hello and welcome to kqed newsroom. i'm thuy vu. coming up on our program, workplace diversity. it continues to lag in the tech industry. we'll talk with a woman at the forefront of efforts to change that. plus from edgy opera to political art. we'll bring you our bay area arts preview for august. first, an important case for students with disabilities in california. this week the u.s. department of education's office of civil rights issued a finding that calls into question the use of prone restraint on special education students. it's a practice that involves immobilizing a student facedown as a disciplinary method. the federal report found that oakland student stewart candle had been denied education and

subjected to a hostile environment after being restrained 90 times in a year. in this interview with disability rights of california which filed the complaint stewart describes his experience. >> when they restrain me, there was two people. pretend this is me. they held my wrists down. and they also held my legs down. and it really hurt. it was like they were grinding my legs into the floor. and it really, really was painful. >> stewart's mom bonnie canned l lchl describes the changes she saw with her son in an interview. >> my son stewart was restrained 94 times over a period of 11 months. and restraint is supposed to be an emergency solution, not a behavior management solution.

and this caused stewart to be depressed, to be suicidal. he didn't want to go to school. he spent a whole lot of time out of the classroom not receiving instruction. and he gave up. he felt like nothing he did was going to work and that they were going to hold him down anyway. >> and joining me now with more on the debate over how discipline is carried out in special education, supervising attorney at disability rights california, and jane meredith adams, reporter at the online education news site edsource. welcome to you both. >> thank you. >> jane, how significant is this u.s. department of education ruling decision against the oakland unified school district? >> the lawyers i interviewed said it was very significant. a lawyer at the national disability rights network, the national group in d.c. that oversees complaints in all 50 states, said it was ground-breaking. >> and what is prone restraint?

define that, because it's legal in california. what is it and when is it supposed to be used? >> prone restraint is when you have two to three adults, sometimes more, holding down the child on the floor facedown. and it's only supposed to be used for emergency containment. but as we saw in stewart's case, it was being used much more often than that. >> and in fact, jane, you've done extensive reporting on this. and there are a number of schools that use it. how often is prone restraint used in california? >> in a series last year we did public records requests, got 696 actual behave why are incident reports. and of those reports that included the restrain of a child, prone restraint was the most frequently used technique. and overall the last time data was collected there were 22,000 incidents that were considered

behavioral incidents, emergencies. and of those the majority were restraint or seclusion. >> and what constitutes a behavioral emergency? >> so behavioral emergency -- behavioral emergency interventions are really only supposed to be used, according to the education code, in situations where there is spontaneous unpredictable behavior that has a clear and present danger of causing serious physical harm. and so that says to me that it's supposed to be a true emergency that there's no other way to prevent somebody from injuring themselves except by intervening in some way. >> in stewart candle's case, were they indeed emergencies? 92 times is a lot, less than a year. >> ocr found in a lot of instances it wasn't -- it shouldn't have been used. >> office of civil rights? >> ocr, office of civil rights that restraints shouldn't have been used because it wasn't an emergency.

they instead were using it as like a routine behavioral management program. >> and what are your concerns about prone restraint? can children be injured or die? >> absolutely. there have been reported instances of death. most times it is what's called positional asphyxiation. it's where the child is on the ground and their breathing becomes compromised. and this is especially exacerbated if the child has asthma or some kind of compromised respiratory system. and also just because you have small kids that are being held down by grown adults. >> jane, there are a lot of special education students in california. how many are there? >> about 700,000. it's about 1 in 10 students in california receive special education services. >> and that covers everything, all kinds of disabilities? >> right. the largest group would be speech and hearing. >> is that correct? >> speech and language. disabilities followed by learning disabilities.

kids with dyslexia, kids with hard of hearing or speech impediments, they all get special ed. >> so the prone restraint is often used for students who are considered perhaps among the most severe in the disabilities group. am i correct? there are kids, usually maybe with the most severe forms of autism or behavioral disorders? >> you're looking at kids who do have problem behaviors. so the -- they're using these emergency behavioral interventions because they're engaging in problem behaviors. but the problem is that when you restrain -- restraint in seclusion is counterproductive if you're trying to teach a kid how to behave appropriately. >> meaning isolation? >> right, you're separated from classmates in a separate space. in california it's illegal to do locked restraints. you can't have a lock on the door. but school districts are still putting kids in rooms and preventing the kids from leaving. >> so -- how is this monitored

or reported? the way that these disciplinary methods are used? are they monitored and reported? >> that's what was so exciting, is clearly monitoring is not happening by and large. that's generally acknowledged. this is one of the first times the federal government said, oakland unified, you place this student stewart, with his parents' consent, into a private special education school that held itself out as experts in managing behavior. >> a private school that does get public funds? >> that's right. so oakland unified pays that school out of state and federal and district money to educate that child. as the expert. and i think what's happened in the past, and you can bear me out, districts sometimes walk away. they say, here's a kid we didn't know how to handle, we've solved the problem. and the federal government said, oakland unified, you have in fact discriminated against this student for allowing stewart to

