🍔 Good morning! Welcome to Thursday, Sept. 18. This is Rob. It’s National Cheeseburger Day.
☔️ Flood watch? Maybe it’s gonna rain. The National Weather Service predicts a 30 to 50% chance of rain late Thursday and early Friday and issued a “flood watch” warning for parts of Fresno County.
🖼️ Museum Day! Celebrate local history and museums from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 20, with several local museums offering free admission, including the Fresno County Historical Museum and the Fresno Art Museum.
💉Free flu shots: The Fresno County Department of Public Health, UCSF Fresno and Saint Agnes Medical Center will provide no-cost flu vaccination clinics throughout at multiple locations across Fresno County. The first flu clinic will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 25 at Dunlap Elementary School, 39667 N. Dunlap Road. More information
🎒Hey, do you have a “go bag”? KMPH
1. No more remote learning for Fresno’s kindergarteners
As Fresno Unified scrambles to meet its ambitious literacy-improvement goals, district leaders are changing which students are eligible for remote, online learning, The Fresno Bee reports.
The Bee says California’s third-largest school district no longer offers distance-learning options for kindergarteners and is “evaluating” whether to exclude additional lower-grade levels at FUSD’s Farber Online.
Carlos Castillo, the district’s chief academic officer, told The Bee that students in second grade and younger struggle more with online learning than their older peers.
Online or remote learning has gained popularity in some circles since the 2020 COVID pandemic forced much of the world indoors. They’ve also become an option for students who fear immigration enforcement at schools, in the wake of ICE raids this year.
Said Castillo: “Reading foundational skills are hard enough to teach in person.”
2. Faster response times?
Fresno police Chief Mindy Casto wants to improve the department’s response times on non-emergency calls, ABC30 reports.
City police response times range from eight minutes for emergency calls to almost four hours for lower-priority calls like custody disputes, car theft, and routine burglaries, ABC says.
A new dispatch center is expected to add at least a dozen more dispatchers and employees next year.
Chief Casto: “We’re always going to be there for those emergencies. But can we do better to make people feel safer and feel like they’re getting their money’s worth out of Fresno PD?”
3. Study suggests good news for these Fresno-area students
English-language learning students in Central Unified schools expect good news later this fall when statewide dashboard results are released, the Merced FOCUS reports this morning.
Students learning English as a second language in California are making steady progress amid challenges in immigration enforcement and educational funding, according to a new study from the Public Policy Center of California.
Central Unified schools have been testing new strategies to boost progress among their multilingual learners.
The district implemented new techniques, such as “EL Bootcamps,” to better prepare students for the end-of-year exams and worked with family liaisons to create adaptive lesson plans across multiple campuses.
Fresno Unified offers peer-to-peer mentorships and online afterschool programs and works with community groups to connect vulnerable families to immigration, healthcare and other basic needs resources.
Today’s newsletter was edited by Danielle Bergstrom.
