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Victims of the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting and their families sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, in US district court in San Francisco on Wednesday, claiming various negligence, product liability, and other violations. The civil complaints are the latest in a wave of litigation against OpenAI alleging that its globally popular chatbot, ChatGPT, helped people commit lethal violence.

The complaints were filed by families of multiple victims wounded and killed at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia, Canada, where a suicidal 18-year-old opened fire on February 10. Shortly after the attack, the Wall Street Journal reported and OpenAI later confirmed that the company had “banned” the shooter’s ChatGPT account eight months earlier for discussion of scenarios involving gun violence—but chose not to alert authorities, despite the urging of some members of its safety team.

One lawsuit includes plaintiff Maya Gebala, a 12-year-old survivor who was injured catastrophically by gunshots to her neck and head. It alleges that “ChatGPT deepened the Shooter’s violent fixation and pushed them toward the attack—the predictable result of a design choice OpenAI made to let ChatGPT engage with users about violence in the first place.”

The lawsuit argues that Altman and other OpenAI leaders knew their product was dangerous and acted negligently, and that they have tried to cover up the danger as the company barrels toward what is anticipated to be a mammoth initial public offering.

The contents of the Tumbler Ridge shooter’s second ChatGPT account remain unknown to the public.

“ChatGPT is not the safe, essential tool the company sells it as, but a product dangerous enough that its makers routinely identify its users as threats to human life,” the lawsuit claims.

An OpenAI spokesperson said in an email that the company has “a zero-tolerance policy for using our tools to assist in committing violence” and has “already strengthened our safeguards.” The spokesperson declined to comment on specific allegations in the lawsuit.

The new litigation underscores crucial questions that I examined recently with an in-depth investigation into the emerging risk of people using ChatGPT or other AI chatbots to plan violence. As I reported, there have been several publicly known cases since 2025 in which troubled individuals allegedly used ChatGPT to focus on grievances and prepare for attacks. In addition to Tumbler Ridge, those include a suicidal bombing with a Tesla Cybertruck in Las Vegas, a stabbing attack by a teenage boy at a school in Finland, and a mass shooting at Florida State University. The defendant in the FSU case received encouragement and tactical advice from ChatGPT just before opening fire, according to chat logs I obtained.

OpenAI says it uses guardrails—built-in limits on what ChatGPT will say or do—to prevent misuse and block harmful content. The company has also said that it improves such safeguards continuously.

Leaders in behavioral threat assessment told me, however, that AI chatbots make it far easier than traditional internet use for a troubled person to move from violent thoughts toward action. They described high-risk threat cases in which the tactical advice and steady encouragement had a powerful effect, fueling users’ delusions and accelerating their violent planning. (The danger in those cases was thwarted with interventions before any violence occurred.)

The Gebala lawsuit claims that OpenAI leaders handled the Tumbler Ridge shooter’s account with “full knowledge that ChatGPT had already been used to plan violence.” It argues the company knew of the above attacks, all of which predated the banning of the Tumbler Ridge shooter’s account in June 2025. OpenAI has acknowledged that it identified an account associated with the FSU shooter shortly after that attack in April 2025 and said it “proactively” shared information with law enforcement. The company now also faces a criminal probe in Florida; it denies wrongdoing.

The suit argues OpenAI’s conduct is a high-tech version of a kind of corporate malfeasance that was uncovered in a landmark 1977 Mother Jones exposé.

My investigation in part highlighted key questions about a second ChatGPT account used by the Tumbler Ridge shooter. That account is under analysis by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and its contents and time frame remain unknown to the public. OpenAI declined to answer my questions about the second account, which it said it found only after the attack. The reason for the belated discovery remains unclear. But threat assessment experts told me that perpetrators often get past tech company restrictions and continue refining plans for violence.

The Gebala lawsuit says the Tumbler Ridge case goes beyond even that pattern: It alleges that the banning of the shooter’s first account is further evidence of OpenAI’s negligence, because in reality it was merely a one-off deactivation for misuse that was easy to circumvent—by following OpenAI’s own published guidance. Here, the suit in part cites customer service instructions from an OpenAI article titled, “Why Was My OpenAI Account Deactivated?” According to the suit, that article explains how to re-register “immediately” for a new ChatGPT account by “using an alternative email address. If you don’t have another address available, you can use an email sub-address instead.”

In other words, customer engagement and retention are paramount, the lawsuit says, arguing that OpenAI’s policies are driven by growth and profit motives that are in direct opposition to product safety:  

The features that make ChatGPT unsafe—its willingness to engage on any topic, to validate any user, to sustain any fixation over time—are the same features that have made it one of the most popular products in history. Fixing those features would cost OpenAI its market share, its path to an IPO, and hundreds of billions of dollars in valuation.

The company’s conduct with ChatGPT is a new twist on a familiar societal danger, according to the lawsuit—a high-tech version of a kind of corporate malfeasance that was uncovered in a landmark 1977 Mother Jones exposé:

In the 1970s, Ford kept selling the Pinto after its own engineers warned that the fuel tank design would cause people to burn to death in rear-end collisions. Ford concluded that paying settlements to the families of the dead would cost less than fixing the car. OpenAI has made a version of the same calculation. For Ford, the dangerous design was a flaw in an otherwise ordinary product. But for OpenAI, the dangerous design is the product.

The lawsuit will test interesting and potentially consequential legal terrain; it further alleges that OpenAI’s chatbot de facto “engaged in the practice of psychology without licensure.” It notes that, in July 2025, Altman acknowledged in an appearance on Theo Von’s popular podcast that “people talk about the most personal shit in their lives to ChatGPT” and that users—“young people, especially”—use it “as a therapist, a life coach.” 

As I reported in my investigation, a Pittsburgh man who pleaded guilty in March to stalking and violently threatening 11 women relied on ChatGPT as a “therapist” and “best friend” to justify his thinking, according to court documents.

The Gebala lawsuit also says OpenAI neglected a duty to warn, pointing to the longstanding Tarasoff precedent that is well known in the world of mental health. “By engaging in the unlicensed practice of therapy,” the suit claims, “OpenAI created a special relationship with certain users, including the Shooter, and assumed a heightened duty to take action when confronted with knowledge of a credible and foreseeable threat.”

The CBC reported on April 22 that the RCMP’s investigation into the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting is “in its final stages,” with BC Premier David Eby suggesting that the results will soon be public.

In a letter dated the following day, April 23, Altman apologized to the Tumbler Ridge community, stating, “I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June.” He also offered generalized statements that the company has made repeatedly about working with “all levels of government” to improve on safety and prevent harm.

Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI has denied the allegations.

