SUMMARY: Over the past year, UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital has been pioneering a virtual reality technology that enables pediatric patients, and their parents, to “tour” their brains before surgery. Special correspondent Cat Wise reports on how this 3-D platform may help young patients with epilepsy and brain tumors reduce their fears and anxieties before surgery, and maybe even yield an "epiphany."
SUMMARY: Mary Daly dropped out of high school and ended up as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. As a part of our weekly series Making Sen$e, Paul Solman travels with Daly to Boise, Idaho, where through a unique lens of economic policy, she tries to help others find the same success in the workforce as she did.
SUMMARY: Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, was found not guilty by a jury on Thursday for murdering San Francisco resident Kate Steinle, a case that was repeatedly invoked by President Trump to rally support for an immigration crackdown. Hari Sreenivasan learns more about the case, the politics, and the outcome from Vivian Ho of the San Francisco Chronicle.
SUMMARY: The San Francisco Bay’s wetlands are disappearing at an alarming rate due to encroaching development, leaving the local ecosystem at risk. Moreover, the wetlands can store as much carbon as a tropical rainforest, an invaluable asset in the effort to slow global warming. Sonia Aronson of the PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs takes a look at a new and contentious proposed tax to save the bay.
WOMAN: Welcome to the Oakland shoreline. This is Martin Luther King Jr. Regional Park (Shoreline).
SONIA ARONSON (Student Reporting Labs): These local high school students have volunteered their Saturday to clean up the San Francisco Bay.
CHRIS LA, Volunteer, Save the Bay: We are helping restore and replant and reinstall native plants into this area of the wetlands.
SONIA ARONSON: They are here with Save the Bay, a local organization that mobilizes the community to restore the thousands of acres of wetlands surrounding the bay.
They also educate volunteers and student groups like this one about the crucial role that wetlands play in sustaining the bay.
Chris La is a sophomore at Oakland High School.
CHRIS LA: We should be connected to our environment, because that’s what we should be worried about first. Without the world, without nature, we wouldn’t be here. And we’re slowly doing a better job at sustaining ourselves, but, so far, we kind of screwed up over the last 200 years.
SONIA ARONSON: In that time, the wetlands that surround the bay have been disappearing at an alarming rate, which could endanger not just the local ecosystem, but the worldwide effort to address global warming and sea level rise.
PATTY OIKAWA, University of California, Berkeley: So, originally, this was all wetlands. About 150 years ago, people came in and drained those wetlands and started growing crops like corn and alfalfa.
SONIA ARONSON: Patty Oikawa, a postdoctoral researcher at U.C. Berkeley, is studying the unique ability of wetlands to store carbon, a trait that can offset the effects of climate change.
SUMMARY: Job growth in the San Francisco Bay Area has exploded in recent years and many people are being priced out. Blame the NIMBYS, including progressives fighting to protect their quaint neighborhoods by blocking any new construction. Activists battling income equality are fighting to change this with the new Yes-In-My-Back-Yard movement. Special correspondent Duarte Geraldino reports.
MAN: Whose house?
AUDIENCE: Our house!
DUARTE GERALDINO (NewsHour): In the San Francisco Bay Area, it seems any small group of voices can derail a proposed housing development.
PROTESTERS: Ed lee, can't you see we don't need no luxury?
DUARTE GERALDINO: Some urban liberals wage war on so-called luxury housing. Around here, the going price for a two-bedroom is over four grand a month.
PROTESTERS: No one Bay Area.
DUARTE GERALDINO: Meanwhile, some suburban conservatives fight against subsidized housing.
WOMAN: Stand up for your property rights before they get taken away. They want to take away your decision of where you're going to live and how you're going to live.
DUARTE GERALDINO: But there is a new and growing group protesting what it sees as the not in my backyard, or NIMBY, attitudes of both the left and the right. This group calls itself YIMBY, Yes In My Backyard.
WOMAN: Welcome, everybody, to the rally for housing.
DUARTE GERALDINO: Sonja Trauss, hobbled by a broken foot, is hopping mad about the lack of new construction, which she says is inflating housing prices throughout the Bay Area.
