Ronald “Ron” Richard Straight, 87, passed away on November 27, 2024 in Eureka, surrounded by his family. He was born in 1936 to his parents Leslie and Grace Straight. He worked as a heavy equipment operator for Lp Loading Trucks and later the Local Union 3.
He often drove cross country traveling to visit family both near and far. Before his passing he made one such trip where he visited with his son Mark Laursen taking in the football games in Indiana. Later he visited with two of his sisters Mary Hill and Patty Bennett in Mississippi. He was accompanied on this journey by two of his daughters, Terri Moore and Shelly Kitchen, who made the journey a reality for him.
Ron enjoyed spending his free time with family, where he worked in the yard or garage, crafted custom Redwood burl tables, he often collected custom built heavy equipment truck models and various other sports items. He could be found around town or at the casino with his friends Gregg and Jim. He took great pride in hard work.
He will be missed and remembered by surviving family and friends. Those left to honor his memory are his brothers: Leslie Straight and Allen Straight; sisters: Patty Bennett, Mary Hill, Janet McDonald, and Barbara Remington; daughters; Terri (Randy) Moore, Shelly (Leonard) Kitchen, and Ronda Henderson; seven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his mother and father: Grace and Leslie Straight; sister: Betty Taylor; brother: Jack Taylor; mother of his children: Pearl Straight; son: Mark Laursen; and great-granddaughter Lily Smith.
Services honoring his life and memory will be held at Wesleyan Church of the Redwoods at 1645 Fischer Ave in McKinleyville on December 28, 2024 at 1 p.m. Reception will follow in the activity center. May he forever rest in peace and live on in our hearts.
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The obituary above was submitted on behalf of Ron Straight’s loved ones. The Lost Coast Outpost runs obituaries of Humboldt County residents at no charge. See guidelines here. Email news@lostcoastoutpost.com.
The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office today released footage from the body-worn cameras of two deputies who were involved in April’s fatal shooting of 32-year-old Kevin Burks.
Burks had shot a 75-year-old Cutten woman multiple times as she stood in front of her home, according to subsequent press releases from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, and in the video released today a deputy can be heard confronting him and yelling, “Show me your hands!” before telling his fellow deputy, “He’s got a gun” and then opening fire.
The deputy who fatally shot Burks was later identified as Lieutenant Conan Moore.
In the video released today, Sheriff William Honsal offers an overview of the events leading up to the confrontation. The video includes an audio recording of the elderly shooting victim’s 911 phone call.
The body camera footage picks up right before the deputies confront Burks on the 2400 block of Fern Street.
Honsal says, “The suspect refused commands, and he pointed the firearm at the deputies.”
Burks died in the hospital two days after being shot.
Toward the end of the video Honsal says, “The CIRT [Critical Incident Response Team] investigation has been completed and submitted to the District Attorney’s Office for review.”
The footage is graphic, and since it’s age-restricted it can only be viewed on YouTube. Click this link to watch the video.
If you’ve been following Arcata High School’s remarkable football season in even the most casual of ways then this will come as old news, but we at the Outpost would be remiss if we didn’t congratulate the Tigers for capturing the school’s first-ever CIF North Regional Division 6-AA championship on Saturday by a score of 35-14.
Ray Hamill of HumboldtSports.com traveled to Winters for the game and reported on the victory. Next, the team will travel all the way down to Fullerton for next week’s state championship game against the Portola High Bulldogs.
Popular YouTube travel vlogger Peter Santenello has been spending a lot of time in our neck o’ the woods lately, and on Saturday he dropped a third video documenting his local excursions. This time he embarks on one of the most beautiful (albeit bumpy) drives in the country, from Ferndale to the remote Lost Coast by way of the Wildcat.
He visits the Petrolia and Honeydew general stores, and at the latter he interviews an employee who discusses her recovery from fentanyl addiction with help from the faith-based recovery center Mountain of Mercy.
Santenello also speaks with Whitethorn royalty Tasha McKee and Jim Groeling about the region’s history, including its lumber heyday, the “back to the land” movement and the recent cannabis market crash. (He interviews a longtime grower about the impacts to Garberville in particular.)
Fittingly, Santenello winds up in Shelter Cove, where he briefly discusses the town’s history of shady real estate prospecting before capturing the sun as it sets behind the Pacific.
On Dec. 3 at about 8:30 p.m., Humboldt County Sheriff’s on patrol in the area of Highway 101 and Sunset Ave., conducted a traffic stop for a vehicle’s expired registration, CVC 4000(a).
