” — as propounded by the psychologist B.F. Skinner — to manipulate people into changing their behavior by rewarding them, which he calls “do this and you’ll get that.”

    “To take what people want or need and offer it on a contingent basis in order to control how they act,” he writes, “this is where the trouble lies.”

    As McCready told me, paying for grades is ultimately not sustainable. “The reward loses its luster,” she said. “The problem is you have to keep upping the ante.”

    The practice can also discourage children who really are struggling. “What if they are working their hardest and are not getting the A or B,” she said. “They should be rewarded for working their tail off.” (And by “rewarded,” she means they should be celebrated. “I distinguish between rewards and celebrations. A reward is contingent, versus, ‘Wow, you have been putting so much time into your math, let’s go celebrate that.’”)

    But that’s my issue with my niece. I don’t think she has been working her hardest, and I believe she is capable of doing better.

    I just needed to figure out how to motivate her. Hence, the bribe, which coincided with her recent acquisition of an iPhone. (We’d had a pact: She would wait until eighth grade for a phone with apps and internet access.) Once she discovered Apple Pay, the app that lets anyone transfer money to your account, she became transfixed by the balance in her account.

    “Wow,” she said when she had accumulated $52. “I’m getting rich!”

    At this point, you are probably wondering how she did on that math test. I am thrilled — more or less — to report that she got her first A. I dutifully added $40 to her Apple Pay coffers.

    And now I am in the difficult position of having to decide whether to continue to this race to the behaviorism bottom or to raise my standards in the service of making her a better student and all-around human being.

    I’m thinking, I’m thinking.

    @robinkabcarian

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    Robin Abcarian

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  • L.A. Unified to pay $19.9 million to settle sexual abuse claims against teacher’s aide

    L.A. Unified to pay $19.9 million to settle sexual abuse claims against teacher’s aide

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    The Los Angeles school district will pay $19.9 million to settle claims against a former teacher’s assistant who sexually abused children at an elementary school in North Hollywood, attorneys for the families announced Thursday.

    The former teacher’s assistant, Lino Cabrera, was originally charged with five felony counts of lewd acts on a child under 14 and one count of continued sexual abuse — and had been accused of sexually abusing six girls, ages 10 and 11, between September 2016 and May 2019.

    Cabrera pleaded no contest in January 2020 to a felony count of continuous sexual abuse, a felony count of a lewd act upon a child under 14 and four misdemeanor counts of child molestation, according to the L.A. County district attorney’s office. As part of the plea deal, Cabrera agreed to register as a sex offender for life.

    Cabrera was sentenced to eight years in state prison, according to attorneys for the victims.

    Cabrera assisted in the school’s computer lab, prosecutors said. According to Los Angeles Unified School District officials, he worked at the elementary school for almost a decade and was placed on unpaid suspension May 30, 2019, when the arrest warrant was filed. State law requires school districts to fire people convicted of sexual abuse and bars them from working in schools.

    “He used his position of trust at the school to molest multiple children on campus over the course of several years,” attorneys for the victims said in a release.

    School district officials were not immediately available for comment.

    If the case had gone to trial, the school district’s liability would have hinged on whether other employees of the school district could have or should have known about the abuse. In settling the case, the school district admitted no wrongdoing.

    This is a developing story and will be updated.

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    Howard Blume

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  • Father suspected of killing two of his four children had violent history, court records show

    Father suspected of killing two of his four children had violent history, court records show

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    The father arrested on suspicion of killing two of his four young children has a criminal history along with a string of domestic violence cases and had lost custody of his children last year, court documents reveal.

    Prospero Serna was detained by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department on Sunday for allegedly killing two of his four biological children, who were discovered by authorities after their mother made a frantic 911 call directing deputies to an apartment in Lancaster, according to the department.

    All four children were found in a bedroom with lacerations, and two died after being taken to a hospital. The other two were in stable condition with non-life-threatening injuries. Their names and ages were not immediately released.

    On Monday, the Sheriff’s Department announced it had enough evidence to charge Serna with killing the two children. His booking was delayed by the fact that Serna was not cooperating with deputies, according to the Sheriff’s Department.

    Court documents show he had a troubled history with the law since at least 2006, when a restraining order was filed against him in San Bernardino County, according to court records.

    That same year he was charged with contempt of court and disobeying a court order, though it is not clear if that was related to the previous harassment case. He was eventually convicted in 2009 of a lower charge of failure to appear after he posted a written promise to appear.

    In Los Angeles, a woman filed for a restraining order in a domestic violence prevention case involving minor children in 2007. There were no documents immediately available in that case, and it was not clear whether the restraining order was granted.

