Bee Opinionated: Chaos in Chino + Sacramento’s immigrant resource + Solutions in San Diego?

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Happy Sunday, Robin Epley here again with The Sacramento Bee Editorial Board, bringing you the best of the state’s opinion journalism over the last week.

“Dear Parent,” begins the notice from the school district. “Student (insert name here) is transgender.”

Opinion

With this new notification policy from the Chino Valley Unified School District, parents and the board of education there succeeded in teaching their children only one lesson — how to vilify their peers, violate equal protection rights, ignore basic human autonomy and disrespect authority, wrote the Sacramento Bee Editorial Board last week.

“The school board’s recent decision to notify all parents of the presence of a transgender child is a grievous abuse of a school notification system that is intended to inform parents of pep rallies and school lunches. It is an unsurprising and uninspired tactic from a right-wing school board with numerous ties to Christian fundamentalism, inside a conservative county that attempted to secede from the state last year.”

When California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond came to the Chino school board meeting on July 20, he was met with heckling and physical removal at the request of school board president Sonja Shaw.

Shaw ordered Thurmond to leave after only one minute of his public comment period, and accused both Thurmond and state leaders in general of “proposing things that pervert children.”

“I ask — if I am forcibly removed from a public school board meeting as the State Superintendent of Public Instruction,” Thurmond wrote in a series of tweets, “how are everyday parents and students in Chino Valley Unified supposed to have their voices heard?”

They’re not — and that’s the entire point of Chino Valley Unified’s cruel, new policy.

From Immigrant to Resident

When Svyatoslav and Svitlana Iotko arrived in Sacramento with their three children in 2021, they were refugees. Family and friends advised them to look into Elica Health Centers, a locally based, federally qualified health-care clinic with 10 locations across Sacramento and West Sacramento.

What they found was far more than just a medical clinic. Svitlana told me last week in a new column that Elica and its Immigrant Resource Center held their hands through the first two years of living in a totally new world.

“You don’t know the system, you don’t know what to do, and they guide you step by step,” Svitlana said. “All those people helped us as refugees, as new immigrants, to understand this system.”

Sacramento is home to the highest number of Ukrainians per capita in the nation, and hosts the fourth-highest number of Ukrainian immigrants of any metropolitan U.S. city, behind only New York City, Chicago and Seattle, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Elica not only provides comprehensive medical, dental, optometry, pediatric and behavioral health services, it helps link thousands of refugees, immigrants and low-income patients with social services across the region. The clinic has served more than 50,000 patients and had more than 200,000 patient interactions — nearly half of them in languages other than English.

An internal survey done by Elica showed that more than 40% of Sacramento’s newest immigrants don’t know about the region’s food banks, and more than 30% don’t know where to find English classes. More than 70% of new immigrants surveyed didn’t know where or how to get information about support programs.

“They can make an appointment with the doctor, ... explain to you what insurance plan to choose, they can explain your everything,” Svitlana said. “In my country, we could spend ... hours standing in the line just to see a doctor.”

Solutions in San Diego?

“Imagine this scenario: A police officer approaches a homeless encampment. Dispatch informs the officer that there are 15 to 20 available shelter beds nearby. The officer encourages the encampment occupant to take the shelter opportunity. After three visits and three rejected invitations, the homeless person gets booked into jail and then released.”

Columnist Tom Philp’s latest explores San Diego’s new policy to jail the homeless if they refuse services and asks if Sacramento might follow suit.

“This scenario is impossible right now in Sacramento,” Philp concludes. “We do not have enough shelters. We do not have a comprehensive real-time system to identify empty shelter space. And we do not have an ordinance that uses the threat of law enforcement to motivate the occupants of troublesome encampments to move to a safer environment.”

The Sacramento City Council will debate at its Aug. 1 meeting — that’s this Tuesday — whether to increase shelter capacity in the short-term by assigning City Manager Howard Chan the authority to establish outdoor “Safe Ground” managed encampments.

Coincidentally, Philp wrote, San Diego and Sacramento counties have roughly the same homeless population — about 10,000 according to the most recent annual census efforts. But San Diego County, with 3.3 million residents, has double the population and essentially double the available government resources.

Op-Ed Roundup

Here’s why I propose that Sacramento’s health care workers make at least $25 an hour by Sacramento City Councilwoman Katie Valenzuela

“I know one thing for certain: I don’t need a study to tell me that people doing lifesaving work while making less than $25 an hour is bad policy.”

Homelessness is the Achilles’ heel of California. Here is why we keep failing by Carolyn Coleman, CEO and executive director of the League of California Cities

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. The same can be said for the state’s piecemeal approach to funding housing and homelessness programs.”

An unfunded wage increase could deplete access to care for vulnerable Californians by Carol Pickard, COO of ACC Senior Services, located in the Pocket Area of Sacramento

“A deeper dive into SB 525 uncovers the reality of what an unfunded minimum wage mandate will have on an already strained health care system: higher costs for facilities and patients, worsened staffing shortages and reductions in life-saving services and programs.”

Opinion of the Week

“If you can inherit generational wealth, you can inherit generational debt” — State Senator Steven Bradford, D-Gardena, a member of the California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans, talking about how the nation’s past prevented the development of generational wealth to benefit African Americans the inequity that has created, in Tom Philp’s column on the issue.

Got thoughts? What would you like to see in this newsletter every week? Got a story tip or an opinion to tell the world? Let us know what you think about this email and our work in general by emailing us at any time via opinion@sacbee.com.

In awhile crocodiles,

Robin