Back to a time when source repositories were printouts and commits were hand-written notes

Antiques code show  Microsoft has released the source for another of its relics. This time, it's 86-DOS 1.00 getting the open source treatment, and a whole lot more for retro enthusiasts.…

'Online platforms can rely on our app,' says Commish, 'there are no more excuses'

The European Commission has recommended EU member states adopt an age verification app designed to protect children from harmful online content.…

Contract negotiations in Pajaro Valley Unified School District have intensified as teachers push back against a district proposal to cap health insurance contributions. The district says the cap is needed to address rising health care costs, while teachers argue it could drive staff out of the district.

The post Pajaro Valley Unified officials, teachers face off over district proposal to cap health insurance contributions appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Divine, a Vine reboot backed by Jack Dorsey’s nonprofit, revives six-second looping videos.

Downtown Santa Cruz’s comic hubs are rolling out the red carpet for Saturday’s national Free Comic Book Day, including an appearance by cartoonist Mike Kunkel of “Herobear and the Kid” fame at Atlantis Fantasyworld as it and Comicopolis celebrate the industry’s day in the sun.

The post It’s ‘nerd Christmas’ in May as Free Comic Book Day returns to Santa Cruz appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

In May 2016, Elon Musk did something out of character that he has now spent years of his life trying to undo: He made what he believed to be a charitable donation. 

The world’s richest man is also among its stingiest. Musk’s private foundation often doles out less than the minimum percentage required by law. He has argued, instead, that his businesses are inherently philanthropic, since they develop technologies that will “extend the light of consciousness.” The $38 million he donated to OpenAI over the next four years was considerably less than the $100 million he later claimed to have given, or the up to $1 billion he offered behind the scenes. But it was vital capital at a critical stage, giving Sam Altman’s fledgling non-profit the nudge and the means to hire talent and make a name for itself in the artificial intelligence arms race. Over time, the two men’s ambitions diverged and the relationship soured. Musk left the board, stopped sending checks, and launched a competitor, xAI. In 2024, he sued Altman and OpenAI, alleging that they had abandoned their mission and misused his money. 

The case, which goes to trial this week in an Oakland federal court, is a clash over AI’s past and future. Musk accuses Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman of “stealing a charity” by effectively turning OpenAI into “a fully for-profit subsidiary of Microsoft.” Musk wants the now-private company behind Chat-GPT to revert back to the open-source non-profit he gave money to. The defendants have denied reneging on any agreement with their early benefactor, and painted Musk instead as a bitter and untrustworthy rival who schemed behind the scenes to benefit his own interests. There are designer drugs and disappearing emails; interludes at Davos and Burning Man; and altogether too much Larry Summers. 

Fundamentally, though, Musk v. Altman is about power—who has it, who should have it, and how it can be used. At a moment when Americans are pushing back against the physical infrastructure of AI and its approval ratings hover somewhere between the Democratic party and ICE, court filings made public ahead of the trial offer a revealing look at how tech oligarchs really see themselves, and the technology they promise will level-up civilization. They want you to trust them. But they don’t even trust each other.

Musk and Altman were first brought together by, of all things, a fear that too much influence was accruing in the hands of one Silicon Valley figure. In 2015, Google and its DeepMind subsidiary were the undisputed leaders in the race for Artificial General Intelligence. As Musk recalled in a 2025 deposition for his lawsuit, he came to fear Google’s hegemony after a conversation with Larry Page while staying at the Google co-founder’s house, sometime in the late Obama era. Musk had wanted to know what would happen to people when we reached AGI. Page had chastised him as a “speciesist” for raising such concerns, and said AI was “our successors.” Musk said in his deposition that based on that conversation, and others he had around that time, he came to fear “a unipolar world where any one person would control AI.” He had one specific person in mind: DeepMind’s CEO, Demis Hassabis. In a 2015 email thread in which he and Altman tried to hash out a name for their new venture, Musk proposed calling their emerging AI project “Freemind,” as a way of signalling its opposition to “Deepmind’s one-ring-to-rule-them-all approach.” Draft language included in an email shared by Musk said the group’s purpose would be to ensure “the power of digital intelligence is not overly concentrated.”

The tech elites are worried about one person exerting too much control, but they’re not really interested in delegating power either.

That OpenAI—not “Freemind” or, as Altman suggested, “Axon”; “Intelligence.com”; or something “related to Turing somehow”—was initially pitched as a more altruistic, safety-conscious venture is well established, but it is nonetheless striking to read their behind the scenes conversations about forestalling what they feared would be Hassabis’ AI dictatorship. Brockman emailed a prospective hire that the aim was to avoid “making anyone into a quadrillion-dollar company or omnipotent surveillance state.” (He continued: “I think most people see the costs of AI (a la Terminator) but don’t know what the benefits would be. Maybe this requires something crazy like getting more movies like Her made.”)

While the men behind OpenAI may have all agreed that the technology they hoped to build would be too powerful to end up in the hands of just one person, figuring out exactly how many other people it should be entrusted to proved more difficult. They ran through a variety of numbers and structures. When they first began plotting in earnest in June 2015, Altman had proposed a five-person “governance structure” comprised of himself, Musk, Bill Gates, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. “The technology would be owned by the foundation and used ‘for the good of the world,’” Altman wrote, “and in cases where it’s not obvious how that should be applied the 5 of us would decide.”

But it was hard to find the right mix of people. Musk didn’t want to work with Gates (“not his biggest fan,” he said in his deposition) and Moskovitz ultimately gave money, but not much time to the project. Mark Zuckerberg’s own AI projects ruled him out. (Still, he makes an appearance: According to court filings, when Zuckerberg texted Musk in early 2025 to say that his team would crackdown on people “doxxing” DOGE members, Musk texted back to ask if he was interested in “bidding on the Open AI IP.”) While Amazon Web Services was an early partner, no one seemed to suggest bringing on Jeff Bezos, whom Musk described in a later email as “a bit of a tool.” They started off small, with four board members, then bumped it to seven. 

By September 2017, with DeepMind still lapping the field, Musk, Altman, Brockman, and star researcher Ilya Sutskever were at loggerheads over how their project could keep growing. They considered a variety of restructuring options—including merging the company with Tesla, or transitioning to a for-profit venture. It’s all a bit in-the-weeds, but the debates they were having internally about how to distribute power amongst themselves are striking. Musk wanted to “unequivocally have initial control” of a rebooted venture, and said he would not be comfortable unless he personally held at least one quarter of the seats on an expanded board. “[T]he rough target would be to get to a 12 person board…where each board member has a deep understanding of technology, at least a basic understanding of AI and strong & sensible morals,” Musk wrote in a 2017 email, while conceding it would “probably” have to be “more like 16 if this board really ends up deciding the fate of the world.” During a meeting that year, Musk, according to notes taken by Brockman, raised expanding the board in the same megalomaniacal terms, saying “the challenge is gonna be how do we find, who should decide the fate of the world.”