    Serna was charged in 2014 in San Bernardino with battery on a spouse, though the charges were dismissed three years later in the interest of justice, according to court records.

    In 2016, Serna was again hit with a temporary restraining order that said he could not harass, attack or strike another woman who was the mother of his children.

    Then in 2021, another temporary restraining order was issued against Serna in a San Bernardino County case involving a man. That order was dismissed a few weeks later.

    Serna lost custody of four of his children to their mother in July 2022, according to court documents reviewed by The Times. “Mother is awarded sole legal and sole physical custody of all minors,” a judge wrote in the July 13, 2022, order.

    Based on those records, the children would now range in age from 3 to 7. Two are 3-year-old twins.

    In the Los Angeles County Superior Court order, the judge decided Serna could have “unmonitored visits” with his four children at his own mother’s home, as well as monitored visits outside that home.

    The judge specified that Serna’s visits would not occur at the home of the children’s mother. The order did not cite any conduct by Serna for the limited access to his children.

    Other criminal cases found in court records include a conviction for causing a fire to a structure or forest.

    Serna was active on social media until a few days before his arrest.

    He was posting regularly on Facebook about the Israel-Hamas war in October, calling for an end to the violence in the Middle East.

    “Ceasefire or the world will be uninhabitable for everyone,” Serna said in an Oct. 16 post on what appeared to be his Facebook account.

    He had previously posted about his own history with mental health authorities.

    “Do u guys remember that time I told u guys I was tortured and injected with different drugs at a mental facility (Arrowhead regional) well I wasnt lying. So don’t judge the way I think. How would u think if u were injected by an unknown poison?”

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    Noah Goldberg

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  • Newsom’s stumble on basketball court in China shows how photo ops can go wrong

    Newsom’s stumble on basketball court in China shows how photo ops can go wrong

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    BEIJING — 

    Gov. Gavin Newsom’s trip to China was many things: A test of his skill in climate diplomacy. An opportunity to burnish his political image on the world stage. A demonstration of the risks of the indulgent photo op.

    That danger played out during a visit to a school in Beijing on Friday where Newsom knocked a child down after stumbling while shooting hoops. They both fell to the ground and quickly sat up. Newsom patted the boy on the back several times before giving him a hug and asking if he was OK.

    It was a cringey moment for the Democratic governor but didn’t cause injuries. Newsom, in dress shoes, a white shirt and slacks, proceeded to play with the 9- and 10-year-old children for several more minutes, spinning the basketball on his fingertip and swishing a few times.

    Then the governor’s wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, stepped onto the court and took a few shots herself. The Newsoms handed out California-themed pins to the kids and moved on to visit a painting class and a school garden.

    The school visit was meant to highlight Siebel Newsom’s interest in farm-to-school programs. In California, she works to get more fresh food into school meals through partnerships with local farms. The visit to the Beijing school was one stop on a jam-packed agenda in which Newsom visited five cities in seven days and met with President Xi Jinping.

    Many of his events were formulaic meetings with government officials to discuss economic development and clean energy — important work toward his goal of advancing partnerships to thwart climate change, but not particularly photogenic. Other events were clearly designed as visual spectacles meant to enhance Newsom’s image as a leader.

    In one case, Newsom’s office sent out a picture of him standing on the Great Wall wearing aviator-style sunglasses and a pensive expression as he looks toward the sun. The glamour shot quickly set the internet aflame with memes of Newsom in the same pensive pose with various fake backdrops. Among them: the Oval Office and a homeless encampment.

    Newsom’s penchant for splashy photos emerged early in his political career when, as mayor of San Francisco in 2004, he and his then-wife Kimberly Guilfoyle posed for Harper’s Bazaar magazine. Newsom’s arms were wrapped around Guilfoyle as they lay on an opulent rug in the home of the wealthy Getty family. The image has endured over the years as a visual punchline for Newsom’s critics.

    A very different photo from Newsom’s days as mayor re-emerged this week while he was in China. The mayor of Shanghai began a meeting with Newsom by presenting him with a framed photo of his visit to Shanghai in the early 2000s. Newsom was in a schoolyard, shooting hoops with local students.

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    Laurel Rosenhall

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  • Two children dead, father detained after ‘traumatic’ child abuse call in Lancaster

    Two children dead, father detained after ‘traumatic’ child abuse call in Lancaster

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    Four children younger than 10 were found in a Lancaster home suffering from severe lacerations, and two of them have died, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

    The children were found early Sunday in a bedroom of the home by deputies who were responding to a child abuse call.