SONJA TRAUSS, Bay Area Renters' Federation: It's caused by zoning, but it's also caused by super local control. That's really what it is.
DUARTE GERALDINO: And you're trying to disrupt that?
SONJA TRAUSS: Yes.
DUARTE GERALDINO: YIMBY groups are fighting to ease local development requirements originally meant to maximize community input, but that today effectively delay new projects for years, meaning newcomers have to outbid existing residents for a place to live.
SUMMARY: An ambitious new plan in San Francisco aims to completely end the transmission of HIV, which infects about 50,000 people every year nationwide. In a city where huge strides have already been made in battling the epidemic, public health officials, doctors and activists are increasing their efforts to bring the number of new HIV infections down to zero. NewsHour's John Carlos Frey reports.
JOHN CARLOS FREY (NewsHour): At Ward 86, a bustling outpatient HIV clinic at San Francisco General Hospital, nurse Diane Jones drops everything when this pager goes off.
It means that someone in the city just tested HIV positive.
DIANE JONES: So, I’m going to make him an appointment.
Jones is following a protocol called ‘RAPID’ which is designed to get new HIV positive individuals into treatment immediately.
DIANE JONES: Just got diagnosed today, last negative was June.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: Jones scrambles to make plans for the new patient who is seen just hours later.
It’s part of an ambitious plan in San Francisco to completely end new HIV infections.
Each year about 50,000 people in the United States are infected with HIV. And while the disease has moved off the front pages as treatment has made infection more of a manageable chronic condition, an estimated 13,700 people still die from AIDS in the U.S. each year.
Globally, an estimated 1.5 million people are killed. It’s the 6th leading cause of death.
In San Francisco there are relatively few new HIV infections — 359 in 2013 and overwhelmingly found in gay men. It’s a number that has been falling over the past eight years. But new infections haven’t gone away.
Today, public health officials, doctors, and activists are increasing their efforts to bring that number all the way down to zero.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Much of our reporting on climate change has focused on the impact it could have on people or on the environment in which they live.
But one area that tends to get less attention is how climate change will affect wildlife. There’s a major habitat restoration project in San Francisco Bay that’s trying to address that very issue.
The NewsHour’s Cat Wise has our report.
RACHEL TERTES, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: So, welcome, everyone, to our first morning of trapping.
CAT WISE (NewsHour): On a recent morning, a small group of volunteers clad in rubber boots gathered at a park on the edge of the San Francisco Bay.
RACHEL TERTES: So when the animal walks in, he sets the trap off.
CAT WISE: They’d come to help U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials gather traps in a restored tidal marsh to determine if an endangered species, found only in this area of the bay, is making a comeback.
Wildlife biologist Rachel Tertes carefully opened the first trap and out spilled a tiny creature, just what they were hoping to find.
RACHEL TERTES: This cinnamon belly would tell us pretty much right away that this is a salt marsh harvest mouse.
CAT WISE: The endangered harvest salt marsh mouse is, well, pretty cute. It’s lost about 90 percent of its habitat due to human development along the bay, and now, according to Tertes, it faces a new threat, climate change.
RACHEL TERTES: The mouse is really tied to this habitat of pickleweed. They live on this plant. They move up and down the plant throughout the tide cycles.
One of the concerns with the climate change is really going to be the sea level rise portion of it, so, as the tide increases, you have more water covering more plants, and so they have less areas for those — for the mice to move up.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): “I celebrate myself, and what I assume, you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” the famous first lines of a landmark of American literature, Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”
Whitman was 36 years old when he self-published the first edition in 1855. A trained printer, he personally hand-set some of the lines of type in the book. Now Whitman’s work is being printed again, just as he did it in the 1800s, on movable type printing presses, the setting this time, in an old industrial building in San Francisco’s Presidio National Park, where the Arion Press is one of the country’s last fine book printers, and limited edition, handmade works are crafted from start to finish under one roof.
ANDREW HOYEM, Publisher, Arion Press: The making of a book is a very, very complicated process.