be subject to prone restraints that a student who is not disabled would not be subject to. that's a major finding. >> and i want to just say that from a statewide baste basis, there is no data, to the extent that there was data in the past? 2013, the state repealed the hughes bill and one of the requirements was that school districts had to report the number of emergency behavioral interventions they were using. >> why was it repealed? >> it was the budget. a lot of the hughes bill had to do with really robust assessments and behavior planning for kids with serious maladaptive behaviors. basically the school districts were saying it was too expensive to do it. >> now there are no reporting requirements? >> no, there are not. >> so then how do you know when these incidents happen and whether they were used appropriately? are parents notified? is anyone notified? >> that's what's been difficult for parents. i know when i spoke with bonnie, stewart's mom, she said parents

either directly or obliquely suggest, how could you let this go on for so long? this is 11 months. in the kendell case. she could hear her son screaming when she pulled up to the parking lot in school. she said, it's very hard to know what's going on, you're terroristing these people to do the right thing. she was lucky they were getting reports. some level of reporting some the school. many times parents don't even know what's going on. >> i do want to point out that oakland unified school district did issue a statement on this. and once the decision came out by the u.s. department of education, it basically said that the district's highest priority is to provide safe learning environments for all students and it says it will actively comply with the terms of the resolution under the finding. so in this case, now that a settlement has been reached, what does oakland unified school district have to do to comply? >> ocr in oakland agreed that

oakland unified school district was going to do a number of things to address this issue of restraint and seclusion. the first big thing is that whenever they enter into a new contract with one of these private schools, that the school is not supposed to be using prone restraint. the other thing is that they're supposed to develop a protocol to monitor whenever there's a report of restraint or seclusion. then have a protocol in place about how to address that situation. and another thing that they've agreed to do is that they're going to hire an outside expert who's going to come in, teach school district staff about the dangers and harms of restraint and seclusion, and also what are some positive alternatives? >> jane, how many other states allow prone restraint and seclusion? and are there states that have outlawed it? >> she'd be better to answer that on the legal front. >> so our agency did do a

report, i think last year, where we analyzed all the different states and what their legislation says. and i think that i can say that california is behind the curve. we're not at the bottom of the heap. but we're definitely behind the curve. there are lots of other states -- alabama, alaska, hawaii, rhode island, i can list a bunch -- that have much more comprehensive and protective laws than california does. which isn't to say california doesn't have anything. but we're definitely less than 50%. >> so jane, bottom line, this decision, a huge wakeup call to other school districts that allow prone restraint and seclusion to perhaps provide better monitoring and reporting? >> absolutely. that's what i'm hearing from people i speak with, that it is a very exciting time for them that the federal government is saying, this is not okay. you're breaking the law. if you do this -- special education students are students first. you can't treat them with that

much difference. >> thank you to you both. suge lee, disability rights california. jane mayer adams with ed source. >> thank you. >> thank you. turning now to tech. it's no secret the bay area's tech industry has a glaring gender gap in its workforce. this week apple released its annual diversity report. it shows a tiny increase in female employees. women make up 23% of technical roles at apple, a 1% increase over last year. still it's higher than the percentages at two other silicon valley giants. at google women account for 19% of tech positions. and at facebook, 17%. recently a group of women in tech started a nonprofit vep tour called "projects include" to track and improve diversity. one of the founders is tracy chow, former engineer at pinterest, welcome. >> thank you for having me. >> in 2013 you posted an article on "medium" highlighting the diversity gap in tech.

it created a firestorm. it's kicked off a wave of disclosures from tech companies about the makeup of their workforce. what do you make of the latest report out from apple showing a 1% increase in tech roles there? for women, that is. >> i think what it's saying, what the reports are saying, it's difficult to make change. we knew it would be difficult to make the change. especially on top of big employee bases. apple employs a lot of people. to make changes in that number is going to take a lot of sustained effort over many years. i am encouraged to see that the numbers are improving slightly. and hopefully they can keep up that trend. >> so what are companies doing now that they weren't doing before in terms of trying to improve diversity? >> the first step was actually tracking those numbers. so part of the reason why i'd written that "medium" post in 2013 was there was irony around the fact that our industry is data driven and there was no data at all around diversity and what our demographics look like.