    The youngsters are siblings, said Sheriff’s Lt. Daniel Vizcarra, and two of them were expected to survive.

    The children’s father, Prospero Serna of San Bernardino, was detained by investigators as a “person of interest,” sheriff’s officials said.

    Vizcarra said deputies were still reeling from what they encountered in the bedroom in the 1800 block of East Avenue J-2 as investigators worked to piece together key details.

    “It was traumatic for everyone involved,” he said. “They are children and truly innocent victims who don’t deserve anything like this.”

    The call, which was received at 11:50 p.m., stated that there was “child abuse in progress,” Vizcarra said. The children’s mother directed deputies to an apartment, where they found all four children in a bedroom with lacerations. Vizcarra said the mother did not have any visible injuries.

    Two of the children were taken to a hospital, where they died. Two are in stable condition with non-life-threatening injuries. Vizcarra said he could not release the children’s exact ages.

    “We don’t know what weapon was used at this point,” Vizcarra said.

    Social service officials have been notified, Vizcarra said. It is not yet known whether the children or adults had come to their attention before Saturday’s fatal incident.

    The Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services said in a statement Sunday that state law “prohibits confirming or commenting on whether a child or family has been involved with the department.” The department has faced intense scrutiny in recent years over its handling of a series of highly publicized deaths and injuries to children on its watch.

    “As a workforce dedicated to the safety and well-being of Los Angeles County’s children and families, we are deeply disturbed and saddened to learn of the deaths of two young children in the City of Lancaster and injuries sustained by two others as reported by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department,” the department said in a statement.

    Officials urged anyone with information about the incident to contact the sheriff’s homicide bureau at (323) 890-5500. Anonymous tips can be made to Crime Stoppers at (800) 222-8477).

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    Melody Gutierrez

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  • For L.A. Jews, weeks of war have changed everything

    For L.A. Jews, weeks of war have changed everything

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    Los Angeles is home to the second-largest Jewish community in America, with more than 500,000 members. And for the last few weeks, it’s been reeling.

    Since the ambush by Hamas militants left more than 1,400 Israelis dead and saw the kidnapping of at least 200 others, Israel has sealed off the Gaza Strip from vital resources and launched a barrage of airstrikes.

    Jewish Angelenos are largely supportive of Israel, which declared war on Hamas, the local authority in Gaza, following the deadly Oct. 7 attack. Many also disagree with the military assault on Gaza, and are heartbroken over the mounting Palestinian death toll, which has exceeded 7,000, including nearly 3,000 children, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza. About 1.4 million Palestinians have been displaced, and Gaza’s healthcare system is teetering on the brink of collapse as water, fuel and vital medicines are running out, according to the World Health Organization.

    The world is watching as Israel mounts an all-out invasion of Gaza.

    The war is creating dual tragedies across the Israel-Gaza boundary. And in L.A.’s Jewish community — whose members hail from different backgrounds, ideologies, cultures and religious sects — people are coming together in unique ways.

    Amid the anguish and anger, the confusion and conflicts, some have found a new kind of resolve and a newfound community.

    Music as a healer

    The crowd held its breath at Sinai Temple as Nilli Salem played an extended note on the shofar, an instrument typically made from a ram’s horn and used in important Jewish rituals.

    “I really believe that artists are the healers of our time,” Chloe Pourmorady said outside the Westwood synagogue, where about 100 people gathered for a night of solidarity weeks after the initial attack on Israel.

    Music is “something beyond words that connects people and brings comfort,” Pourmorady said.

    Cantor Marcus Feldman, left, Chloe Pourmorady and Nilli Salem perform at a concert to support Israel at Westwood’s Sinai Temple.

    (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

    For many Jews in Los Angeles, there are few degrees of separation between the U.S. and Israel. The extent of death and warfare in the region, considered the Holy Land for Jews, Muslims and Christians alike, has been staggering — and has hit close to home.

    Pourmorady had initially planned a musical gathering for friends, but felt compelled to invite the public so the community could dance, sing and cry together.

    “Music is being used as a tool for comfort, healing and prayer during this time of great sadness and anguish,” said Cantor Marcus Feldman, who oversees the musical department at Sinai Temple and who sang at the event, which included performances in both Hebrew and English.

    Sinai Temple hosts a concert in support of Israel.
    A man in a wide-brimmed maroon hat holding a guitar and gesturing as he speaks into a microphone

    Mikey Pauker shared his frustration and anger during the Sinai Temple gathering.

    (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

    Emotions overtook many that night. Mikey Pauker’s voice broke before he started singing. He told the congregation that in the last few weeks, he’d been called a white supremacist for supporting Israel.

