As we swelter with unseasonably hot weather this summer, too many children are sitting at home, losing months of instructional gains produced during the academic school year. The educational leaders know this to be true based on a wide variety of studies that indicate children without summer enrichment activities lose several months of achievement gains made during the school year.

Day two of the BART strike once again left commuters scrambling, the highways hopelessly jammed and countless people late for work.
 Go to 511.org for real-time updates and suggested ways around the hold-up, which has doubled or tripled commute times for a lot of people who work in and around San Francisco. Employees of the regional transit agency—the fifth most-used rail line in the nation—are on strike because contracts with the agency’s two biggest unions expired and discussions over a renewal fell apart. BART workers want higher wages—23 percent raises over the next four years.

The South Bay homeless population appears to be pooling in San Jose, as a new study estimates an 18 percent increase in the number of homeless people in the city since 2011. Overall, Santa Clara County’s homeless population grew by 8 percent—7,361 total—in the last two years, according to the county’s biennial census of the homeless population.

Discussion on technology dominated much of the Fair Political Practices Commission’s June 20 meeting in the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors chambers, as the state political watchdog discussed the role of monitoring campaigns, candidates and elected officials in between dealing with some technical difficulties in setting up its equipment.

Each fiscal year, San Jose’s councilmembers are allocated $20,000 in “HP grants” that can be utilized to provide grants to cultural, educational or recreational groups. These funds are allocated solely at the discretion of the elected official. My allocations, listed in this column, represent my personal priorities and values not only as an elected official, but also as a proud citizen of San Jose.

A new survey recently commissioned by the William C. Velasquez Institute (WCVI) and supported by Californians Against Utilities Stopping Solar Energy (CAUSE) reveals some striking trends in key voting demographics in California and nationwide.

I was 13 when I saw my first William Shakespeare play. We saw “King Lear,” one of the Bard’s last and darkest plays. It was a magnificent occasion for me, and I still have a passion for the Bard’s work, as well as watching performances in an outdoor setting—especially in a park. San Jose residents should feel lucky that special performances will take place next month in Willow Glen, where the Shady Shakespeare Theatre Company will put on its season opener, “The Twelfth Night.”

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of marriage equality, Ray Hixson will assemble at a celebratory rally in Mountain View with hundreds of others. And while the LGBT community and its allies are hoping for a party, others want to head down to the Santa Clara County courthouse to apply for a marriage license. County Supervisor Ken Yeager, who’s openly gay, already asked the courthouse to prepare for an influx of same-sex couples ready to tie the knot.

To handle the surge of complaints, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office set up a fraud hotline in Vietnamese and English for customers bilked by a San Jose travel agency. Sunlight Travel, founded in 1996 by Diane Ho, suddenly closed up shop June 5, leaving customers in a lurch. Many of them stand to lose thousands of dollars for flights bought but never booked. Sunlight Travel catered to a lot of Vietnamese clients from its now-closed strip mall storefront on South King Road.

There have been a lot of reports in the media recently about teens and children being bullied at school and through social media. Dating violence among teens has been studied for years, but the relationship to online harassment is a new issue.

People like Frederick Law Olmstead and Henry David Thoreau claimed that direct access to natural surroundings, such as parks, has psychological benefits for people. Noth based these claims more on opinion than fact, but recent studies show both men were on the right track.

On Friday, June 21, the San Jose Stage Company has an especially auspicious occasion scheduled, as the company will put on a benefit performance to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the political comedy show Monday Night Live! and the 30th anniversary for the company as a whole. The five-hour gala will start at 7pm inside the Silicon Valley Athletic Club’s Corinthian Grand Ballroom. Ticket reservations can be purchased at http://www.thestage.org, or by calling the box office at 408.283.7142.

Original Joe’s has become a San Jose institution by serving the best eggplant parmesan in the Bay Area for over 50 years. It has thrived in Downtown San Jose because their owners, the Rocca family, like so many other San Jose businesspeople, know what it takes to compete. As they compete for the loyalty of their patrons, Original Joe’s has helped to support the college tuitions and mortgages of generations of cooks and wait staff.

The city expects to clear up 40 to 60 homeless encampments a year—indefinitely. Annual cost for the cleanups will range around $550,000, and possibly more, if the city approves a contract with Tucker Construction, Inc., at Tuesday’s City Council meeting. Other agenda items for the last council meeting of the fiscal year include a settlement for a man struck by a police car, a renewal agreement with the city’s Sacramento lobbying firm and a potential shift to store city data through cloud computing.

The Government Attorneys Association (GAA) held a special meeting Friday, and sources tells San Jose Inside that if the county attorneys agreed upon anything, it’s that a “deep division” exists amongst the membership. The big question is how can this be resolved when the union’s leadership continues to focus on scoring fleeting political points.

A schizophrenic man bused with a one-way ticket, no cash and a few-days-supply of meds from Las Vegas to Sacramento earlier this year has filed a federal class action lawsuit against the state agencies he says abandoned him and at least 1,500 other mentally ill patients. Those patients were bused to nearly every state in the nation, many to major cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Jose.