Deputies identified the driver, Brian Adams, age 41, of Eureka, by his driver’s license and confirmed that Adams was a convicted felon for numerous drug-related charges and wanted on two misdemeanor arrest warrants.
Adams was searched incident to arrest, and deputies located pepper spray, 2.2g of methamphetamine, and a glass pipe. Adams was then taken to the Humboldt County Correctional Facility (HCCF), where 1.2g of fentanyl was located inside his rectum.
After the booking process was completed at HCCF, Adams has the following charges:
Possession of a controlled substance—HS 11377(a)
Possession of control substance paraphernalia—HS11364(a)
Drug addict in possession of tear gas—PC 22810(b)
No evidence of current registration—VC4000(a)(1)
Bringing drugs/alcohol into penal facility—PC 4573.5
Anyone with information about this case or related criminal activity is encouraged to call the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office at (707) 445-7251 or the Sheriff’s Office Crime Tip line at (707) 268-2539.
Students complete assignments in Spanish together at Washington Elementary School in Madera on Oct. 29, 2024. Photos by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local
California first demanded public education be conducted exclusively in English in 1872, a policy that stayed on the books until Ronald Reagan, as governor, signed a law to get rid of it in 1967. About a decade later, the state started to require bilingual education for kids who couldn’t understand English, taking up a Civil Rights-era argument that the children of immigrants deserved an education in their native language to be able to get the full benefits of public schooling. Other immigrant-heavy states passed the same requirements, including Texas, Illinois, and New York. But California made a radical break with its peers in 1998 when voters approved another English-only law. For nearly two decades, bilingual education became increasingly popular among native English speakers and celebrated as a best-practice for educating the children of immigrants, but the nation’s most linguistically diverse state continued to ban it.
We investigated the fallout of that ban and the state’s limping recovery since voters repealed it in 2016, conducting nearly three dozen interviews with researchers, policymakers, state education officials, advocates, bilingual educators, school leaders, teachers, parents, and students in California as well as education leaders in Texas, Illinois, and Colorado, where bilingual education has been a priority in state education policy for decades, and in Massachusetts, which is recovering from a 15-year-long ban of its own.
Three key findings:
The Education Department is underfunded and understaffed, so its support for bilingual education hasn’t translated into widespread enrollment in these programs. Last year in California, 10% of students still learning English got a bilingual education. In Texas, 40% did — and schools got extra state money for each child enrolled in a long-term bilingual education program called dual-language immersion.
A decades-long slump in bilingual-teacher prep programs has led to a decimated teacher pipeline, meaning there aren’t enough people to lead bilingual classrooms in K-12 schools or professors to train them. Even districts that want to start new bilingual programs haven’t been able to because they can’t find the staff.
Unlike in the 1970s, the California Legislature has not stepped up to require bilingual education or fund a systemic recovery from the English-only years. Since Massachusetts ended an English-only law of its own, the state has awarded $11.8 million to help schools start or expand dual-language programs. California, home to 10 times the number of kids who don’t speak English, has given districts just $10 million for that work.
The Background: Why people advocate for bilingual education
Bilingual education lets kids use their native language while they learn English. Kids who already know how to read and write in one language just have to transfer those skills to a second language rather than learning the processes from scratch. Taking classes in their native language while they’re learning English also lets kids tackle more complex topics in their first language rather than having to put that off until they master English.
Dual-language programs set all students up for the “bilingual advantage.” Traditional bilingual education creates a pathway to English-only classes as quickly as possible. Succeeding in English-language classes is the goal. Increasingly popular dual-language programs, by contrast, have kids splitting the school day between two languages for their entire schooling, preparing them to reap the benefits of bilingualism in their lives and work long-term.
Dual language programs boost student outcomes. Districts with strong dual-language programs report significantly higher standardized test scores for students in those programs compared to students in general education programs. The leaps in student achievement show up by middle school. Researchers have found these programs lead to higher college entrance exam scores, high school graduation rates, and college-going rates. For kids who enter the programs not speaking English, they lead to faster English proficiency.
Dual-language programs create more integrated schools. Because dual-language programs have become so popular among English-speaking families, they represent a way to integrate classrooms with recent immigrants and those whose families came to this country generations ago.