JEFFREY BROWN: The man who’s kept it all going for four decades is founder, publisher, and a poet himself, Andrew Hoyem.
ANDREW HOYEM: We do what we do not to be quaint, but to use these techniques of letterpress printing, printing from metal types, because when the type is pressed into good quality paper, it creates an aesthetic effect you cannot achieve any other way.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): The national battle over inequality, the rich vs. the rest of the population, has taken a curious turn in the San Francisco Bay Area, where buses carrying high-tech workers have become a symbol of the divide.
NewsHour special correspondent Spencer Michels has our story.
SPENCER MICHELS (NewsHour): Every weekday morning, between 7:30 and 10:00, dozens of big, sleek buses roll down Valencia Street in the heart of San Francisco’s traditionally Latino Mission District and other city thoroughfares.
Using bus stops created for city buses, the private coaches pick up a cargo of workers who for the most part have moved into the city and work 30 or 40 miles south of it at places like Google, Facebook, Apple, eBay and Yahoo! The free buses, generally referred to as Google Buses, are one of the perks for high-tech workers in high demand in Silicon Valley.
When they began rolling six or seven years ago, they were generally praised as an alternative to crowded highways and carbon emissions from cars. But that’s not the issue, says writer Rebecca Solnit, one of the first to charge that the buses were more than a way to get to work.
REBECCA SOLNIT, Writer: They’re unmarked, and with tinted windows, so you don’t know who’s inside. They’re like a cross between a limousine and an armored personnel carrier, cruising around the central city.
SPENCER MICHELS: Critics say the buses are clogging city bus stops. And while the tech companies have recently agreed to pay the city a dollar per bus per stop for their use, the critics say it isn’t enough to make up for the congestion they cause. So feelings are raw.
SUMMARY: As a new wave of tech enterprises gentrify San Francisco’s older, modest neighborhoods, an area known as the Tenderloin, populated by the city’s poorer residents, remains in the grips of drugs and crime. Special correspondent Spencer Michels explores the dilemma of whether upgrading the neighborhood will result in inhabitants being displaced en masse.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): American cities often wrestle with redeveloping blighted areas, since longtime residents are often displaced in the process.
There’s a seamy neighborhood in San Francisco called the Tenderloin that’s resisting change right now, despite a high-tech boom that could upgrade the area.
Our special correspondent Spencer Michels has our story, co-produced with public station KQED San Francisco.
SPENCER MICHELS (Newshour): No one is sure where the Tenderloin got its name, but it has been the soft underbelly of San Francisco for decades: drug dealing and drunks, prostitution, the homeless and mentally ill, troubled veterans, and impoverished new immigrants; 28,000 people live in the 40-square-block area in single-room occupancy hotels and dingy apartments.
The neighborhood is adjacent to the city’s affluent booming downtown, with its expensive hotels, upscale shops and well-attended theaters.
SUMMARY: A new housing development in San Francisco is ready for its new tenants -- homeless individuals and families -- to move into apartments of their own. But due to the government shutdown, units that are federally subsidized sit empty. Mina Kim of KQED reports on how the standstill in Washington is affecting people in California.
SUMMARY: The government shutdown has touched hundreds of thousands of federal employees, but as the shutdown stretches on, the distinction between essential and non-essential has varied depending on agency and need. Jeffrey Brown talks to Reid Wilson of The Washington Post and Gregory Korte of USA Today for a broad look at the impact.
SUMMARY: Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crashed landed at San Francisco International Airport, killing two passengers and sending more than 180 to the hospital. Federal investigators say the plane was flying significantly below the necessary landing speed and was too low to the ground. NewsHour correspondent Spencer Michels reports.
SUMMARY: Judy Woodruff talks to Deborah Hersman, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, and former managing director of the NTSB, Peter Goelz, for more on the crash of the Asiana Airlines flight and the continuing probe into the accident, including the pilot's technical experience and whether fatigue could have played a role.
