This week many listeners may be in their kitchens preparing a big meal for Thanksgiving, so we're rebroadcasting an episode from 2022, where we visit a kitchen in Davenport, California, a little seaside town, south of San Francisco, not far from Santa Cruz.

The town is home to a tiny district with just one school, nestled between ocean, farmland, and mountains. John Fensterwald is taking us there for lunch, cooked from scratch by the fifth and sixth graders.

Pacific Elementary’s unique Food Lab program is a boon for the district, boosting its enrollment by attracting students from nearby wealthier districts.

Guests:

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Over the last ten years, San Luis Coastal Unified School District has changed up its menu, replacing packaged pizza and chicken nuggets with freshly baked chicken drumsticks, sweet potato, black bean chimichurri bowls and plates of coconut rice with a red lentil dal.

The district has done that in part through a federal grant program that helps school districts buy ingredients from local farms to make more nutritious school lunches from scratch.

Now, that federal program has been gutted, leaving many districts, especially smaller ones or those just starting out on the journey of making over their menus, without a crucial funding stream.

Guests:

Read more from EdSource: Schools, farms grapple with lost funds after federal program is gutted 

Education Beat is a weekly podcast hosted by EdSource’s Zaidee Stavely and produced by Coby McDonald.

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Improve Your Tomorrow provides mentorship services to about 1,000 students at Stockton Unified School District, transforming struggling students into leaders prepared for college.

But funding is uncertain under the second Trump administration. Improve Your Tomorrow, like many mentoring and tutoring programs in K-12 schools, relies partially on federal grants through AmeriCorps — funding that President Donald Trump has proposed entirely eliminating.

Guests:

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Education Beat is a weekly podcast. This week's episode was hosted by EdSource’s Emma Gallegos and produced by Coby McDonald.

As a kindergarten teacher, a big part of Violet Nye’s job  is teaching kids how to read. But the way she teaches her students is very different from how she learned as a kid. She remembers being taught to memorize whole words.

Now, she's steeped in the practice of teaching kids how to sound out words, while also building up their vocabulary and helping them lift words off the page to imagine whole new worlds from stories.

A new law aims to get more California teachers to teach reading the way Violet does. It comes after years of advocacy and debate and required a significant amount of compromise.

Guests:

Read more from EdSource: New law changes how California kids learn to read

Education Beat is a weekly podcast hosted by EdSource’s Zaidee Stavely and produced by Coby McDonald.

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Miliani Rodriguez is a senior at Coachella Valley High School. The school buildings are old, she says, and they show it. The air conditioning often breaks in over 100-degree heat. When it rains, the ceilings leak. The sinks in her ceramics classroom broke and flooded the classroom.

Miliani thought these kinds of things were  normal, after attending school in the Coachella Valley Unified School District since kindergarten. But last year she visited her cousin’s high school, just a couple of miles away from her, and found modern buildings, spacious athletic fields, and working air conditioning.

Now, she is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit, Miliani R. v. State of California, which claims the way the state subsidizes school renovations perpetuates vast inequalities for students, sending more money to districts that already have more property wealth, and locking out poor districts from accessing funding.

Guests:

Read more from EdSource: California sued over bond program that sends more money to fix facilities in wealthy school districts

Education Beat is a weekly podcast hosted by EdSource’s Zaidee Stavely and produced by Coby McDonald.

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When Sarahi Sanchez Soto joined a dual-enrollment program at her high school in Dinuba, it allowed her to enroll in college-level computer science classes and jump-started her college career.

But that program is now in peril, after the Trump administration announced it’s eliminating grant programs for Hispanic-Serving Institutions, colleges where at least 25% of students are Latino, because they claim they are discriminatory.

These cuts hit California's community colleges hard, where the grants provided services meant to help all students get past early hurdles in their college journeys.

Guests:

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Education Beat is a weekly podcast hosted by EdSource’s Zaidee Stavely and produced by Coby McDonald.

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For Chelsea Duran, returning to Maywood Academy High School this fall for her senior year means feeling like she has to be on high alert, watching over her shoulder for immigration enforcement agents.

Summer break started with the news that Chelsea's friend Johanna had been detained by immigration authorities. News of her arrest sent shock waves through the school. In the days that followed, the neighborhood around the school was thrust into the center of intense immigration enforcement activity, leaving students and teachers on edge.

Guests:

Read more from EdSource: A student deported and a summer of raids leave a school reeling

Education Beat is a weekly podcast hosted by EdSource’s Zaidee Stavely and produced by Coby McDonald.

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Saran Tugsjargal grew up with multiple disabilities. At school she received speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, and help with learning to understand social cues. But the support often felt isolating. 

Making things even more difficult was the designation Saran received because of some of her behavioral challenges: emotional disturbance. She says it felt stigmatizing.

Saran found herself wondering who would stand up for students like her. Little did she know that she would become that person.

Guests:

Read more from EdSource: How this teen pushed California to change special education policy

Education Beat is a weekly podcast hosted by EdSource’s Zaidee Stavely and produced by Coby McDonald.

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Schools across California could lose hundreds of social workers, school counselors, mental health clinicians, wellness coaches and graduate student interns, after the Trump administration cut federal grants for mental health support.

In rural areas like Humboldt County, school districts have relied almost entirely on these federal grants to provide mental health workers for students, who are struggling with high rates of poverty, drug addiction, and suicide, and difficulty accessing care.

Guests:

Read more from EdSource: After federal cuts, California schools could lose hundreds of mental health clinicians

Education Beat is a weekly podcast hosted by EdSource’s Zaidee Stavely and produced by Coby McDonald.

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All high schools in California will be required to offer a semester of financial literacy to all students, beginning in the 2027-28 school year. The course will be required for graduation beginning with the class of 2031.

Some high schools are already offering the course.

Meet Allison Saiki, named teacher of the year from Sweetwater Union High School District, where she teaches students how to manage money, pay rent and open retirement accounts, all with a classroom currency she calls "Saiki Cents."

Guests:

Read more from EdSource: Districts gear up for personal finance graduation requirement

Education Beat is a weekly podcast hosted by EdSource’s Zaidee Stavely and produced by Coby McDonald.

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