You can see some flaws emerging here, both philosophically and logistically: On one hand, the tech elites are very worried about just one person exerting too much control; on the other hand, they’re not really interested in delegating power either. A dozen or so people, adhering to Elon Musk’s sense of morality, does not a democracy make.

Indeed, Musk’s partners in the venture expressed misgivings about giving him too much control. In a September 2017 email titled “honest thoughts,” Brockman and Sutskever wrote to Musk and Altman to express their fear that Musk would “end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI… The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship. You are concerned that Demis could create an AGI dictatorship. So do we. So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator if you chose.” In a private journal that’s been excerpted in court records, Brockman expressed his desire to “get out from Elon,” and questioned whether Musk was the “glorious leader” they urgently needed. 

The fellowship scattered not long after. Musk left OpenAI in early 2018, and the project launched its for-profit arm later that year. Then it was Altman’s turn to be the target of suspicion from people who believed he couldn’t be trusted with the one ring. (Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent organization of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI has denied the allegations.) 

OpenAI, according to Musk’s lawsuit, has become a “market-paralyzing gorgon,” and a “for-profit leviathan” that has betrayed its founding ideals and sacrificed safety for money and market-share. Musk’s complaint laments that “OpenAI dropped a clause from its Usage Policies banning the use of its technology for ‘activity that has a high risk of physical harm’ such as ‘weapons development’ or ‘military and warfare.’” The complaint also warned that OpenAI was abandoning its safety mission at a time when AI “is leading to a proliferation in child sexual abuse material” and “supercharging the spread of disinformation” and “malicious human impersonation.” 

What started as an underdog alliance has become a parable about hubris and power.

It’s an interesting argument coming from Musk, a Pentagon contractor who built a Nazi-loving chatbot for pervs. It’s likewise a bit dissonant for someone who destroyed public health programs in the name of cost-cutting to argue that the “obligation to generate financial returns” will corrupt someone else’s mission, but Musk was not the only person raising these concerns about Altman. I won’t rehash the 2023 power struggle at OpenAI that led to Altman being fired by the board and then reinstated days later, but suffice to say, it is central to the narrative of the lawsuit. Musk’s team has cited criticisms of Altman by Sutskever and Dario Amodei, who both left OpenAI to start new companies after questioning Altman’s commitment to safety. Musk suggests that Altman—“Scam Altman,” as he called him eight times during his deposition—has become the Demis he wished to stop.

The court records offer a rare glimpse at the strained relationships and bruised egos behind one of Silicon Valley’s nastiest falling-outs. We find Altman backchanneling with Shivon Zilis—the Neuralink employee who, unbeknownst to Altman, had multiple children with Musk while serving on the board of OpenAI—in 2023 to ask if he should tweet something nice about Elon to make him feel better. We find Musk’s lawyers moving to censor a portion of their client’s deposition where he was asked if he ingested something called “rhino ket” at Burning Man in 2017 (he says he did not), and OpenAI’s lawyers responding in a later brief with the dubious but indelible words, “there’s nothing unfairly prejudicial about attending Burning Man.” Zillis is asked if she and Musk have “ever been in a romantic relationship” and responds by saying: “‘Relationship’ is a relative term. But there have been romantic moments.” Sounds like a dream.

“it really fucking hurts when you publicly attack openai,” Altman wrote Musk in one 2023 text exchange.

“it is certainly not my intention to be hurtful, for which I apologize, but the fate of civilization is at stake,” Musk responded.

“i agree with that, and i would really love to hear the things you think we should be doing differently/better. it’s also not clear to me how the attacks on twitter help the fate of civilization,” Altman wrote.

What started in 2015 as an upstart alliance against Google has become, in every respect, a parable about hubris and power. They each believe the other is the thing people hate about Silicon Valley, and they are each, in a sense, sort of right. Musk, in his deposition, pointedly noted having “read that—allegedly, Chat GPT convinced some kid to commit suicide.” (OpenAI has denied culpability.) Altman, in his deposition, called Musk’s Grok a “goonbot” and said xAI makes “anime sex bots for children.” (X has said it has “zero tolerance for any forms of child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity, and unwanted sexual content.”) In January, they waged a public argument on X about whose companies were responsible for more deaths. Neither OpenAI or xAI responded to emailed requests for comment on the case.

As a result of Musk’s months-long assumption last year of quasi-dictatorial powers within the federal government, he caused the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and helped destroy the country’s capacity for cutting-edge research while still finding time—as he revealed in his deposition—to complain about Altman to the president of the United States. Brockman, for his part, was perhaps not quite as concerned about a dictator as he once let on: In September he became one of the single-largest donors to Donald Trump’s super-PAC.

There’s one email exchange that embodies the mix of civilization-defining grandiosity and get-over-yourselves gamer brain that made and then broke the relationship—a short back-and-forth in the hours before OpenAI’s official 2015 launch. Altman and Musk took turns hyping each other up with motivational quotes that underscored their sense of civilizational struggle. Under the subject line “Re: Great Acton quotes,” Musk shared a remark attributed to the British aristocrat: “Liberty consists in the division of power. Absolutism, in concentration of power.” Altman replied with a link to a YouTube trailer for Halo 3, which began with the words, “This is the way the world ends.” (In fact, T.S. Eliot.) 

Acton, of course, is most famous for a line that captures the essence of these court filings, even if it doesn’t show up in them: “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Sweeping changes underway at the federal agency tasked with protecting the nation’s forests could result in the loss of more than a century of critical historical documents, conservationists warn. 

The US Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service announced a major restructuring at the end of March that includes closing all 10 regional offices. Those offices house troves of archival documents—many of which are not digitized—that chronicle the history in the nation’s forests. Thus far, the agency has not made public its plans to keep that information safe. 

The Forest Service archives include data and records from the 120 years that the agency has operated, as well as historical documents going back to the 1800s. Included among them are photographs showing changes in forest landscapes, scientific research data, land management records and samples of water and plants. 

These records outline the recent history of climate change and provide crucial information for ongoing adaptation, said the Center for Biological Diversity’s Brian Nowicki.

“We have to have our heads on straight in order to address [climate change],” said Nowicki, a senior public lands advocate. “We do that by having a strong historical record.” 

