Attorneys with the ACLU filed a lawsuit Wednesday against a school district in Madera County, saying it violated two students’ right to free speech and right to anti-LGBTQ bias in California schools.
 

When Minarets High School students Steven Madrid and Mikayla Garaffa submitted their senior quotes to the yearbook, they thought they were being inclusive. But the yearbook advisor said their quotes were “politically divisive.”

Today on Young Artists Spotlight, we hear music from two sisters from Bakersfield - twins Claire Soyoon Park and April Soyeong Park --  twin pianists from Bakersfield, both of them students of Bonnie Farrer, who provided the following biographies:

Mental health care is a constant need here in the San Joaquin Valley, especially for those who can’t afford to go elsewhere—and for those whose symptoms are tough enough to require some treatment but not hospitalization.

Last week, Fresno County opened a new crisis residential facility to house those who fall in that in-between space. In this interview, we speak about the new facility with Dawan Utecht, director of the Fresno County Department of Behavioral Health.

Fresno's 10 day Rogue Fest is one of the longest running fringe festivals in the world and it's happening this week in the Tower District. There's music, theater, dance, spoken word and magic. We asked three Rogue performers to join us live in our studio: Marcel Nunis, the founder of Rogue, Heather Parish, the former executive director and Donna Kay Yarborough, a returning performer from Portland, Oregon. 

Tony Amarante’s home in Bakersfield is about an 8-minute drive to the Mesa Verde Detention Facility. He has volunteered there on occasion to visit detainees. But recently he’s been housing immigrants who’ve been released from the facility.

“This is my kid's old room,” Amarante says. “I’ve had three asylum seekers stay here. I’m happy to offer them some shelter, a bathroom and get them on the bus or airplane or wherever we got to go.”

Late in 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint against the Visalia Unified School District for violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act. According to the ACLU, African American students said their white peers referred to them as slaves and joked about hanging them from trees. Two reporters from the Visalia Times Delta decided to look back at the city’s racially charged past starting with a Ku Klux Klan convention in 1931. We spoke with reporters James Ward and Calley Cederlof.

A large group of mostly teachers stands outside the door of the Bakersfield City School District’s board meeting. 

“Let us in! Let us in!” they shout.

They’re angry because there’s not enough space in the boardroom for all the teachers who want to voice their concerns.

“All of a sudden, we’ve got an authoritarian type of administration here at the district where people are excluded rather than included? I’m so disappointed,” says educator Mary Helen Barro. She made it inside the meeting, but a large crowd still waits outside.

This weekend, Fresno State’s Music Department will be performing the opera, “Madama Butterfly.” The hundred-year-old show is about the convoluted marriage of an American naval officer and  a Japanese geisha known as Madama Butterfly.

To learn more about the performance, and navigating racial stereotypes, we sat down with director and producer Anthony Radford, chorus master Cari Earnhart, and voice coach Maria Okunev Briggs. Okunev Briggs also plays the title role of Madama Butterfly.