WALNUT CREEK – As Cheryl Dumesnil and Tracie Vickers prepared for their wedding a decade ago, they thought about living in San Francisco, where other gay and lesbian families would surround them, or retreating to the suburbs where they grew up were.

Their choice of central Contra Costa County made them pioneers, the first two-mother family in their leafy Walnut Creek neighborhood.

“This is Tracie's suburban dream,” Dumesnil said Tuesday at their ranch house, as the couple's 6-year-old son, Brennan, quietly read a book and 4-year-old Kian marched around the kitchen, a singing troubadour playing a white guitar Guitar. Neighbors welcomed this family with cookies and open arms.

“After saying I would never move to the suburbs again, here I am,” Dumesnil said.

The family of four is among nearly 1 percent of California households – about 126,000 households – headed by same-sex couples, according to 2010 Census statistics released Thursday. If the numbers are accurate, they show that nearly a quarter of same-sex couples in California are raising children.

While San Francisco remains a gay hub – the city has more than 10,000 gay and lesbian couples, compared to fewer than 300 in Walnut Creek – the census found same-sex couples in every corner of the state, making it clear that Same-sex couples in many parts of the state, suburban and rural areas have far higher chances of having children.

“We are not just a special interest group concentrated in large urban centers,” Dumesnil said. “We’re basically everywhere, just trying to live a legally protected and fulfilling life.”

Fifteen years after the federal Defense of Marriage Act banned gay marriage and seven years after San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom defiantly ordered licenses to be granted to same-sex couples, gay and lesbian families remain at odds political crosshairs, but also say that society is increasingly at risk. I'm getting used to having them – and their children – with us. In turn, whether they have been previously counted or not, more same-sex couples are aware of identifying themselves on census forms.

Demographers warn that the numbers may overcount same-sex couples because opposite-sex couples miscoded each other in a confusing way. The errors are compounded because there are far more opposite-sex couples than same-sex couples.

Gay and lesbian couples are identified in the census when the head of the household reports living with a “husband” or “unmarried partner” of the same sex. Changes in the way the Census Bureau counts same-sex couples make it difficult to accurately compare with the 2000 census, when the count found more than 92,000 same-sex couples in California.
However, it is clear that the number of open same-sex couples nationwide has increased significantly over the last decade.

“We have evidence that over time, more and more people are willing to report (same-sex unions),” said demographer Gary Gates of UCLA's Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law. “We saw that these increases were the largest outside of well-known gay neighborhoods. I expect these increases would be larger in the Central Valley than in San Francisco.”

Same-sex couples in suburban and rural areas are far more likely to be raising children than their urban counterparts. National studies show that about 19 percent of children of same-sex couples are adopted, Gates said. Many more are children from previous heterosexual relationships.

“This type of pattern is much more common in conservative areas where people come out later in life,” Gates said. “The further you get from San Francisco, the greater the proportion of same-sex couples raising children.”

For some same-sex couples, life in the outskirts of the Bay Area still seems like living on a cultural frontier.

The census counted 138 gay male couples in Antioch last year and found that 30 percent of them have children. However, partners Joe Horacek and Jonathan Lee only know one other family like them, who lives on the other side of town.

The family moved from South San Francisco to Antioch in 2004 because they wanted a larger, cheaper home to raise their three adopted children. Horacek and Lee were among about 18,000 same-sex couples who married for six months in 2008, when gay marriage was legal in the state, before voters passed Proposition 8. Life in Antioch was simpler when the children were small; Her oldest children, 14 and 13, now struggle to fit in in a community where two fathers are a rarity.

“My son encountered some negative reactions from kids on Facebook,” said Horacek, a local teacher. “We don’t want to be the ones putting the targets on their backs. All children get teased about something, but usually it has to do with themselves. We add that additional liability for customization.”

Hosts who greet the family of five at local restaurants sometimes mistake them for two separate parties. Because her 9-year-old daughter doesn't have a mother, a school principal recently asked if she could play the role for a Mother's Day tea. Usually polite conversation smooths over an adult's confusion, but the couple sometimes wonders if life would be easier for their children on the other side of the East Bay hills.

“For the most part, no one has questioned us or given us any problems, but there is more assumption here that the children have both a mother and a father,” Horacek said. “I know that, particularly in places like Berkeley and Alameda County, conversations about different types of families and same-sex relationships are part of the curriculum. That’s not necessarily the case out here.”