On Thursday, the Center for Biological Diversity submitted a public records request to the USDA asking for details on the agency’s plans to relocate archives from the regional offices, and for any records that the agency refuses to submit to the National Archives before the offices are closed and the records are destroyed or inaccessible.

The agency has 20 business days to respond to the request, per federal law. 

In an email to Inside Climate News, a USDA spokesperson said the Forest Service follows legally mandated standards to ensure that public records are not lost or destroyed during organizational changes. 

“The Trump administration is trying to rewrite our history… Right now, long-term access to public information isn’t a guarantee.”

“As offices transition or close, our protocol ensures public documents, from field photographs to hard-copy data, are preserved, accessible and protected under federal law,” the spokesperson wrote. 

The agency added that it will retain the majority of its agency-owned regional facilities after closure, but it did not respond to requests for a timeline and details of its plans to relocate or continue managing the archives. 

But the Trump administration has eliminated a variety of data sources in the past year. Nowicki wants to see specifics on the agency’s preservation plans. 

He said he has been speaking with staff within the Forest Service and they’ve told him they have no clarity on plans for the archives. 

He added that relocating more than a century of archival material will be a huge job for an agency whose staff is already overextended. The Forest Service lost 16 percent of its workforce in the first year of the second Trump administration, according to an Inside Climate News analysis of data from the Office of Personnel Management.  “It would take years for staff to be able to go through and correctly digitize and archive all of these materials,” Nowicki said. 

The agency has said its reorganization will be implemented over the coming year. That includes other big changes, like moving the Forest Service headquarters from Washington, DC, to Salt Lake City, Utah and shifting more authority to the states. About 6,500 employees have received preliminary notifications that they could be impacted, such as changes to their role, supervisor or location, the USDA wrote in an email to Inside Climate News. The agency did not directly answer a question about whether the impacts could include layoffs.

About 500 employees, mostly from Washington, will be relocated more than 50 miles from their current station, the agency said. 

The USDA said these changes will help streamline forest management and boost timber production. “Proper forest management means a healthy and productive forest system that provides affordable, quality lumber to build homes right here in America and it means preserving and protecting the beautiful landscapes we are blessed with across this great country,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke L. Rollins said in a statement with the announcement. 

Critics say the latest changes will cause further upheaval and disruption, hindering staff’s ability to properly manage the nation’s forests while wildfire threats grow.

Eliminating swaths of Forest Service documents would fall in line with the administration’s axing of data and historical records, said Rachel Santarsiero, director of the National Security Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project.  

Santarsiero recently published a comprehensive timeline of disappearing data from the start of the second Trump administration, including deletions of web pages and online tools, removal of data from federal websites and the closure of NASA’s largest research library. 

Climate information has been a central target. The administration has removed references to global warming from government documents and websites and ended federal tracking of high-cost climate disasters, alongside making big staff and funding cuts to agencies focused on environmental protection, weather and disaster management. 

“The Trump administration is trying to rewrite our history,” Santarsiero wrote in an email to Inside Climate News. “Right now, long-term access to public information isn’t a guarantee.”

After the administration abruptly dismantled the US Agency for International Development, officials ordered staff to destroy classified documents and personnel files, The New York Times reported. Elimination of records-keeping staff there and in other agencies has hampered access to public records, Bloomberg and other news organizations found.

Nowicki emphasized that some records kept by the Forest Service can’t be digitized. The archives include samples of water or tree logs that can detail histories of forest growth progression, fires, rainfall and more. As scientists come up with new ways to glean information from historical samples, these specimens are involved in ongoing study.

Historical photographs dating back to the 1800s are critical for understanding patterns of forest fires, challenging assumptions about what historic forests looked like and learning how the nation’s forests have changed, Nowicki said. 

Records kept by the Forest Service are invaluable for climate adaptation and resilience, Santarsiero said, because they detail wildfires, soils, ecosystems, biodiversity and more. That’s crucial not just for historians and scientists, but for any person who wants to engage in their right to know about their environment, she said. 

“It’s the way the public is able to access its own history,” Santarsiero said. 

To prevent a potential lawsuit, the Capitola City Council will convene a special session on Thursday night to discuss switching from at-large to district-based elections.

The post Capitola City Council to weigh switching to district-based elections to avoid litigation appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

After Hashicorp co-founder blasts the source shack and numbers slide

Microsoft's code hosting shack Github has published a lengthy mea culpa about its availability and reliability woes - one that includes the words "we are sorry."…

Joby’s electric air taxi takes Manhattan, a Monterey Bay nonprofit launches a forward-looking job training initiative and the end of the line for a Gateway Plaza coffee spot are all part of Jessica M. Pasko’s weekly look at local business.

The post This week in Santa Cruz County business: Joby’s big ride in NYC, training for emerging aviation careers, Java Junction shutters River Street café appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

32 phone calls, 17 email chains, a 5-day ordeal, and no help during the daddy of all stuffups, claim those affected

GoDaddy is currently investigating claims that it handed complete control of a valid 27-year-old domain to another customer, without requiring them to pass any authentication processes or upload any supporting documents.…

Micha Scott has been named the 2026 Santa Cruz County artist of the year by the county’s arts commission.

Scott is a professional dancer, choreographer and teacher who has performed on stages around the world as a 13-year member of Garth Fagan Dance.

The annual award is presented to local artists for outstanding achievement in the disciplines of performing, visual or literary arts who also have made a substantial contribution to the cultural enrichment of Santa Cruz County.

Since moving from New York to Santa Cruz in 2008, Scott has been involved in the local dance community, with particular focus on being an advocate for Black youth dance.

Since 2011, she has been the artistic director of the Tannery World Dance and Cultural Center (TWDCC). In 2021, she also became the executive director, using her roles to highlight the artistic traditions passed on to her by dance pioneer Garth Fagan.

In 2022, Scott started the annual Deep Roots Dance Fest, bringing artists of the African diaspora to perform original contemporary dances rooted in their traditional forms to Santa Cruz stages.

Scott served on the grants panels at Arts Council Santa Cruz County from 2021 to 2025, on the California Arts Council in 2023-24 and recently served as a guest panelist for The Great Cabrillo Arts Design Challenge at Cabrillo College. She has secured more than $120,000 in grants over the past four years to bolster TWDCC’s youth scholarship program.

For information on previous artist of the year winners, visit the Santa Cruz County Parks website.

A profile performance will be held at the Museum of Art & History on June 5 from 7 to 9 p.m. Admission is free, though seating is limited and is on a first-come, first-served basis the night of the event.

Have news that should be in Lookout Briefs? Send your news releases, including contact information, to news@lookoutlocal.com.