    Azar Elihu, a former temple member, said the pain is universal, and she grieves for both sides.

    “Even I feel for the Palestinians. I cried so much for the little boy that was killed in Chicago,” she said, referring to 6-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume, a Muslim boy who was stabbed dozens of times in a deadly attack carried out by his family’s landlord.

    But after the musical performance, Elihu said, “This felt like something of a healing.”

    How do you talk to your children?

    Nicole Guzik, a senior rabbi at Sinai Temple, said that in the weeks following the declaration of war, many in their Jewish community had drawn closer together, checking on one other. They ask: “Are you sleeping? Are you eating? Did you cry today?”

    But they are also filled with outrage — and fear — as both antisemitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric abound online and in person.

    While some in Israel have called for a full attack on Gaza, including a ground invasion, Sinai Temple congregants say they worry about innocent lives lost.

    ‘I also don’t want them to be afraid to go to school. I don’t want my daughter to be afraid to wear the Jewish star.’

    — Amanda Kogan, of Sinai Temple’s board of directors

    “I think what gets lost is that there isn’t a single Jew or Israeli who wants to see a single hair hurt on the head of any innocent civilian,” said Jason Cosgrove, who grew up in the synagogue and said he now finds himself explaining the war in Israel to his 7-year-old daughter and wondering when he will have to discuss antisemitism with her.

    “I’m sparing her all of the gory details,” said Cosgrove, who finds himself taking breaks from the news when he can, but who also feels compelled to stay up to date on what’s happening. “I think you obviously can’t bury your head at a time like this.”

    Amanda Kogan, who’s on the board of directors at Sinai Temple, also finds herself in the difficult position of trying to explain the war to her children. Her teenage daughter recently attended an event that involved a bus trip in Los Angeles, and the group was accompanied by an armed guard.

    Kogan said she was doing her best to explain the complicated history between Israel and the Palestinians to her kids, noting that she doesn’t want to sanitize the details but that she also doesn’t want to alarm them.

    “I also don’t want them to be afraid to go to school,” Kogan said. “I don’t want my daughter to be afraid to wear the Jewish star.”

    “War is not fair to the innocent people. It’s terrible,” she added. “We’re trying to explain all of this as best we can in a very balanced manner. And no matter what, it’s all horrific.”

    Sinai Temple boasts roughly 5,000 members and includes a private Jewish day school with about 600 students, a recreation center and a mental health center that offers counseling to the community.

    A man standing and holding a guitar, surrounded by several people seated on the floor.

    Duvid Swirsky joins other musicians and cantors in a meditation circle before performing at the Sinai Temple benefit.

    (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

    Members say their support for Israel is unwavering, and have gathered supplies, including headlamps, tents, blankets and phone chargers to be sent in care packages, which also include notes from children.

    But grief hangs heavily over the community.

    “As you walk through the halls here, it feels like a house of mourning,” said Senior Rabbi Erez Sherman.

    Sherman and Guzik, husband and wife, became senior rabbis about two weeks after the attack on Israel as they worked to console their congregants.

    Working for peace

    Estee Chandler was a child living in Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, fought between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Syria and Egypt. At the time, she worried every time her parents left their house at night. She would sometimes hear air raid sirens go off and hide with the rest of her family in the unfinished basement of their apartment building.

    “Even back then, we had those places to go in. Now, Israelis have safe rooms in their homes,” the 50-year-old said. “[But] Palestinians who are being bombed — they have nothing. They don’t have those rooms to run into. They have no way to protect their children.”

    When Chandler awoke to the news that Israel had declared war with Hamas, she started reaching out to friends and family living overseas. Then, she reached out to her colleagues at Jewish Voice for Peace, whose Los Angeles chapter she founded nearly 13 years ago.

    “My heart sank thinking about what we were surely going to start seeing in the hours, days and weeks to come, and unfortunately, that has all borne out,” she said.

    A woman in a black "Jewish Voice for Peace" T-shirt clasps her hands as she stands in grass, framed by the shadows of trees

    “I don’t understand how people’s hearts can bleed … for only one-half of the people who are bleeding,” says Estee Chandler, who lived through the 1973 Yom Kippur War and has loved ones in Israel — and friends whose loved ones in Gaza have been killed by Israeli airstrikes.

    (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

    Jewish Voice for Peace and another Jewish organization, IfNotNow, have staged protests outside the White House and the homes of other politicians, demanding a cease-fire. Hundreds have been arrested while protesting at the U.S. Capitol in Washington.