Three percent of households in San Francisco and just over two percent of households in Oakland, Berkeley and Emeryville are headed by same-sex couples, making these Bay Area cities with the highest concentrations of gay and lesbian partners. Other East Bay cities are close behind, and most of the neighborhoods outside of San Francisco with the census-highest number of same-sex couples are along the East Oakland foothills.

Same-sex couples from the East Bay are also more likely to have children than couples from San Francisco, although the same is true for heterosexual couples as well. Just over 4 percent of gay male couples in San Francisco and 19 percent of lesbian couples have children, compared to 11 percent of gay male couples and 22 percent of lesbian couples in Oakland.

Maya Scott-Chung and her multi-ethnic family also chose the East Bay because she found it more diverse.

“It wasn't just because we could afford to buy a house here, although that was part of it,” said Scott-Chung, who lives with her transgender partner and daughter in Oakland's San Antonio neighborhood . “It is important to us to live in Oakland because it is one of the most culturally, linguistically and economically diverse places in the Bay Area and probably the world. There are a large number of lesbian and two-mother families here.”

Nationally, lesbian partners are more likely to raise children than gay men – 32 percent of lesbian households have children, compared to 17.8 percent of gay male couples. Horacek said being a minority among minorities in a place like Antioch can be exciting and a little scary.

“Obviously gays have been in relationships for centuries, but this appears to be the first generation where this is happening in large numbers, particularly through the addition of children into the family,” he said. “We sometimes feel like we are soldiers at the front. Change is happening, but it’s still not mainstream here.”

Dumesnil said she and her wife have seen perceptions in Walnut Creek slowly change as they interacted with straight families at school events and in their neighborhood.

“Someone has to be out here,” she said. “In a way, the presence of the children was the great equalizer.”

Cities in the Bay Area with
the highest percentage
of same-sex couples

Guerneville: 7.6 percent of all households are headed by same-sex couples (176 same-sex couples)
San Francisco: 3 percent (10,384)
Oakland: 2.2 percent (3,442)
Emeryville: 2.1 percent (119)
Berkeley: 2.1 percent (961)
El Cerrito: 1.9 percent (189)
Pacifica: 1.7 percent (237)
Albany: 1.7 percent (123)
Alameda: 1.5 percent (459)
San Rafael: 1.3 percent (301)
Vallejo: 1.2 percent (497)
Santa Rosa: 1.2 percent (757)
Richmond: 1.2 percent (427)
Concord: 1.2 percent (512)
Pleasant Hill: 1.1 percent (152)
San Leandro: 1.1 percent (326)

nationwide household figures

49%
Households headed by
Man-woman couples

6.2%
Households headed by unmarried partners of different genders
1 %
Households headed by
same-sex partners

43.4%
Resident does not live with us
a spouse or unmarried partner

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The San Francisco Board of Education is set to unveil in October a plan to increase literacy rates, math achievement and college and career readiness.

But there is an obstacle to achieving the new goals. More than 25% of San Francisco Unified School District’s students were chronically absent in 2021-2022, the first full year of in-person learning since the pandemic began.

Although SFUSD is not alone in this phenomenon — 72% of public schools saw an increase in chronic absenteeism for both students and teachers during the 2021-22 school year — the district’s twofold rise to 24.8% is well above the national average of 17%.

“We know the past few years navigating the impacts of the pandemic have been incredibly difficult for students and families,” said Jenny Lam, president of the San Francisco Board of Education. “Students missing significant time from school is an alarm — we need to understand the factors and how to provide students with supports and receive the care they need to learn and succeed.”

Data from SFUSD Research, Planning and Assessment Department

A student is deemed chronically absent if they miss more than 10% — or 18 days — of the school year, excused or otherwise.

The term was coined in 2010 by education consultant Hedy Chang who found students who are chronically absent in kindergarten are less likely to read at grade level by third grade, less likely to succeed academically in middle school and more likely to drop out in high school. Soon thereafter, she founded Attendance Works, a San Francisco-based nonprofit focused on improving attendance practices and policy at all levels of governance.

In San Francisco public schools, one of the greatest increases can be seen among transitional kindergarten students, 50% of whom were chronically absent last academic year as opposed to 20% in 2020-2021 — perhaps because students under 5 were not eligible to be vaccinated until this past June.