MORE LOCAL COVERAGE

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When President Donald Trump returned to office last year, he promised to largely steer America clear of foreign entanglements. But over the last year, his administration has captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, threatened to take over Greenland, pressured Cuba’s communist government in an attempt to destabilize it, and openly talked about making Canada the 51st state.

But the most consequential move by far has been the attack on Iran, which reportedly has killed thousands inside the country and snarled the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil.

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In some ways, it might appear that Trump is trying to revive the American empire. Not so, says Daniel Immerwahr, a Northwestern University history professor and author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. What Trump is really doing, he says, is undermining the liberal international system, something the US itself largely built following World War II.

“People sometimes look at Trump’’s wars and they see imperialism,” Immerwahr says. But instead, Immerwahr argues that Trump is “cannibalizing the empire” through what he calls “hit-and-run” foreign policy. On this week’s More To The Story, Immerwahr sits down with host Al Letson to examine Trump’s attack on Iran, why Trump is ripping apart the postwar international order, and the long-term consequences of his impulsive foreign policy.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

If Donald Trump is remembered for anything, it may be as a war president: His enemies so far have included migrants, trade, Venezuela, Iran, maybe Cuba—and now religion. His latest full-on assault was against Pope Leo XIV, whom he called “weak on crime” and a “very liberal person” who caters to “the radical left,” accusing the pontiff of wanting Iran to have a nuclear bomb. 

Trump’s verbal attack on the Holy See followed a series of posts that were equally offensive not just to Catholics, but to the full spectrum of Christians. Those posts included a profane Easter-morning missive about Iranian leadership; a day later, a threat to perpetrate genocide against the Iranian people; and, perhaps most offensive of all, an AI-generated image of himself as a Christ-like figure performing a miracle.

Added to this affront to Christians, as well as believers of other faiths, was Vice President JD Vance’s brazen attempt to justify Trump’s lambasting of the pope with a lecture on how the pontiff should speak about moral and spiritual issues. Vance delivered his remarks at an event by Turning Point USA, the highly politicized, quasi-religious, MAGA-friendly youth organization. To underscore the religious nature of the vice president and recent Catholic convert’s impertinence, the event was held in an evangelical megachurch.

This escalation in Trump’s conflict with religious constituencies comes as a slow but tectonic stress is occurring in his normally unified conservative Christian base. I’m a scholar of evangelical Christianity, so I’ll do my best to stay in my lane as I offer some analysis as to why I believe the MAGA religious base is deteriorating—possibly denying Trump, his cronies, and MAGA successors the extraordinary reliability of the right-wing religious vote they’ve enjoyed to date.  

  Evangelicals used to be united in supporting Trump. But now, they’re fighting over theology. And neither camp is happy with Trump’s irreverent behavior.

President Donald Trump holds a Bible outside St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, in June 2020.Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty

To understand how we got here, we first need to get into the theological weeds. For all the complexities of various denominations, American evangelicals can basically be divided into two groups: the Reformers—or Calvinists—and the Arminians. They’re named for two very important players in the 16th-century European Reformation. While we usually associate the Reformation with Martin Luther or even Henry VIII, there were figures who loomed just as large—and, at times, even larger than Luther. One of these figures was the Dutch theologian John Calvin, who taught that God preordains some people to go to heaven and others to hell and that no one can do anything about it. On the other hand, a rival of Calvin’s, James Arminius, taught that every human being has a path to salvation and can choose to embrace or reject it. 

Portraits of John Calvin (left) and James ArminiusUnknown artist/Wikimedia; David Bailly/Wikimedia

Until recently, Arminians dominated American evangelicalism. For at least 50 years, and arguably much longer, they’ve had the largest churches, maintained enormous ministries, and organized massive conferences, conventions, festivals, and other events—while wielding considerable political influence and prospering handsomely in the process. Think Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell. It’s this wing of evangelicals that also controls most of the still very popular and highly effective old media platforms: radio and broadcast television, paper book publishing, and direct mail houses, many with millions of donors. 

But that generation is aging out, and the younger evangelicals coming up, particularly male multi-campus pastors, podcasters, and conference-circuit speakers, are becoming increasingly Reformed in their orientation, and they’re taking over the internet-based media. The most vocal sect of Reformers is the new Calvinists, sometimes referred to as TheoBros, many of whom follow Idaho-based pastor Doug Wilson, famous as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s spiritual mentor. Many of them promote strict interpretations of gender roles, rail against immigration, and champion Christian nationalism. 

One key point on which Reformers and Arminians disagree is the biblical importance of Israel and the Jewish people. Reformers espouse “fulfillment theology,” a Protestant tradition that began during the Reformation and holds that the Christian church fulfills God’s promises to Abraham. Some experts call this “replacement theology.” This crew sees Israel and the Jewish people as no longer occupying a central role in the divine plan; God has little to no interest in them because the church has replaced ancient Israel as the divine homeland, and Christians have replaced the Jews as God’s chosen people. 

Pastor Doug Wilson of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho Geoff Crimmins/ZUMA

Arminians, on the other hand, see history as a series of divinely orchestrated and distinct eras, or “dispensations,” and in the current one, God means for the Jews to occupy the land deeded to Abraham’s progeny and to manage it until Christ’s second coming. While there are differences within this subset when it comes to how Jews can ultimately find salvation, the consensus is that they retain a special status as God’s chosen bloodline to bring the messiah to humanity and that Christians are obligated to bless and celebrate them—meaning, in practice, that most Arminians are Christian Zionists. (Their friendliness toward Jews can have a dark side, though. Many of them believe Jews will be given a last chance to accept Christ as their savior before facing perdition.) 

The Reformer-Arminian divide was on full display during an incident that occurred in February, when right-wing broadcaster Tucker Carlson sat down opposite US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee in Tel Aviv. Doctrinally, Huckabee, while a Baptist, hews to the Arminian tradition. Carlson was raised Episcopalian—a denominational product of the British side of Reformation history (think Henry VIII’s break with Rome)—which makes him a kissing cousin of the new Calvinistic Reformed folks. 

“It is unjust to attribute the violent actions of a few to entire communities based on nationality or ethnicity,” read a statement from a major evangelical group.

In a clip that went viral, Carlson pressed Huckabee to explain what exactly it means to be a “Christian Zionist,” a label that the former Arkansas governor uses to describe his own faith and position within evangelical Christianity. In response, Huckabee insisted that the Bible explicitly states that the Jewish people have a right to a homeland, and therefore, that belief should be a tenet of Christian faith. Among Christian Zionists, this worldview includes the hastening of the end times, in which Jews will return to Israel and embrace Jesus Christ as their savior—a subject that was not broached during the interview. What they did get into, however, was the geography. Carlson cited the Old Testament passage in which God promises Abraham that his descendants will possess land “from the Nile to the Euphrates.” Did Huckabee literally believe that Israel had a right to claim the entire Mideast? “It would be fine if they took it all,” Huckabee replied, before acknowledging that the question was hypothetical.