SPENCER MICHELS (Newshour): For 75 years, the Bay Bridge has been the workhorse on San Francisco Bay, linking Oakland and San Francisco, and carrying 270,000 cars and trucks a day.
On the San Francisco side, its towers support suspension cables that keep the bridge deck up. But this gray utilitarian structure that partially collapsed in the 1989 earthquake has never captured the world's attention the way its nearby cousin, the Golden Gate Bridge, has. Built toward the end of the Depression, both were engineering marvels.
Now the Bay Bridge is making its own splash. On a cold rainy night last week, it was transformed into a giant work of art; 25,000 tiny white undulating LED lights strung from the vertical cables were turned on in a flashy display of public art that can be seen for miles.
SPENCER MICHELS (Newshour): Each year, Americans throw away about 250 million tons of garbage. That's roughly four pounds per person per day.
You can find all manner of trash in a landfill, old bent music stands, plastic bags, and a lot of items that could have been recycled, like bottles and cardboard. Beyond the obvious blight they cause, landfills create environmental damage and emit harmful greenhouse gases. They are monuments to waste.
Those concerns have prompted San Francisco and a handful of other cities to aim for a once-unthinkable goal, zero waste.
In 2009, San Francisco became the first city in the country to require that residents and businesses alike separate from their trash compostable items, like food scraps, and recyclable goods, like paper, metals, and plastic, into separate bins.
And that has led to a big reduction in the amount of garbage headed to the landfill, according to San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee.
An 11-year-old boy in San Francisco made headlines early last year when a shooting near his Western Addition home left a random bullet lodged permanently in his abdomen. Nerve damage, a ruptured bladder and chronic pain kept him out of school for more than four months.
For a brief moment after the shooting, the boy, who was 9 at the time, became the city’s latest example of how violence touches vulnerable young people. The fifth-grader spoke out against gun violence on local television and the steps of City Hall. He returned to Bessie Carmichael Elementary School last fall.
Then in February, the boy turned from the victim to the accused.
School administrators kicked him out of Bessie Carmichael for allegedly shooting another student in the face with a BB gun. He denied having a BB gun and shooting his classmate but admitted to carrying a plastic pellet gun in his backpack. The victim in the case was hit in the upper right cheek but was not seriously injured.
Although the facts are in dispute, the boy’s situation illustrates the San Francisco Unified School District’s haphazard struggle to fulfill complex health and safety mandates: Prevent violence, nurture victims and deal with inner-city trauma when it spills into the classroom.
While the district is responsible for keeping children safe, it’s also required to address the needs of students who exhibit risky or even violent behaviors. In the case of the boy at Bessie Carmichael, it failed to do both, records and interviews show.
A review by The Bay Citizen, sister site of California Watch, of violence prevention programs for youth in San Francisco revealed a web of services, mostly provided by city-funded nonprofit groups working in neighborhoods and, sometimes, schools. Even so, Shawn Richard, founder and executive director of Brothers Against Guns, said there are not enough resources to reach all of the kids who need help.
“The school district needs to partner up with organizations that deal with these issues in the communities instead of kicking a kid out of school with no counseling or services,” said Richard, whose group has a limited arrangement to work with students in the district. “But right now, we’re not at enough schools where we can do intervention.”
The district employs roughly 60 social workers and therapists to work in the city’s roughly 120 elementary and middle schools, but Andi Hilinski, who oversees the team, says that’s not enough to address the emotional needs of all students.
“Our department stance is that every school should have a full-time social worker and full-time nurse,” she said.
Despite limited resources, anti-violence experts say, schools remain the best places to help students from broken homes and violent neighborhoods get support.
In a study titled “Mitigating the Effects of Gun Violence on Children and Youth,” researchers at Cornell University said schools were “the most promising avenue for successful identification of and therapeutic intervention for exposed and victimized youth.”
California’s policy on weapons and “dangerous objects” in schools is strict – one strike and the student is referred for expulsion, unless the principal deems the action inappropriate. The state also allows districts to expel students for threatening to injure others.
The Cornell researchers noted that banning students who make threats “may actually exacerbate the danger by inflaming students who are already at risk for violent activity.”