The other large increase occurred among the two-thirds of African American, Pacific Islander and foster students and half of Latino students who were chronically absent in 2021-22. This is a significant increase from 2020-21, the year most disrupted by the pandemic — when 45% of African American students, 47% of Pacific Islander students, 46% of foster students and 25% of Latino students were chronically absent.

Even prior to the pandemic, however, students in these ethnic groups saw higher levels of chronic absenteeism in San Francisco and across the nation, according to educational researchers.

“A lot of the things that we know are causes or at least strongly associated with chronic absenteeism are disproportionately unfortunately present for students of color,” said Ethan Hutt, associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education. “When we talk about schools that have a high prevalence of chronic absenteeism, we want to disentangle things that are within their control and things that are not within their control.”

The disproportionate impact of the pandemic on historically underserved communities exacerbated those factors, said Cecelia Leong, vice president of programs at Attendance Works.

She pointed to a Wayne State study chronicling Detroit families’ experiences with COVID-19 and school attendance that found that students whose families faced greater economic hardship during the pandemic were more likely to be chronically absent.

“There were significant socioeconomic differences between moderately and severely chronically absent students, reinforcing that reducing chronic absenteeism will require social and economic supports beyond what schools alone can provide,” the study read.

The impacts of absenteeism

According to Hutt, whose research at UNC focuses on the metrics used to quantify school performance, the single oldest measure is attendance. He noted that although the quality of a school used to be determined by its average daily attendance — or percent of enrolled students who came to school on a daily basis — the reality is that taking attendance has long been an ambiguous metric.

“School districts almost immediately realized that these numbers are easily manipulated,” Hutt said. “It’s very hard to verify who is in the building and so districts will engage in all kinds of shenanigans to make their numbers look good.”

If students missed consecutive days, for example, districts would drop students and re-enroll them when they returned so as not to count their absence in the final metric.

This went on as recently as 2017, when a Washington, DC, high school graduated all of its seniors despite a majority missing more than six weeks of school. Some couldn’t even read or write.

Michael Gottfried — a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education — found that chronic absence has four distinct impacts on students, their classmates and their school.

The first is on school finances, given that California schools receive funding from the state based on how many students show up each day.

Similarly to Chang, Gottfried found that chronic absenteeism impacts both literacy and math achievement in a negative way. However, absences tend to impact math more than reading because while parents will read to their children at home, they don’t feel as equipped to teach math.

Chronic absence was also found to impact child development; those who are absent often are less engaged in the classroom and don’t want to be there, prompting further absence and a reinforcing cycle.

Lastly, Gottfried found that classmates are impacted as well. For example, if a student has missed a few days of school, the teacher may slow down to catch them up, affecting the learning of the rest of the class. In contrast, if the teacher doesn’t slow down, the student may be confused and disengage from the lesson. Either way, learning is altered.

Pandemic-imposed absenteeism

In studying factors that contribute to absenteeism, Gottfried established four distinct drivers: routines, transitions, engagement and health. Seeing twofold increases in chronic absenteeism post-pandemic, Gottfried said the COVID-19 pandemic appears to have disrupted all four drivers.

Routines are all about practice, Gottfried said, and while many are out of practice, there are kindergarten through third graders who have never practiced going to school before. Likewise, many made the transition from elementary to middle school or middle to high school online.

“Middle schoolers have missed this entire huge developmental piece of growth of preadolescent development,” Gottfried said. “They haven’t been able to have those moments in school that are super engaging, either making those connections with teachers or curriculum or with peers.”

Aside from the obstacles students face at school, some may not even want to go back due to concerns surrounding COVID-19, something that Leong at Attendance Works said schools need to address.

“There’s been so much trauma and anxiety and stress from the pandemic that part of the normal transition almost has to be augmented, so that you’re really addressing some of the anxiety and fear of leaving home or being exposed to COVID,” Leong said .

SFUSD’s approach

In addition to an ongoing joint research project examining chronic absenteeism at SFUSD with UC Berkeley, San Francisco’s public school district offers wraparound services to assist student attendance, said SFUSD public relations manager Laura Dudnick.

Once a student incurs six unexcused absences, school-based coordinated care teams are supposed to reach out to the family and schedule a meeting. Based on that meeting, support plans are created, Dudnick said. When a family cannot be reached, the issue is referred to the district-level Coordinated Care Team for Truancy, which tries to find other ways to support the family.

