For school teachers, as in many other professions, there’s no substitute for hands-on experience.  But there are ways that experience can be shared, as new teachers in California are learning.

The North Coast Beginning Teacherprogram has been in place for seven years now, reports regional director Corrine Muelrath, and is now part of California’s teacher credentialing process.

There are 560 new teachers currently in the mentoring program, Muelrath adds, a higher-than-usual number that reflects some of the uncertainties that school districts face in preparing their budgets without a state budget in place.

The area served by the North Coast Beginning Teacher program are shown in color on this map.

Calls for greater transparency in the inner fiscal dealings of foundations based at California State University campuses are mounting, after some of those details became public.

State Senator Leland Yee (D-SF) has championed legislative action to apply the state’s Public Records Act to the CSU academic foundations and other auxiliary organizations. He says these latest revelations about their lax fiscal management only reinforces the need for such a measure.

California Faculty Association president Lillian Taiz, a history professor at Cal State Los Angeles, charges that the newly revealed CABO minutes make it clear that the CSU administration’s opposition to Senator Yee’s sunshine bill, SB 330, was driven not by principle, but protective self-interest.

At Sonoma State, there are four separate auxiliary organizations, explains Chief Financial Officer and Vice President for Administration & Finance, Laurence Furukawa-Schlereth. But the budget for the Academic Foundation is much larger than those of  the other three  combined.

Here's the link to the SSU tranparency webpage. You can also read the Executive Summary of the CFA report on the CABO minutes they found. To read the full report, go here. Scroll down for the links to the minutes themselves.

Land-based sewage discharges into the ocean are illegal. Soon that ban will apply to big ships, too, under new EPA rules being announced today.

Jared Blumenfeld, Regional Administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, was Environmental Director for the City and County of San Francisco before he was appointed his new job by the Obama administration last January. He would prefer that the ship sewage discharge ban reached at least twice as far offshore, but says three miles is all his agency can cover.

 Even these new rules will only restrict about 4/5ths of the sewage discharges into the state’s bays and other coastal waters; most of the remaining 20% comes from smaller vessels not governed by the new rules. Blumenfeld would like to see an eventual system of controlled dockside flushes into regional treatment facilities, but acknowledges that’s little more than a vision right now.

While the new EPA rules are welcomed, some environmental groups are pushing for more stringent standards. There is also a separate  move underway to impose a full ban on sewage discharges from all vessels on Tomales Bay.

The federal health care bill, passed earlier this year, will also boost the fiscal well-begin of community clinics in Sonoma County, as well as the patients they serve.

Mary Szecsey, Executive Director of the five West County Health Centers,  explains that the local clinics, and many of their counterparts across the county, have helped pioneer and refine the concept known as a “medical home” for patients.

This approach, developed in considerable part out of necessity, has proven to be both efficacious and cost-effective, Szecsey adds, which is why it is being more widely adopted.

Defenders of uniform access to the internet, a concept termed "net neutrality" are calling on the FCC to reject a new proposal from Google and Verizon to create multiple tiers of access.

Historically, Google has been among the defenders of of Net Neutrality. But Craig Aaron, Managing Director of the Communications watchdog non-profit Free Press, says the company’s latest move appears to contradict that stance.

The joint announcement of their proposed new regulatory framework from Google and Verizon announcement drew a mixed and bitterly divided reaction from tech writers across the country, but was defended in a Washington Post op-ed essay by the top executives of the two companies.

The Free Press petition drive to tell Google, "Don't Be Evil," is online here.