The Coast News
Sunday, Nov. 1st
ESCONDIDO, SAN MARCOS, VISTA
VOL. 5, N0. 22
OCT. 30, 2020
Mission Vista closed due to COVID-19 By Steve Puterski
REGION — The Vista Unified School District Board of Education unanimously agreed to temporarily close Mission Vista High School due to two positive COVID-19 tests. According to an Oct. 26 press release from the district, a second student tested positive, although it was an isolated case and not related to the first case. The board, though, made its decision during its Oct. 27 meeting. According to the release, the parents notified the district their student likely contracted the
Underestimated cost projections threaten dozens of VUSD projects. Page 14 novel coronavirus while traveling with a club athletic team not associated with VUSD. Regardless, at least 150 students and staff members were placed into a 14-day quarantine. According to a report by Fox 5, positives COVID-19 tests have been confirmed at Alta Vista High School, Roosevelt Middle School and Mission Meadows and Alamosa Park elementary schools. However, the current changes to the district’s reopening plans will only apply to secondary levels. The first positive test at MVHS led to the quarantining of 130 students and four teachers. VUSD reopened its 28 schools on Oct. 20 after a lengthy board meeting lasting nearly six hours. The board also approved virtual and in-person models during the meeting.
Shadow Campaign The Coast News investigates reports of a Tri-City candidate’s conflicts of interest, mismanagement and ‘machine politics.’ Page 5.
Chicano educator and activist pays it forward By Tigist Layne
SAN MARCOS — Chicano Educator Dr. Xuan Santos, an associate professor at California State University at San Marcos (CSUSM), has been a mentor to many over the years, a blessing he attributes to his own mentors. He calls them “OGs,” a term he coined that does not, in fact, mean original gangsters, but “opportunity givers.” Santos, a first-generation immigrant from Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, grew up in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood east of downtown Los Angeles that has long been heavily impacted by crime and poverty. “As a youngster, I didn’t know what my life was going to be like. I wanted to do exactly what my father and my mother did and just keep a blue collar job. I wanted to be a worker in a factory,” Santos said. “Then I came into contact with mentors
DR. XUAN SANTOS, left, an immigrant who grew up in a poor Los Angeles neighborhood, earned a Ph.D. at UC Santa Barbara and is now a professor of sociology at Cal State San Marcos. Photo courtesy of Cal State San Marcos
that saw something in me life — that I didn’t have to be in Boyle Heights forever, that very few people did.” that I could actually become the architect of my future if OPPORTUNITY GIVERS “When my teachers I just pursued higher eduand mentors started telling cation — I just ran with it,” me about college and the Santos said. He attended Cal State prospect of having a better
Los Angeles for his undergraduate degree, he got his first masters at Cal State Dominguez Hills and went on to earn a Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) in Sociology. For the past 10 years, Santos has been at CSUSM and now works as an associate professor in the Department of Sociology & Criminology and Justice Studies. “I didn’t know that I wanted to become a teacher until I came across teachers that reminded me of my worth. They inspired me, and I decided that I wanted to pay back my community through research and teaching,” Santos said. Santos also works with formerly incarcerated youth and gang-involved students. He serves as the faculty director of Project Rebound, a program that helps formerly incarcerated and system-impacted students to be accepted and retained at the
university and to graduate. “We’re very disproportionately represented in academia, so to come from this highly stigmatized context and to thrive and become a role model as a professor, I always keep in mind all of the people that mentored me along the way,” Santos said. “I refer to them as OGs, opportunity givers, people that understand your plight, your struggle; people that understand that you are a person that has potential and your life has meaning.” Martin Leyva, the program coordinator of Project Rebound and a lecturer in the sociology department at CSUSM, has known Santos for roughly 11 years. Leyva told The Coast News that he considers Santos his mentor, a status he doesn’t hand out lightly. “When I met him, he was one of the first ChicaTURN TO EDUCATOR ON 14