    While working for former President Obama’s 2008 campaign, Chandler said she saw “the intersection between the Israeli lobby and the Democratic Party politics.” She was upset by “a lot of horribly racist things” that were happening and tried to educate herself as much as possible about Israel.

    Chandler later discovered Jewish Voice for Peace, which was supporting a movement at UC Berkeley to divest from weapons manufacturers providing arms to Israel. The group contacted Chandler and asked whether she would be interested in starting an L.A. chapter.

    The daughter of an Israeli father, Chandler has relatives and friends in Israel and some fighting in the Israel Defense Forces, Israel’s national military. She also has friends whose family members were killed in Gaza by the Israeli airstrikes.

    “My concern for my family’s safety and my friends’ safety doesn’t stop at any border,” she said. “It’s not a choice that has to be made. I don’t understand how people’s hearts can bleed in the same situation for only one-half of the people who are bleeding.”

    One of Chandler’s friends is L.A. resident Hedab Tarifi, a Palestinian advocate and member of the Los Angeles Council of Religious Leaders. Tarifi has lost 69 family members in the bombings in Gaza.

    ‘I wake up in the middle of the night, and I can’t breathe. … I have to swallow my pain and my anger, and remind myself that they don’t have a voice while they’re being bombed and massacred.’

    — Hedab Tarifi, a Palestinian advocate and member of the Los Angeles Council of Religious Leaders

    “I have a roller coaster of emotions,” said Tarifi, who was born in Gaza and moved to L.A. in the mid-1990s.

    “I wake up in the middle of the night, and I can’t breathe. I want to cry, but I can’t cry. I’m mad, and at the same time, because I have to be their voice, I have to swallow my pain and my anger, and remind myself that they don’t have a voice while they’re being bombed and massacred,” she said. “I need to pull myself together and be their voice.”

    Chandler and other Jewish Voice for Peace supporters want a cease-fire. They have been protesting in Los Angeles and recently attended a county supervisors meeting where a resolution condemning Hamas and supporting Israel was unanimously adopted after tense public comments.

    She has been disheartened by media portrayals of the war as simply a battle between Israel and Hamas, noting that the events of Oct. 7 “didn’t come in a vacuum.”

    “You can’t say that anything that happened there is unprovoked. You have people who have been living under siege for 75 years, people who’ve been living in a state of constant ethnic cleansing.”

    While her support of Palestinian rights may seem unconventional in light of her heritage, Chandler said she wouldn’t be deterred — even if friends and family have opposing views.

    “My family loves me anyway,” she said.

    ‘Never again’

    When Mor Haim finally turned on the TV on Oct. 7 — breaking her usual observance of Shabbat — she watched as Hamas trucks bulldozed through a neighborhood in Sderot, an Israeli city near Gaza where she lived until the age of 7. She immediately recognized the street where her cousin lived.

    ‘I’m scared to talk on the phone in public, [worried that] someone will recognize my accent and say, “Hey, she’s Jewish.” ’

    — Mor Haim

    “Life was sucked out of me at that second,” said Haim, 31. Luckily, none of her family was killed, but the grief has been no less soul-crushing. The brother of her cousin’s wife went on a run the morning of the ambush, and was killed. Many childhood friends were slain. A friend’s father died shielding his children.

    “Even though I’m far away, I feel as if I’m physically there,” said Haim, a dual Israeli American citizen who lives in Woodland Hills.

    Since that night, Haim said, she’s had panic attacks and has been unable to sleep well.

    She said she tries to go about her daily life for the sake of her four young children. She’s found solace baking challah with friends and family or just sitting in silence with others who share her pain.

    A woman in royal-blue scrubs posing for a selfie inside a car

    For Mor Haim, who lived near Gaza in Sderot, Israel, as a child, the Hamas attack hit too close to home.

    But the images from that day are seared in her mind, and she is afraid.

    “I’m scared for my safety. I’m scared for my children’s safety,” she said. “I’m scared to talk on the phone in public, [worried that] someone will recognize my accent and say, ‘Hey, she’s Jewish.’”

    “We’ve kind of been in hiding,” she said.

    Haim wants people to understand why the attack on Israel — carried out on the holiday of Simchat Torah, a day meant for rejoicing — cannot be ignored.

    She said no one wants innocent people to die — “not our people and not their people in Gaza.”

    But Jewish people can’t stand idly by, and Israelis must fight to defend their country, their people, she said.

    “We said ‘never again’ when we went through the Holocaust. And this is the never again,” she said. “It feels like we’re screaming our life out and nobody’s hearing us.”

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    Summer Lin, Nathan Solis, Grace Toohey

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