District officials said they were aware of 30 incidents this past school year in K-12 grades involving some type of gun – toys, BB guns, replicas or actual firearms – up from 22 the year before. The district would not say how many of those students were referred for expulsion, but the state Department of Education said four students in San Francisco were expelled for violations involving firearms during the 2010-11 school year.
Self-reporting by students indicates that they’re bringing more weapons to school than administrators would otherwise know. In a 2011 district survey of more than 2,200 high school students, 5.8 percent reported carrying a weapon on school property. More than 7 percent said they had been threatened or injured with a weapon in the past school year.
San Francisco police Officer Lois Perillo, a liaison to public schools, said reported gun incidents on campuses were rare, but districts nationwide have been under pressure since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo.
“After that tragedy happened, many jurisdictions around the country made revisions to the education code,” she said, “and that’s when zero tolerance for weapons came to bear.”
Not a clear-cut case
By all accounts, the 11-year-old boy, Tori, has experienced significant trauma in his life. Between being shot and being suspended, he has missed more than seven months of classes since January 2011.
As he sat home last semester, his mother, Sabrina Carter, worried that he could wind up in the “school-to-prison pipeline” through which she has seen so many other boys in the neighborhood pass.
“If they feel like the school is turning on them, that’s when they end up hanging around on the streets doing things they have no business doing,” Carter said.
District officials declined to discuss Tori’s case, citing confidentiality. The Bay Citizen chose not to use Tori’s full name because of his age and to protect his privacy. He and his mother have different last names. The family of the victim declined to be interviewed for this story.
After a district investigation failed to prove Tori shot his classmate, an expulsion panel decided not to remove him from the district. But administrators at Bessie Carmichael refused to allow him back, contending that Tori had threatened his classmates, who were then scared to tell the truth about the incident.
Regardless of guilt or innocence in such cases, said Aliya Sheriff, a psychologist at the 3rd Street Youth Center and Clinic in the Bayview district, teachers and school administrators should be better trained to address not just student behavior, but also the underlying causes of it.
“Our schools are not trained to respond to trauma,” said Sheriff, who is not involved with Tori’s case. “Kids often act out what they’re going through in play, and teachers need to learn how to break it down. To me, it looks like a real cry for help, and I’ve seen that a lot.”
Much of the evidence in Tori’s case comes from the recollection of elementary school students, and the facts are murky.
According to a report written for the district by Alicia Gonzalez, assistant principal of Bessie Carmichael, one of Tori’s classmates was shot with a BB gun inside their classroom Feb. 29. Initially, students reported that plastic pellets had been thrown at the victim, but they were unclear whether Tori or another student was responsible.
Tori’s teacher, Elvira Ebalo, was in the classroom but did not witness the incident.
The next day, when students were questioned individually, their stories changed, Gonzalez wrote. All of the students in class, except Tori, were asked to write statements, most of which contained varying accounts of Tori brandishing, and in some cases shooting, a BB gun or a toy gun in the weeks leading up to the incident. The students noted in their statements reviewed by The Bay Citizen that Tori was seen with the gun in the classroom, school library or a nearby park.
Tori told school officials that it was not a BB gun, but a toy gun that shot plastic pellets, which he got from a group of third-grade students at school. He admitted to carrying the gun in his backpack – which itself could violate state policy against possessing a dangerous object at school – but said another student took it out and shot his classmate while the teacher’s back was turned.
Tori said he eventually broke the gun and threw it away.
No support services received
Gonzalez – who declined requests for an interview – placed Tori on a five-day suspension after the incident, according to district documents provided by Carter, Tori’s mother. Within a week, Carter met with school administrators and a social worker to determine whether the boy needed support services. Notes from the meeting reviewed by The Bay Citizen show the group agreed that Tori was a role model at school and had strong peer relationships.
Although they planned in writing to arrange therapy for Tori, Carter said he has not received a mental health assessment or counseling. She also said that since that meeting, she has not heard from the district about services for her son.
The school was supposed to provide weekly homework packets for Tori while he was suspended, Carter said, but provided only one, which he finished in two days.
