Daily Report: All

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Under proposals the state's teacher credentialing agency is set to consider today, school districts would need to show on a case-by-case basis that no fully credentialed teachers are available before they resort to less-qualified educators, and under-prepared teachers could serve a maximum of three years instead of five.

The Commission on Teacher Credentialing is weighing the changes after expressing concern that under-prepared teachers disproportionately serve students who are living in poverty and learning English.

"Until that changes, we need to tighten up our process a little bit," Commissioner Kathleen Harris said at a September commission meeting, where possible regulatory changes for under-prepared teachers were first discussed.

California grants emergency permits to credentialed teachers so they may instruct English language learners, deliver a bilingual curriculum, or serve as resource specialists or teacher librarians before they have the required authorization to do so. In order to hire teachers on emergency permits each year, school districts must preemptively declare with the state the number of under-prepared teachers they might need and certify that they will first try to recruit fully credentialed teachers...

Zusha Elinson/The Bay Citizen Three people have been struck walking in this crosswalk at Santa Helena Avenue and El Camino Real in the past two months. 

A perilous stretch of El Camino Real in Millbrae where the state was found liable in 2010 for endangering pedestrians continues to claim victims as people try to cross the busy six-lane thoroughfare.

Caltrans was ordered to pay $8 million to the family of Emily Liou, who was struck by a Toyota in 2006 while crossing the highway in a crosswalk. Age 17 at the time, she was left in a coma. The jury found that Caltrans had known for years that the crosswalks without traffic signals were dangerous but had taken no action to prevent the accident.

Despite the jury’s verdict, Caltrans has done little since then to improve the crossing at Ludeman Lane where Liou was hit or three similar crosswalks within a six-block stretch of El Camino Real. Since the accident, 11 more pedestrians have been hit in these crosswalks. In the past six weeks alone, three people have been injured...

Mike Kepka/San Francisco Chronicle The Sonoma Developmental Center in Eldridge is one of five state-run institutions for the developmentally disabled.

Sonoma County’s top prosecutor has joined with advocates for the developmentally disabled in calling for local police to take charge of criminal investigations of patient abuse at California’s board-and-care institutions.

Cases involving reported assault and negligence have long been left to the Office of Protective Services, the police force at the five state-run developmental centers. The force's detectives and patrol officers have routinely failed to do basic police work even when patients die under suspicious circumstances.

The force has performed especially poorly in sexual abuse cases, California Watch reported in a story published Thursday.

Patients have accused caretakers of molestation and rape 36 times since 2009, but the Office of Protective Services did not order a single hospital-supervised rape examination for any of the alleged victims. “Rape kit” exams are routinely used to collect evidence at most police departments.

Eleven of the sex abuse cases were...

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A handful of mobile app makers that defied an order from state Attorney General Kamala Harris to post a written privacy policy can expect enforcement actions to be filed against them as early as next week.

Several companies might face sanctions after Harris sent warning letters in late October to 100 app makers that had not posted a written policy. The vast majority agreed to comply, said Travis LeBlanc, who oversees the attorney general’s new Privacy Enforcement and Protection Unit.

The companies that rejected her order maintain they aren’t required to have a policy because the personal data they collect is not subject to the California Online Privacy Protection Act, LeBlanc said. He declined to name the companies or say how many were violating the law.

The prevalence of mobile app downloads has exploded in recent years, while enforcement of privacy protections has struggled to keep up. Privacy advocates say having a policy in place is the minimum requirement for app makers and a necessary first step in educating consumers who increasingly rely on mobile devices to share and store sensitive information...

Monica Lam/California Watch Shasta Regional Medical Center in Redding 

A Prime Healthcare Services hospital in Redding has been fined $95,000 for publicizing a patient’s confidential medical files in an effort to discredit a California Watch news report.

The state Department of Public Health imposed the financial penalties on Prime’s Shasta Regional Medical Center on Nov. 9 for five offenses that occurred last year.

At the time, officials of the Ontario-based hospital chain were trying to undercut a California Watch story about aggressive Medicare billing practices at the Redding hospital.

In an attempt to rebut the story, the hospital's CEO sent an email to 785 people – virtually everyone who worked at the hospital – disclosing details from a 64-year-old diabetes patient’s confidential files, state investigators wrote in their report. The patient had been interviewed by California Watch for its story.

Earlier, the hospital CEO, Randall Hempling, took the woman’s medical files to the editor of the local newspaper, the Redding Record Searchlight, to dissuade him from reprinting California Watch's story...

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State regulators allow nursing home companies to siphon money away from patient care to pad corporate profits, alleges a lawsuit filed by a longtime foe of the industry.

Glendale attorney Russ Balisok, who has made a career of suing nursing homes, brought the suit seeking to invalidate parts of state law that allow nursing facilities to contract out their own management. The suit, filed last month, targets Country Villa Health Services, which runs a chain of 50 skilled nursing and assisted-living facilities throughout California.

Balisok's strategy is to attack the industry's business model. At issue are state-approved agreements in which Country Villa homes contract out their operations to another Country Villa entity. The management company gets a percentage of revenues from the homes it operates. Balisok contends that the management company doesn't actually run the facilities and instead consumes money needed to care adequately for patients...

Kendall Taggart/California Watch The Church of St. Leo the Great in Oakland recently installed a cell antenna in its bell tower.

Inside the bell tower of the Church of St. Leo the Great, constructed in 1926 on a corner of Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, isn't the obvious spot for a cell antenna, but that's where AT&T installed one.

Across the state, wireless companies are installing an increasing number of cell sites inside church steeples and bell towers. With the growing use of tablets, smartphones and other wireless devices, the wireless industry has approached churches because of their height and residential locations, where putting new towers would be difficult.

The practice has created additional work for property tax assessors, who are responsible for determining how much of the church's property is no longer tax-exempt. Churches and other nonprofits often are exempt from property taxes, but only if the property is used for religious or charitable purposes. If property is used for commercial purposes, such as leasing space for a cell tower, tax assessors must charge the organizations...

Columbia_Admissions/Flickr

Solano College will pay a consultant more than $100,000 over two years to recruit international students from Asia – at a time when the community colleges have undergone severe budget cuts and many in-state students are struggling to get the classes they need.

Solano College Superintendent-President Jowel Laguerre says the move will bring in additional revenues that will eventually help support the college’s bottom line. International students pay about $197 more per unit than local students at Solano.

But the academic senate has weighed in against the plan, saying it could have a negative effect on local students, was approved without adequate faculty input and might not pencil out financially.

The move comes as the University of California and California State University systems have increased the number of international and out-of-state students in an effort to increase tuition revenues.

The CSU system stoked controversy this year when officials announced they were closing spring enrollment for graduate programs for California residents but...

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Larry Ihrig, the longtime pastor of Celebration Christian Center in Livermore, began a recent Sunday sermon with the issue on everyone’s mind: the outcome of the presidential election.

“Now, some of you may glory in the result, but I know some of you are disappointed,” Ihrig told the 100 members of his evangelical Bay Area church after Election Day.

In the lead-up to the Nov. 6 presidential election, he was one of about 1,600 religious leaders around the country who talked politics from the pulpit, challenging a 1954 law that bans churches from supporting candidates during worship services. 

The movement, called Pulpit Freedom Sunday and organized by the Arizona-based Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, encourages pastors to “preach a biblically based sermon regarding candidates and the election without fearing that the IRS will investigate or punish the church,” according to the group’s website.

Pastors across the country have posted videos on the Internet of their direct or thinly veiled political endorsements and sent letters to the...