A preacher holds up his Bible at a pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” protest outside the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta in November 2020. Megan Varner/Getty

While the Reformed group mostly objects to Trump’s cozy relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Arminian Christian Zionists are unhappy with Trump’s boorish personal disposition and heartless policies toward immigrants. The Roys Report, a Christian investigative media outlet, noted that while most prominent evangelicals have remained silent or approving of Trump, some have recently publicly criticized him. They include stalwart Trump supporter Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. When Trump launched that obscenity-laden screed on Easter Sunday, Perkins objected to the “decline in language and decorum” on X, noting it is “very troubling and should not be acceptable.” 

Earlier in the year, Pastor Erick Salgado of the Brooklyn-based Iglesia Jóvenes Cristianos and a prominent leader among Arminian-leaning Hispanic evangelicals, broke from his previous support for Trump after ICE detained one of his longtime congregational lay leaders. During a January news conference, he remarked: “It is not true that ICE is coming for people who have criminal records. They’re coming after everyone.” 

And even before the ICE surge wreaked havoc in Minneapolis, the National Association of Evangelicals, whose core constituency is largely Arminian, had already issued a call for an end to the inhumane treatment of immigrants. “Most immigrants in the United States are living peacefully and working productively in their communities,” the group’s statement said. “It is unjust to attribute the violent actions of a few to entire communities based on nationality or ethnicity. We believe refugees and immigrants deserve safety, dignity, and fair treatment.” After reports that ICE had detained Minnesota immigrant families that had legal status, Myal Greene, president and CEO of the National Association of Evangelicals-affiliated World Relief, released a stronger statement, saying: “This shameful and unpatriotic operation preys on our basest fears and manipulates the truth. Enough. ICE must be held accountable, and this operation must cease.” 

An engraving of John Wesley preaching in the City Chapel, 1822.T. Blood/Wikimedia

Again, it is Arminian doctrine and church polity that inform this reaction to Trump’s immigration policies and practices. These evangelicals emphasize God’s love, grace, and compassion. The teachings of John Wesley, the 18th-century Arminian founder of Methodism, regarded by many as the first modern evangelical religious movement and eventual denomination, are summarized in the adage, “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can.”  

Arminian sects have long maintained “mercy ministries” that provide food, clothing, and shelter to needy populations and have generously funded global medical and public health programs. The Salvation Army, with its residential addiction treatment programs and extensive emergency relief services, is the quintessence of Arminian polity.

Many of these hybrid human services–spiritual outreach entities have suffered under the Trump administration’s disastrous cuts to foreign aid and domestic social services. World Vision, a prominent international evangelical relief organization, lost more than $400 million in government grants after Elon Musk’s DOGE purge of foreign assistance in 2025, leading to some of the first public expressions of evangelical discontent with the Trump administration. The Reverend Eugene Cho, president and CEO of Bread for the World, denounced the cuts as a “policy failure,” and National Association of Evangelicals President Walter Kim warned they would be “damaging and wasteful.” On the other hand, there was little to no pushback on DOGE actions from the new Reformed evangelical groups. 

In contrast, Reformed evangelicals, much in the fire-and-brimstone tradition of Jonathan Edwards, tend to focus on God’s law. Consider them analogous to Supreme Court constitutional originalists, only with the Bible as their key document. A theological belief known as “theonomy” holds that biblical laws, specifically Old Testament judicial laws, remain binding on all modern nations and should form the basis for civil government. It’s a sort of “law-and-order” ethic, with a spiritual zing to it. 

Demonstrators interrupt proceedings with White House budget director Russell Vought (seated) during a House Budget Committee hearing in April.Andrew Harnik/Getty

Cutting foreign aid and domestic social programs is in keeping with the long-standing conservative argument that such government largesse is counterproductive, in that it creates dependency rather than independence. Government entitlements also violate biblical mandates regarding work and wealth creation, reflecting the so-called “Protestant work ethic.”

Playing to this same script has been Trump’s director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, a Reformed Baptist with deep ties to the New Calvinists. He is best known as a principal author of the Project 2025 master plan for neutralizing what right-wingers call “the deep state.” As ProPublica reported in a comprehensive profile piece, Vought “wanted spending on foreign aid to be as close to zero as possible.”

I began hearing from many on the Arminian side who expressed shock and horror at Trump’s unlawful cruelty. 

Reformed opposition to government foreign aid can be extreme. For example, in September, Christian Reconstructionist Radio posted an audio excerpt from the late new Reformed theologian R.J. Rushdoony’s volume, Threatened Freedom: A Christian View on the Menace of American Statism, in which he argues for an end to all American foreign aid because, according to him, among other atrocious things, it has funded rituals of human sacrifice. 

This division within Trump’s exclusively evangelical sector continues apace, separating congregations, clergy, and even family members from one another. What was once a near uniformity of opinion that the only candidates worthy of a Christian’s vote were MAGA Republicans utterly loyal to Trump has started showing signs of unraveling.  

  Among evangelicals, I felt very alone in my dissent. Then came Trump’s vilification of immigrants and the Iran war. I began hearing from Christians who expressed shock and horror. 

Trump is surrounded by clergy at a National Day of Prayer event in 2025.Joyce Boghosian/White House/Planet Pix/ZUMA

For all their profound theological disagreements, Reformers and Arminians seemed ready to bury the hatchet when it came to supporting Trump. When he emerged as a credible presidential prospect in 2015 and then the eventual Republican nominee in 2016, tens of millions of American Christians were ready to accept such a highly unlikely champion, even a morally suspect one, provided Trump offered what conservative religious voters wanted. 

For years, conservative Christians had heard their pastors, guest preachers, and innumerable television and radio personalities exhort them to pray that God would give them bold leaders who would bring an end to baby killing and stand unapologetically against gay rights, same-sex marriage, and transgender people. Multipage fundraising letters warned donors that Satan—embodied by Democrats—was determined to destroy their families, communities, and country if they didn’t vote for righteousness. My organization and numerous others sent out millions of letters and emails every year telling Christian Americans that what we needed was a strong leader who would appoint Supreme Court justices who would defend religious liberty, return prayer to public school classrooms, allow crosses and Ten Commandments monuments to stand in public spaces, and, most importantly, reverse Roe v. Wade. 