What the Education Department has done, and what it’s up against
The state has taken steps to champion bilingual education. In 2017, the Education Department released an English Learner Roadmap, urging schools to help students who don’t speak English maintain their native languages while mastering English. In 2019, the Global California 2030 initiative named concrete goals for how soon the state’s schools should foster widespread bilingualism: By 2030, half of California students should be on a path to becoming bilingual and 1,600 schools should be running dual-language programs (more than double the number doing so in 2018).
But the state’s aspirations for bilingual education are running up against a severe teacher shortage. During the 2022-23 school year, the state commission on teacher credentialing only authorized 1,011 new bilingual teachers — across all languages. Only seven went to teachers who speak Vietnamese, the second-most-common language in California schools that year. It gave out fewer credentials to Spanish-speaking teachers that year than in the three years prior.
Patricia Gándara, a longtime bilingual education researcher and co-director of the UCLA Civil Rights Project, called the decimated teacher pipeline “one of those stories of ‘I told you so.’ … I could see what the problem was going to be: that when people came back to their senses and realized what a mistake this was, the big fallout was going to be that we didn’t have the teachers.”
Bilingual education advocates say the Legislature needs to do more.The Legislature has put $20 million toward helping districts coach up bilingual teachers and prepare them to lead bilingual classrooms and another $10 million to help districts start or expand dual-language programs. Advocates say it’s not enough.
What’s next
Statewide accountability may be coming. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill this year requiring the Education Department to come up with a statewide plan for helping districts adopt the English Learner Roadmap’s guidelines and report on districts’ progress.
Supporters of bilingual education find inspiration in Texas, which never stopped requiring these programs and more recently created financial incentives for districts to start and expand dual-language programs as an even better model. Alesha Moreno-Ramirez, director of the Education Department’s Multilingual Support Division, said the Legislature would need to make the call to require bilingual education in California or create financial incentives for it.
“That said, we would enthusiastically support the movement toward requiring bilingual education,” she added.
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CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.
The Roman Soldiers Falling Before Christ. Augustin Hirschvogel, 1547.
I settled into the local movie
theater to see Gladiator II last night, surrounded by pungent stale
popcorn and sweat. I’ve heard disappointment regarding this movie.
Watchers
were left
wanting depth it never provided.
It certainly lacked depth, but I found myself pondering this ancient
empire that
continues to fascinate, influence and compel humanity for the past
2,000+ years. Maybe Caesar is remembered today mostly
as a salad dressing, but obviously that’s silly. The Caesars’
impact has reached into places and spaces they could only dream of —
and dream they did. Rome fell and yet it still endures, doesn’t it?
We’re
entering the second week of Advent, which traditionally comes with
the word “peace.” (My intention here isn’t to convince you to
believe in Jesus or go to Church. That’s not within my power. I
simply desire you to think a little deeper about your own
spirituality. We
are spiritual beings and I believe we’re designed to connect with
this part of ourselves. What God wants you to see is God’s
business.)
Peace.
What we all long to cultivate in our lives. That full breath. The
open-handed surrender. Trust
that all will be well, and all matter of things will be well. We long
for peace on Earth
and sing as much this time of year. We pray for peace in the Middle
East while sending artillery in one hand and aid in the other —
like an abuser who carefully dresses the wounds he caused
Peace.
Like the Pax Romana: We’ll conquer you and kill your best and
you’ll be so grateful for our rule!
How did such “peace” come about? Let’s do a basic fly-over
history lesson on the rise of Rome and the peace she offered.
Rome,
as a republic, was perpetually at war, either in defense or to
conquer. As its
military might grew and the entire Italian Peninsula was taken for
Rome, it
defeated Carthage in 202 BCE and continued to expand and violently
overthrow the known Mediterranean world. Writers
of that time described
the Roman Empire as
having the boundaries of the Earth.
Rome would make lists of the people they conquered and would erect
monuments in those occupied cities.
Caesar
Augustus ruled from modern-day Syria
to Portugal
at the time of Jesus’s birth. He was declared god incarnate on
Earth,
demanding prayers and sacrifices be made in his honor.
So
who is Caesar Augustus? Born Octavian in 63 BCE, he was the nephew of
Julius Caesar and was adopted as his son. Julius was assassinated in
44 BCE and Octavian began to rule at that point, becoming the first
Emperor of Rome. Even though Rome was in continual battle with other
nations and kingdoms, he made it his goal in those first years to
avenge his father by creating a war at home between Caesar’s allies
and those who assassinated Caesar.
