Around the Capital Region, schools are still working to recover socially and academically from the COVID-19 pandemic. Test scores have been affected, as has school attendance. A new wave of behavioral issues has unfolded, too. Now, a variety of people are working to help students catch up.

FROM THE PUBLISHER: As it is with all catastrophes, there’s plenty of blame to go around. I guess this can be a useful exercise at some point, but it won’t rebuild people’s homes, restore their most valued possessions or, most importantly, stop this from becoming an annual, recurring heartbreak. We need to ask and answer some obvious questions.

Efforts by California’s government to help students recover from the pandemic go back to its earliest days, with the state investing more than $36 billion to deal with pandemic impacts. The funding has gone to Learning Recovery Emergency Block Grants, expanded teacher recruitment, literacy specialists and much more.

“I think what the pandemic really did was just lift the curtain on what was taking place in the classroom and at the administration level for parents to see,” says Justin Caporusso, a Roseville father of four and owner of Caporusso Communications. “A lot of parents saw how much time was spent on classroom management, behavior and really how little time was spent on kind of overall education.”

As an Albanian immigrant who grew up poor, Aldi Agaj dreamed for his children to have the access and opportunities he didn’t have. When his daughter was 4, he had an idea to create an edtech company that gives kids free access to innovative games.

Climate change is increasing the strength of Sacramento’s winter storms. Higher temperatures allow atmospheric rivers to carry more water, research shows. Climate change is also jacking up other flood risks, such as sea rise and snowmelt. All this is raising the chances of catastrophic flooding in Sacramento.

Stockton’s levees haven’t received a major overhaul since the 1990s, while Sacramento’s have received widespread upgrades in the last 20 years. “We think they’re in danger,” says Jane Dolan, chair of the Central Valley Flood Protection Board. “They’re behind on flood protection.”

I need to encourage a manager to accept a religious accommodation request, as it is reasonable, in my opinion. The employee, who is Balinese Hindu, has requested a 10-minute prayer break at noon as part of her religion.

The farm-to-fork pipeline is well established in Sacramento — but what about forage-to-fork? We talked to some of the foragers, scientists, chefs and enthusiasts who want to see more foraging in the Capital Region. 

In my 30-plus years providing financial advice, I’ve worked with many people who have reframed retirement in order to make it work for them. Here’s what I’ve learned.

Despite polls showing overwhelming public support for teaching financial literacy skills to school students, prior to the passage of McCarty’s bill California had no statewide requirements around financial literacy courses in the schools. As a result, the infrastructure that does exist around this has largely been developed through the initiatives of a few banks and some forward-looking schools. 

While many of us believe that Sacramento’s light rail trains were innovative when they began tooting their way throughout the Capital Region in the 1980s, the current system is actually the reboot of a suburban trolley that slid, wended and awoke its way through the area many decades before. 

Pawlek keeps that positive outlook through all aspects of managing the 800-employee operation. One secret to keeping a positive morale: lots of dad jokes.

Stepping through the Oriental Saloon in Tombstone, Arizona, there’s a sense of history colliding with the American imagination that is as heavy as its oak bar columns. It’s possible to drink here and wonder if the whole story of Western settlement can be crystallized by 17 violent months that happened in the still-dusty streets outside the door. 

The food recovery process for SB 1383 is divided into separate tiers. Tier 1, which involves large grocery chains and food distribution centers, went into effect in 2022. The following year, Rancho Cordova’s locker alone recovered 800,000 pounds of food. In that same period, Sacramento Food Bank & Family Services oversaw the redistribution of 14.6 million pounds of edible food that came directly from Capital Area grocery stores. 

The Solano County city of fewer than 30,000 residents is also an easy day trip for visitors from Sacramento and the Bay Area, with a 10-block stroll along Benicia’s First Street providing a unique opportunity to visit 300 eclectic businesses amidst 19th-century Victorian buildings — all while basking in bay views a couple of blocks away.