Virtually all evangelicals, and many Bible-literate Catholics, were familiar with the story of King David, who committed both adultery and murder but whom God forgave and came to be known as “a man after God’s own heart.” Those who grew up attending Sunday school likely had teachers who lionized figures like the Persian King Cyrus. Although he was a pagan, Cyrus ordered the badly war-damaged holy city of Jerusalem rebuilt and the sacred Temple sacrifices restored. As a way to assuage any discomfort their congregants may have felt or ease their own pesky consciences, self-proclaimed prophets and pastors across the country announced Trump was just like these biblical figures. He may be an imperfect vessel, but really, aren’t we all? Notwithstanding his past failings, they believed Trump would accomplish God’s work, most importantly bringing down Roe v. Wade and recriminalizing abortion. That was enough to convince an overwhelming majority of religious voters to cast their ballots for the unfaithful, thrice-married former playboy and financially and morally bankrupt casino magnate. Thus was born the meta-narrative of grand redemption, helping to make Trump an inspiring symbol of hope for moral transgressors.

“The Prophet Nathan rebukes King David”Eugène Siberdt/Wikimedia

After almost 40 years of conservative evangelical ministry, I broke with my religious tribe’s orthodoxy on abortion, same-sex marriage, and the Second Amendment in 2016. There were many reasons for my defection, but the final straw was the overwhelming support by conservative evangelicals for Trump. My refusal to jump on the MAGA bandwagon left me an exile in my own community. In my thinking, for me to support Trump as I had Ronald Reagan, the two Presidents Bush, and Mitt Romney would have meant abandoning the most important core beliefs taught and modeled by Jesus Christ—love of God and neighbor—which were most important to me. I wanted no part of Trump’s fake religion and contempt for humanity, and I publicly said so. Some of my constituents accused me of dissing God’s man of the hour, while others admitted they found Trump revolting but would support him because he could get things done for us. That year, Trump managed to convince the vast majority of American evangelicals that electing him would deliver the world they longed for. 

And then, in 2024, he did it again. During his bid for a second presidential term, Trump addressed the conservative National Religious Broadcasters convention in Nashville. In his hour-and-15-minute speech, sprinkled liberally with the word “hell” in a nontheological context, he assured his well-churched listeners: “I fought for Christians harder than any president has ever done before. You know that. You know that. And I will fight even harder for Christians with four more years in the White House.”

The author, Rob Schenck (second from left), with other reverends from the National Clergy Council, Kenneth Johnson (from left), Allen Church, and Patrick Mahoney, pray in front of the Supreme Court before the body of Justice Antonin Scalia arrived to lie in repose in February 2016.Tom Williams/CQ/NC/ZUMA

In yet another contradiction of the Christian ethic of humble service to others, Trump declared: “You have such power. But really, you weren’t allowed to use that power, and you’re now allowed to use it. I get in there, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used it before. It’s going to bring back the churchgoer.” 

In his conclusion, and using a term dear to Bible-believing American Christians, Trump promised his reascendancy to power would be the start of a great “revival.” Just as many of the televangelists in the room conclude a broadcast with an appeal to their audiences for financial support, Trump ended his appearance with an appeal for their political support: “With your help and God’s grace, the great revival of America begins on November 5, 2024. It’s a great revival.”

Until Trump’s second term, I felt very alone in my dissent. Then came his dismantling of USAID, his vilification of Haitian and Somali immigrants, and ICE’s abductions and killing of US citizens. In what seemed to be a sudden shift, I began hearing from many on the Arminian side who expressed shock and horror at this unlawful cruelty. 

And it’s not just Arminians who are beginning to speak out against Trump. Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen many Reformers and Arminians agree on one thing, at least: that Trump’s behavior is beginning to look increasingly blasphemous. His Easter Sunday profanity-laced ultimatum directed at Iran regarding the Strait of Hormuz, in which Trump threatened to bomb civilian infrastructure and kill a 3,000-year-old civilization, was over the top for even the most enthusiastic Trump evangelicals.

In response, the Reverend Patrick J. Mahoney, a minister of the ultra-conservative Reformed Presbyterian Church and director of the Christian Defense Coalition, posted on Facebook, “In no way does this kind of language or spirit represent Christianity or the church and should be condemned by believers…it is very concerning to have our Commander in Chief making military decisions with this kind of attitude.” Bryan Kemper, longtime director of the anti-abortion youth movement Rock for Life, also posted on Facebook: “While I’m still happy that we have Trump over Harris I’m not going to put my head in the sand about this. This is unacceptable and makes me cringe. President Trump please stop this garbage and learn what Christianity actually is. This isn’t it.” 

The subsequent post by Trump threatening “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” amped up the religious criticism even more. To that, Russell Moore, the former Southern Baptist Church leader and editor-at-large of Christianity Today, responded on X: “Rhetoric calling for war crimes is a moral horror, under any circumstances. Using the Bible to try to justify targeting civilian populations makes it even worse. It comes from, and leads to, hell.”

Mourners gather at a cemetery to commemorate victims, most of them children, of a US-Israeli attack on a girls primary school in Minab, Iran, in March.Hassan Ghaedi/Anadolu/Getty

Following criticism from Pope Leo on the Iran bombing campaigns, Trump denounced the pontiff as “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.” He also claimed credit for the election of Leo XIV by the College of Cardinals. Seeming to troll the first American pope, Trump reposted the AI-generated image of himself dressed in a white robe with a red cape draped around his shoulders, leaning over to touch the forehead of an ill man. Most Christians recognize such raiment as belonging to Jesus. Trump’s sacrilege blew up my social media pages, with numerous conservative influencers and a broad spectrum of religious leaders decrying it, including Pete Hegseth’s Reformed spiritual mentor, Doug Wilson. He told the Washington Examiner that Trump’s image constituted “blasphemy.” David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network posted on X: “You’re not God. None of us are. This goes too far. It crosses the line.” Still, Trump’s most reliable Arminian clerics, like First Baptist Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress and his Pentecostal senior White House religious adviser, Paula White-Cain, remained silent as of this writing.

It remains to be seen whether Trump’s latest offenses to conservative Christian sensibilities (not to mention Catholic sentiments when it comes to respect for the Holy Father), together with the Arminian-Reformed internecine conflicts, will change right-wing religious voting habits. But the revulsion over Trump’s boorishness, the respective anger over Iran and immigration enforcement practices, the charges of blasphemy from several quarters, and the growing number of influential anti-Trump voices may be just enough to deny Trump’s political toadies and his eventual MAGA successor the same overwhelming level of evangelical support they’ve enjoyed to date. After all, the Jesus at the center of all versions of the Christian faith admonished that “every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand.” And that, we can take as gospel. 