On March 9, after Carter rejected the district’s offer to transfer Tori to another school, Gonzalez referred the case for expulsion, according to the assistant principal’s report. Some of the grounds for expulsion were unclear; documents show that allegations included possession of a firearm, possession of an imitation firearm and possession of an explosive.
Tori was present at the expulsion hearing when Gonzalez told the panel that his classmates were afraid of him. He denied allegations by Gonzalez that he had threatened to shoot students with a “real gun” if they told on him for shooting his classmate.
“Why would I threaten to shoot somebody with a gun when I got shot with a gun and it hurt?” Tori said in an interview.
Tori said he does not understand why people would be afraid of him. In April, during a brief visit to Bessie Carmichael to meet some friends after school, he saw his class coming out of the building.
“They were excited to see me, and they were asking me when I was coming back to school,” he said. “They weren’t even scared at all. Nobody. They were all like, ‘What’s up, Tori?’ ”
Options for schooling
The expulsion panel eventually dismissed the case, citing lack of evidence. According to Carter, the district said gave her three choices: Tori could return to Bessie Carmichael, transfer to another school or begin homeschooling. But when Tori arrived at Bessie Carmichael, Gonzalez refused to let him in.
District officials then told Carter that Tori could transfer to another elementary school, Rosa Parks, but she declined, arguing that it was unfair to move Tori away from his friends. Tori had attended Rosa Parks three years earlier, but Carter said she removed him because he had altercations with children from other neighborhoods.
“And if they say he’s a threat,” she added, “why do they want to put him in another school?”
Carter said home-based schooling, another district suggestion, was “not an acceptable option” either because her son needed to socialize and engage with teachers.
Although Tori stayed home with his mother for the rest of the semester, he continued attending a nonprofit after-school program, United Plaza. That group’s director of programs, Misha Olivas, whose three children have attended Bessie Carmichael, criticized the school for refusing to take Tori back.
“They’ve already given up on him,” she said.
Olivas said that after Tori was shot in 2011, the school’s principal, Jeffrey Burgos, chose not to discuss the shooting with Tori’s classmates because he was afraid the students would glorify the incident. Burgos did not return calls seeking comment.
As the end of the school year drew near, Olivas and Carter asked administrators if Tori could attend the school’s fifth-grade graduation ceremony and walk across the stage with his friends. The school denied the request, Carter said, until the day before the ceremony. But Burgos cautioned Carter that Tori might not be “welcomed back with open arms,” she said.
When Carter and Tori arrived for graduation, several uniformed police officers were present. School staff told Carter that the police were there “to make sure that you guys are safe,” she said.
“Safe from what?” Carter said later in an interview. “It was ridiculous. What kind of message are they trying to send this child?”
Tori was the last student to walk down the aisle at graduation, Carter said. Then police escorted them both out of the school.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): ..... the Golden Gate Bridge, an icon of American engineering and architecture, turns 75 this week. Its impact, its legacy and even some of the controversy that initially surrounded it are once again the center of attention.
NewsHour correspondent Spencer Michels has our story.
SPENCER MICHELS: Even before it opened on May 27, 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge was hailed as a modern wonder, a spectacular feat of engineering. In the midst of the Great Depression, the bridge, then the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world, brought hope and pride to a city and a country in need of optimism. It was far more than a roadway linking San Francisco with counties to the north.
SPENCER MICHELS (Newshour): Perched atop Telegraph Hill, Coit Tower has dominated the San Francisco skyline since it was dedicated in 1933.
It's a familiar symbol of the city, a beacon at a spot where residents in the 1850s used to signal ships in the bay. But there is historic treasure inside as well. More than 75 years ago, Ruth Gottstein watched as her father, Bernard Zakheim, along with other artists, painted frescoes on the walls of the tower, murals that depicted the life of America in the early 1930s.
The murals, in which Gottstein appears as a young girl, were funded by a predecessor of the federal government's WPA program, begun by President Franklin Roosevelt to keep artists working during the Depression.