the first step was having those numbers to understand where we were, what that baseline was. what we saw when companies started releasing their data from the first set of reports in 2014 to 2015 and then 2016 was that it's hard to change those numbers. so what we're seeing now is that companies are trying to figure out what to do, exactly. >> what are they doing? >> there are a number of different efforts. some are more focused around pipeline, which is the shorthand in industry for saying the educational system isn't producing enough grads for us to hire. >> that is true? or is that more passing the buck? >> there's a little bit of that. i would say that the pipeline issues are there. if you look at the numbers of women and minorities, which is black and hispanic students, who are studying computer science, there are disparities there. there is something about the educational system we need to address, but of course there is much more than that. so when we look at industry

numbers, there's also disparity. there's not as many blacks and latinos being hired into technical roles as are graduating from computer science programs, for example. there is that gap there. then we look at retention numbers and promotion numbers. once people make it into industry, they're not all staying at the same rates. one stat is that for a woman in tech over a 10-year period, 41% will leave. versus 17% of men. >> astounding numbers. >> women are leaving at more than twice the rate that men are why are they leaving? >> there's a whole bunch of factors in there. a lot of it is going to be cultural. kind of the norms around how the tech industry does work. how it promotes people. what kinds of personality types and work styles are rewarded and promoted. a lot of the cultural issues include making people feel uncomfortable.

there's not a good place for them there. >> so then is the project doing anything about that, the retention issue? >> the project includes efforts trying to give a more comprehensive framework for companies to understand how to address diversity and inclusion issues. so that phrase diversity and inclusion is a very good one to look at. diversity refers more to just having different people, different backgrounds represented. inclusion is actually making sure that people will have that chance to succeed. >> what are you doing to help these companies, specific things that you're giving them guidance on? >> on our website, projectinclude.org, we have a lot of recommendations listed there. we're trying to provide a general comprehensive framework. so it's not just about one-off solutions. it's about understanding, this is a very large problem and these are concerted efforts and sustained efforts. we have a number of recommendations that are listed out on our website. a lot of links to resources. >> project include has been in place about three months. ellen powell, who made

headlines, also a cofounder. are you working with specific companies now? i understand that 800 companies signed up to have you advise them. what did you ultimately do? >> we had a lot of people apply to be involved. so we're running two programs right now. one is called startup include. we've actually selected ten to do s that we're monitoring closely, companies where we saw they had executive commitment toward diversity skin conclusion and were willing to try to make changes. with these ten on companies in our cohort we're working to define the metric set. we collectively think are good to track. and then a few months in, we want to be checking in on these different companies to see how they're doing in terms of implementing different recommendations that project include has put out there. for us also we understand the recommendations we've put out there are a first draft. and we want to solicit feedback, see what works, what doesn't. >> you graduated from stanford with a master's degree in

computer science. both your parents have ph.d.s in computer science. what has it been like for you personally as a woman in tech? >> i've had a range of experiences. i've definitely experienced being marginalized, being discounted on behalf of my gender. it was surprising to me having come from this tradition of being in computer science and growing up in the bay area. i actually experienced quite a bit of unconscious bias, discrimination -- >> how did that manifest itself? >> just a lot of little thins that would come up. people would doubt whether or not i belonged in computer science or just make these comments that felt to me -- people would call it now death by a thousand paper cuts. little questions like, are you sure you want to do this? have you considered other roles? are you sure you know what you're doing? do you need help? as well as more egregious comments like, you're too pretty to code. or, i assumed you weren't very

good at coding because technical ability and physical attractiveness are inversely correlated. wow. >> all sorts of comments to that effect. and then just in the workplace. more su subtle things like when i wanted to go for projects having to fight harder. having my technical points being debated a little bit longer or discredited. so a lot of the those things that would come up. and it didn't feel necessarily that people were outright sexist. but just a lot more headwinds i had to approach. >> and do you see that situation getting any better now? >> i'm not sure. it's hard to say from my own personal experience. i've also become more experienced, become more a senior in my work. it's hard to say just for me. it has gotten a lot better. some of it has to do with the work environments. when i joined pinterest, i had a sudden revelation there were really good workplaces to be. it was the first place i felt like i was treated as an engineer, and not a female engineer.

it was an experience -- the first time, and i'd never known before what it felt like to be treated so equitably. >> tracy, thanks for being here. i understand you left your software engineering job at pinterest two months ago and you're about to move to new york to test out new adventures. so much luck to you in new york. tracy chow, thank you. >> thanks. ♪ on the art scene, west edge opera is back with three exciting operas all performed in a previously abandoned oakland train station. and in her 25th and final season, music director and conductor marin allsop prepares to take her final bow at the festival of contemporary music. kqed senior arts editor chloe beltman is back with us to share some of her top picks. always good to see you. >> good to see you. >> tony bennett left his heart if san francisco.