Individual schools also have their own methods of promoting attendance. In fact, most of Independence High School’s students enroll because they have struggled with chronic absenteeism.

True to its name, Independence provides an independent study program in which students create their own schedules and attend small classes with up to 15 students. The school also has a special education program for students with moderate to severe anxiety, depression, school phobia and school avoidance.

“Some of the kids we haven’t gotten stepped foot in their school for six months or more,” said Principal Anna Klafter. “We start from a really hard place with some of our kids and we work to get them through school, but also to get them to a place where they can be successful after school and find something that’s meaningful for them.”

Independence hired an extra social worker to focus on chronically absent students who may be involved in the juvenile justice system, foster care, are between homes or are dealing with other situations that impede school attendance.

“The addition of this position … has really turned around outcomes for our Tier 3 students,” Klafter said. “She’s able to case manage 25 kids and really be their go-to person for everything from academics and school supplies to food and housing and family needs, and has just been a real lifeline for students and families.”

Since the start of the program in 2019 and the additional social worker in 2020, graduation rates at Independence have increased from 54% to 91%, according to Klafter.

Though these solutions are specific to Independence High School, Gottfried and Hutt said research shows that when high school students are taught by a teacher of the same ethnicity, attendance rates tend to increase. Serving breakfast in the classroom and placing students with disabilities in general rather than special education classrooms has also proven to increase attendance.

Hutt added that parent communication about the impacts of absenteeism can serve as a further solution.

“It doesn’t matter if we talk about new standards or higher quality teachers. If the students aren’t there to receive the benefits of what’s going on in the schools, then why even talk about anything else,” Gottfried said. “It’s almost like absenteeism/attendance is the first step in trying to create educational opportunities.”

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April 26, 2022

Payment processing giant Visa’s profits rose 21% in the first three months of the year fueled by a large jump in spending on the company’s namesake credit and debit card network.

The San Francisco-based company reported Tuesday that it earned $3.65 billion, or $1.70 a share, in its fiscal second quarter that ended March 31. That was up from $3.03 billion, or $1.38 a share, in the same period a year earlier.

Its earnings adjusted to exclude one-time items amounted to $1.79 a share. The results topped the expectations of analysts who were looking for Visa to earn $1.65 a share on an adjusted basis, according to FactSet.

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See’s Candies from Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B, BRK-A), the 100-year-old maker and seller of chocolates, lollipops, toffee and Warren Buffett’s favorite treat – peanut brittle – had the best quarter ever in 2021 earlier in the year, according to CEO Pat Egan.

“We are fully back, I think. We had our best January ever, our best February ever, we just finished our best first quarter ever, ”Egan told Yahoo Finance ahead of Berkshire Hathaway’s 2021 annual meeting, streaming exclusively on Yahoo Finance.

Egan, who took the helm of See’s Candies in the spring of 2019 and is the third CEO in the company’s history, described the past year as “the longest decade” of his life, when the famous candy retailer survived the COVID-19 crisis.

Full coverage of Berkshire Hathaway 2021 2021 Annual General Meeting

When the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States last March, See closed all of its 245 stores in a matter of days, and shortly after closed its e-commerce fulfillment center in southern California.

“From that point on, we just said, ‘We’re not going to reopen any stores or our factories until we can create a safe operating environment for all of our employees.’ That took a while and when we restored at the end of summer we saw customers come back. But it was pretty tough for that time, “added Egan.

PALM SPRINGS, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 25, 2019: A man pushing a stroller stops outside a See’s Candies shop in Palm Springs, California. Founded in Los Angeles in 1921, the company is now headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company has been owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Corporation since 1972. (Photo by Robert Alexander / Getty Images)

Amid pandemic bans and stay-at-home orders, See’s Candies’ e-commerce business grew by about 70% in total packages shipped last year. In addition, online sales have remained robust even with reopenings.

“”[What] you might expect that when the stores open again [e-commerce] would wear off a little. It has not. In our first quarter, we were up nearly 160% from the first quarter of last year. ”

Egan noted that in-store traffic was gradually decreasing, but the company was “almost back to 100%”.

The story goes on

“But our e-commerce, which has more than doubled, has actually stayed at that level, and we are okay with it not coming back to earth. It presents some other operational challenges, but we have definitely expanded our customer base. ”Egan added.

Julia La Roche is a correspondent for Yahoo Finance. Follow her up Twitter.

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Berkshire Hathaway rerun

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