San Bernardino Press MONDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2014 - OCTOBER 19, 2014
sanbernardinopress.com
VOLUME 1, NO. 24
California’s water officials neglect their Bill to own laws and waste water mandate by jennifer schlueter child-abuse training for teachers signed into law
ing from The Great Recession. He did say, however, that a full recovery will come during 2016. “We lost 143,000 [jobs] during the Great Recession,” Husing told the Sun. “We have gotten back 110,000, but we
Assemblyman Mike Gatto’s (D-Los Angeles) bill to strengthen training requirements and prevent child abuse in schools was signed into law by Governor Brown Monday. The legislation would require all school employees to be trained according to standards developed by the Department of Education in the proper identification and reporting of child abuse, so that abuse can be stopped in its tracks. Gatto’s AB 1432 addresses the lack of training on how to recognize and report child abuse in K-12 settings. The California Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting Act requires certain professionals, known as mandated reporters, to report to law enforcement or protective services known or suspected instances of neglect, or physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. Despite these requirements, current law does not require school districts to train personnel on detecting and reporting child abuse, nor does it inform them of their responsibilities or that failure to report is a misdemeanor punishable by jail time. Gatto’s legislation addresses this problem by requiring school employees to complete reporting training. The Assemblyman has been working closely with child advocates and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom
Please see page 2
Please see page 2
-Photo by Terry Miller
California’s law makes water bills of state officials defining water rates and rules public record. Thus, The Center for Investigative Reporting examined their data and found the state’s representatives wasting up to eleven times as much water as the typical California
household. Fresno City Councilman Oliver Baines is responsible for this number, using 4,000 gallons a day. After finding out that he had defective sprinklers using 1.24 million gallons of water in 2012, Baines now cut his usage to 149 gallons per day in March of this
year. According to NBC, he apologized and admitted to not being “a model of water usage.” Next to Baines’ wasting due to leaking sprinklers, Mike Soubirous, member of the Please see page 4
Unemployment rate remains high in Inland Empire by Vickie Vértiz While the latest reports from the U.S. Department of Labor show a national decline in unemployment to 5.9 percent, the unemployment figure for the Inland Empire area was still higher at 8.7 percent. The San Bernardino County Sun spoke with John Husing,
chief economist for the Inland Empire Economic Partnership. While the national data was reported for September, the Inland data was for August. Husing told the Sun that the difference in percentage points is due to the fact that the Inland Empire economy is still recover-