Around
this time, Octavian threw a party in honor of his father. During this
celebration a comet was seen in the sky and Octavian said his cosmic
hour had come. Witnesses came forward declaring they saw Julius
ascend to the right hand of god (Zeus) making Julius a god. And if
Julius was a god that would make Octavian the son of god. He
inaugurated a celebration that lasted for 12 days every year and
called this celebration the 12 days of advent to celebrate his birth.
In
31 BCE, Octavian defeated Marc Antony in the Battle of Actium and for
the first time in 100 years Rome was not at war — there was peace
throughout Rome. Octavian — renamed Augustus, meaning
illustrious one, in
27 BCE — united all of Rome under himself. He took the name
“Sebastos,” which means one
who is worshiped or revered and
inaugurated the
Pax Romana. Peace through Rome. Caesar Augustus, the son of god,
required all people to pay him homage by declaring “Caesar is
lord.” The senate gave him the title Patar Patria, which means
“Prince
of Peace,”
and the oracles said the kingdom of Augustus would usher in a new era
of peace on Earth.
Roman
priests, seen as divine mediators between people and Caesar, would
alleviate
past guilt through the burning of holy incense. Roman youth would
create worship choruses about Caesar’s birth to be sung during
advent. Caesar had coins minted with his image on them as a form of
communication, showing the world who rules. If occupied by Rome,
subjects were required to declare “Caesar is lord,” with threat
of incarceration or violence should they rebel.
How
does Rome amass such a reign? In most simplistic terms, through
enormous and powerful military strength. And how would one amass this
enormous military? Through paying a good wage. And how would one pay
this military such a good wage? Through taxing the people. If you tax
the people then you grow the military and then can grow the empire to
get more people so you can keep taxing them. Depending on where
people lived and how Rome was doing, the people could be taxed 80-90%
of their income. These heavy taxations might demand people to sell
their ancestral land — generational land passed on with deeply
sacred meaning and value. Land, for the occupied Jews, promised and
given by God, and now sold for tax
to a hated empire.
And
there was constant threat of military violence that kept these
occupied peoples in line. Crucifixion was Rome’s torture of choice.
The incarcerated would be beaten and tied to crosses in as many
creative forms as possible until they suffered and died. They were
placed in high-traffic areas so everyone
would know the consequence of disrespecting Rome and Caesar.
This
was Roman peace — as long as we’re not at war, we’re at peace.
Peace defined by those on top. Peace for the wealthy and powerful.
Peace for the few while the masses remain impoverished and the
vulnerable remain afraid. And if Caesar wanted to know how big his
empire was and how much money he could get from those he ruled, he
would have to take a count.
Luke
2:1-5
In
those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be
taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took
place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to
their own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of
Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because
he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register
with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a
child.
The
Christmas story isn’t about two lovebirds who had a baby in a barn
in their hometown. This is about a people displaced and occupied. And
in an oppressed corner of a backwater town of ethnic minorities, a
baby was born. This story rebels against unjust power structures and
resists oppressive tyranny. Sixty years after enforced proclamations
that Caesar is lord, people began to radically whisper “Jesus is
Lord.”
Those
early Christians began co-oping familiar language to transform
meaning. Caesar is lord, Jesus is Lord. The good news of Caesar’s
birth and his military being called “euangelion” – “good
news” — and the news
of Jesus’s birth, and Jesus who preached release of the captives
and food for the poo,r also being called “euangelion.” Where
Caesar was called the “prince of peace” through military might
and violent occupation, Jesus is called the Prince of Peace through
blessing and loving his enemies.
Where
the kingdom of Caesar looked like the sword — oppression, pride,
power, and forced worship — the way of Jesus looked like setting
people free, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, advocating for the
marginalized, forgiving and blessing your enemies. Jesus talked about
the kingdom of God being like yeast or leaven,
where a small bit can cause a whole batch to change. It started
small, and looked like nothing but a band of people refusing to align
with the power and pride of Rome — to align with common life
together, and to care for those on the margins. It’s the smallest
bit of peace, that sacred breath, a clear recognition that you are
already loved and whole and you belong to God and to each other, that
bit of peace which shifts hearts and moves mountains. Let there be
peace on Earth
and let it begin with me, the hymn goes.
So,
may peace begin with you. Not through weapons and rulers or
presidents and religions, but within your own body and with your own
hands and words and ways of love. May peace begin with you this
advent as you wait in the darkness for Light to arrive once again.
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Bethany Cseh is a pastor at Arcata United Methodist Church and Catalyst Church.