Clergy members gather for a press conference at a memorial for Renée Good, who was shot and killed in a confrontation with an immigration agent, in January in Minneapolis.Stephen Maturen/Getty

We visited Scout AI's training ground where it's working on AI agents that give individual soldiers control of fleets of autonomous vehicles.

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Just a few months after California overhauled the way it teaches children to read, a new bill takes on math education — and may be just as controversial.

Senate Bill 1067 would require schools to screen all kindergartners, first- and second-graders for basic math skills, and give them extra help if they’re behind. The idea is to help those children catch up to their peers who might have had much more exposure to math before starting school.

“A student’s early math skills are the most powerful predictor of their later success in school,” said Amy Cooper, a senior advisor at EdVoice, an education nonprofit that’s cosponsoring the bill. “We’re not talking about tracking kids. There’s no labels. It’s just about getting support to students so that they can get up to grade level.” 

California students, in all grade levels, have long struggled in math. Last year, just 37% of students performed at grade level in math, with some groups of students faring far worse. Just 16% of Black 11th-graders, for example, met the state’s grade-level standard. Nationwide, California ranks 43rd in 4th grade math scores, behind Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and dozens of other states. 

One reason for the poor performance, experts say, is California’s uneven early education landscape. Until transitional kindergarten became available to all 4-year-olds last year, children showed up at kindergarten with a wide array of abilities and skills. Some had years of exposure to early math — either at preschool or at home — and could count, do basic arithmetic and even read a little. Others, especially low-income children, had no prior exposure to the ABCs and 123s, and lagged far behind. Even now, TK and kindergarten are optional, so some students start first grade with no previous math instruction at all.

‘Critical tipping point’

Some of those children catch up eventually, but many continue to fall further and further behind, research shows. And because math is sequential, catching up becomes harder over time, and the gap widens. Some researchers found that early math skills can even be a predictor of how well students do in high school and college.

It’s still too early to gauge the impact of transitional kindergarten on students’ long-term math performance, but so far there’s still a gap between children who’ve had exposure to math — either through preschool or at home — and those who haven’t. Low-income children are far less likely to get that early exposure, said Alice Klein, a developmental psychologist and research director at the education research firm WestEd.

“It is a critical tipping point,” Klein said. “Unless those students get intervention, the gap will widen. It’ll be harder for them to access higher-level math classes later on, and this will have implications for future job opportunities and the economic future of California. It’s a continual closing of opportunities.”

Transitional kindergarten teacher Rachelle Bacong leads students during a math lesson at Ira Harbison Elementary School in National City. Credit: Adriana Heldiz / CalMatters Transitional kindergarten teacher Rachelle Bacong leads students during a math lesson at Ira Harbison Elementary School in National City. Credit: Adriana Heldiz / CalMatters

Klein supports the math screening legislation because she said it’s an effective way to identify students who are struggling and provide them with support. At least 20 other states have math screenings and have seen positive results, she said.

“I’m so happy that California is considering passing this bill,” Klein said. “It’s a great start, and could be the next step” in improving math outcomes in California.

Numbers and objects

Districts would have their choice of several screening tests to choose from, each ranging from 10 to 20 minutes long and testing children’s knowledge of basic math concepts. For example, kindergartners might be asked to look at two groups of dots and decide which group has more. Or they’d be asked to identify certain numbers and show that they understand what the numbers mean — that “three” means three objects, for example. English learners would take the test in their native languages. 

The bill is authored by state Sen. Akilah Weber Pierson, a Democrat from San Diego, and last week passed unanimously in the Senate education committee. 

Its cosponsor, EdVoice, was behind the push for phonics-based literacy instruction in California public schools. That initiative passed, but only after a long fight with the California Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers union, and English learner advocates, who argued that it didn’t give teachers enough flexibility and that it wouldn’t be effective for students whose first language isn’t English. The final version of the bill doesn’t require schools to take advantage of state-funded teacher training, but it does require them to use phonics-based classroom materials. 

Too many tests?

There might be a fight over the proposed math testing as well. The California Teachers Association opposes it, as well as California County Superintendents, the Association of California School Administrators and the California Mathematics Council. 

They argue that the screening is unnecessary because the state already has a comprehensive new math framework and has made other big investments in early math. It’ll take time for those investments to show results. Also, the math framework emphasizes critical thinking and real-world math problems, and the screening might be too narrow and not take into account young children’s developmental differences.

They also argue that the testing will be pointless unless the state funds tutoring to help those students who are identified as needing extra help.

Transitional kindergarten students arrange number blocks during class at Ira Harbison Elementary School in National City. Credit: Adriana Heldiz / CalMatters

Nick Johnson, an associate professor of teacher education at San Diego State University, questioned whether schools need yet another standardized test. The federal education policy No Child Left Behind, adopted in the early 2000s, focused heavily on testing, and led to few improvements, he said.

“Since No Child Left Behind testing, we’ve assumed that (standardized testing) will improve student learning,” Johnson said. “But the evidence shows that’s rarely true. Is public education in a better place now than it was 25 years ago?”

Magic of math

Rachelle Bacong has been teaching kindergarten and TK for 30 years in National City, near San Diego. She weaves math into every activity the children do. When she sets up an art project, she asks them how many chairs are at the table and how many scissors they’ll need. When she makes smoothies with them, she asks them how much juice or how many chunks of bananas they should add. When the children wash their hands, she asks them how long they spent at the sink.

They also spend a good portion of their day playing with blocks, tiles and tubes, experimenting with shapes and dimensions. Bacon’s goal is to make math fun and easy to grasp, no matter where the child is developmentally.

“Math crosses all cultures, abilities and backgrounds. It’s accessible to everyone. It’s my job to design the learning environment to make it accessible to everyone,” Bacong said. “That’s what’s so magical about it.”

Transitional kindergarten teacher Rachelle Bacong insider her classroom at Ira Harbison Elementary School in National City. Credit: Adriana Heldiz / CalMatters

She also spends time every day explicitly teaching them math, although in a way that’s blended with play. She’ll teach them songs about numbers, show them how shapes fit together, and gently guide them when a solution might not be clear. Math instruction needs to come from several angles, she said, because children’s cognitive skills develop at such different rates.

She welcomes extra help for children who need it, but she’s skeptical that a test will reflect how individual children process math concepts. She already knows how her students are faring, and she fears that screening results will be used to stigmatize children, teachers or schools. 

“My fear is that it’ll focus on a child’s deficits,” Bacong said. “Math needs to be joyful, fun and developmentally appropriate. We want to set students up for success, so they’ll be prepared for whatever they’re going to be designing or building in the future.”

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