♪ i left my heart ♪ in san francisco >> feel like i need a glass of wine right about now. loving tony bennett right back. big day coming up august 19th in the city. >> the city is celebrating tony bennett's 90th birthday. >> 90. >> 90th, 90 years old. the artist bruce wolf, the sculptor, has been commissioned to make an eight-foot-tall bronze skull tour of the crooner, multi grammy award winning seener, placed outside the fairmont holt where bennett first sang "i left my heart in san francisco" in december 1961. >> nice bit of history. the giants are getting in on the big day. >> that's right. the 19th is also declared tony bennett night by the san francisco giants. >> tony ben neat all day and night on august 19th. the visual arts. there's a show by contemporary

graphic artist shepherd ferry, perhaps best known for a work from the 2008 presidential election? >> that's right. many people will be familiar with this poster. "hope" by shepard ferry. a very important 2008 president elections. shepherd ferry has reinterpreted iconic photographs from jim marshall from the 19 skis. cesar chavez, johnny cash. also photographs displaying ideas of social issues, gun control, mass incarceration, things like that. the exhibition "american civics" at the san francisco art exchange which runs through september 30th is all about putting a face on some of these social issues. people can actually buy the precipitations. it's a limited edition of 100 signed precipitations that are being run. they cost $3,500 each. >> where does the money go? >> 10% of it goes to a variety of charities, including the naacp legal defense and educational fund. >> he has a very strong social justice motivation. one of his messages, he hopes,

is to question everything. >> absolutely. yeah, that's definitely part of shepard ferry's credo. >> okay. heading south to santa cruz, cat debris i don't festival. summer in santa cruz would not be the same without them. this year this is a milestone year are. >> yes. it's the final year that marin allsop is going to be the music director center. she's been there 25 years. she's a very important figure in the classical music world. the first woman to ever get the top job at a major symphony orchestra in baltimore. she's cut a path for women conductors all over the country and beyond. this is a festival where we're going to hear music by composers like anna kline, mason baits, a world premiere by john adams. shall we take a listen? >> yes. ♪ >> this is "spider dance"

performed this weekend, saturday, if you can make it. >> fantastic. who's going to replace her? >> they don't know yet. >> okay. all right. we'll find out when they're ready to announce. moving on to the world of books. for those who really love books, not just reading but seeing how they're made, there is something special in san francisco for those folks. >> that's right. so the san francisco center for the book, which is this hidden gem near potrero hill, has an exhibition through october 16th called "20/20 vision." it's looking back at 20 years of this organization's history, in fact looking forward to see who are the emerging artists in this field? what is the stage of book arts for the next 20 years? so one of my favorite pieces in this show is called "man eater." it's a set of four book busy hannah batsell, hand precipitated, hand bound. >> we're seeing it there? >> this is it. they look like boys' adventure books from 100 years ago. they're pretty dark. you can read them separately.

then if you put them all together and look at them in this sort of russian nesting doll fashion, they tell a story of greed and colonialism. >> what can we learn about the future of art books from this show? >> i think because there's such a variety of work across so many different media. some things are funny, some are serious, all kinds of fabrics and papers and different shapes and sizes. it's an amazing feast for the eyes. you take away the idea that book arts are alive and well, even though they're an old, ancient art, and there's no particular aesthetic or overarching direction. >> and this is running through october 16th? >> indeed. >> finally, edgy opera. do those words go together? >> that's right. definitely. west, they're performing in this disused 16th street station which is in west oakland. it's an amazing space. the kind of decor of the 1989 loma prieta earthquake, it's been out of use.

edge, because they do edgy work. we're seeing footage from "powder her face." "cunning little vixen." "powder her face" written in the 1990s and "cunning little vixen" is a 1920s opera. three operas, "agrippa," strong interesting female character "powder her face" dramatizes the sexual obsessions of a british duchess. not something you see in opera. usually when they talk about promiscuity, it's male promiscuity. >> and female too. but it tends not to be women of high rank, necessarily. the duchess of argyle was somebody who made tabloid news headlines in the uk in the 1960s for her sexual exploits and her messy divorce and all of that. thomas addis dramatizes the events of her life. >> and for those who want more information on tickets and exactly when these shows are

playing? >> kqed.org/arts. that rolled off your tongue. >> so used to saying it. >> got that memorized. you have a great weekend. you could take so many of these things, chloe, for the weekend. >> i'm going to be off to cabrillo, actually. >> i may be on your heels. chloe, thanks so much. >> thank at lot. >> that does it for us. i'm thuy vu. thanks for watching. . news coverage, kqednews.org. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

of san jose state university and this edition of equal time. i'm your host, journalism school director, bob rucker. california continues in a severe drought emergency. water is running low. we'll show you ways you can help and what the government is doing to support the effort, on this episode of equal time. [ music ] lawns are turning brown. reservoir levels are dropping. and rainfall is few and far between. even if the drought comes to an end, water conservation will continue to be a concern in california.