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Paul Mathew Thomas Fortino, 29, of Clearlake pleaded no contest to continuous sexual abuse of a minor, said Deputy District Attorney Rich Watson.
Watson said Fortino was sentenced for the charge on Jan. 30.
The charges stem from a report to Clearlake Police Department by a detective from another state on Jan. 18, 2021.
Det. Lee Walker notified the Clearlake Police Department that Fortino, while living in Clearlake, had sexually assaulted a 12-year-old minor starting in July 2019 and continuing through March 2020. The family of the victim subsequently moved out of state.
The investigation showed that Fortino provided the minor with nicotine vapes and marijuana and had sex with her multiple times over a 10-month time period.
After the girl and her family moved out of state, Fortino continued to contact her via social media and engaged in lewd and lascivious conduct with her.
The penal code gives a sentencing range of six years, 12 years or an upper term of 16 years in state prison for for continuous sexual abuse of a minor, Watson said.
Recent changes in the California Penal Code limits the court from imposing the upper term for most felony offenses if the defendant was under the age of 26 at the time of the offense.
Defense attorney Justin Peterson of Ukiah, who represented Fortino, argued that the low term of six years would be the appropriate sentence based on mitigating factors, including that the defendant was under the age of 26 during when the offense first started and the fact that the defendant had no prior criminal record.
Watson argued that the middle term of 12 years should be imposed due to the manner in which Fortino targeted the minor, concealed the assaults, and continued to pursue and assault his victim even after the victim moved out of state with her family.
Judge Andrew Blum imposed the middle term of 12 years in state prison. Judge Blum based his decision on several factors including the fact that Fortino groomed the minor, mentally manipulated her and concealed the locations where the assaults occurred.
Conviction for that charge also limits accrual of work time credits to no more than 15%, Watson said.
The girl’s family told Lake County News that it was a miracle she survived, and they wanted a formal, public apology from the Clearlake Police Department and the District Attorney’s Office over the case’s handling.
They called Fortino “a dangerous pedophile” who they said should have received a mandatory life sentence because that is what he has given his victims.
“Our daughter will live in constant fear for the rest of her life due to Paul Fortino’s actions,” the victim’s family said. “Paul Fortino has shown no remorse. He has stolen our daughter’s innocence in the most violent way and left a lifetime of horrible memories and scars. He stole our daughter’s childhood and those precious milestones can never be replaced.”
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation reported that Fortino has been transported to North Kern State Prison, a medium security prison that also serves as a reception center for inmates.
He will be eligible for parole in July of 2031.
The California Highway Patrol’s Clear Lake Area office reported the crash occurred at 6:13 p.m. Thursday on Highway 20 in Lucerne.
Office Efrain Cortez said Kathleen Alicia Kolthoff was driving a white Chevy Tahoe eastbound on Highway 20 approaching Foothill Drive in Lucerne when, for reasons that remain under investigation, the Tahoe veered to the right and went off the roadway, the CHP said.
Cortez said the vehicle rolled and ended up in the lake.
Kolthoff from Santa Rosa was transported by air ambulance to Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital with minor injuries, Cortez said.
Cortez said Kolthoff’s passenger, Joseph Sullivan, was released by medics at the scene with no injuries.
The crash remains under investigation, Cortez said.
Student learning took a big hit during the COVID-19 pandemic. Just how much is only becoming clear nearly three years after the World Health Organization declared the pandemic and nearly all U.S. public schools pivoted to online instruction for at least several months in March 2020.
However, the data guiding the nation’s efforts to help kids catch up does not generally include the students who experienced the most dramatic learning disruptions.
Nationwide testing results released in the fall of 2022 revealed that the reading and math performance on standardized tests of students who were in fourth and eighth grades in the U.S. in the 2021-2022 school year declined by historic amounts.
This dramatic evidence of learning loss has mobilized federal, state and local education leaders. The federal government has allocated US$122 billion to support state and local efforts to help students “catch up in the classroom.”
Public school districts are using these resources to fund tutoring and extended learning time. And researchers are assessing the effects of these investments on standardized test scores.
However, these efforts do little to identify or target support to the children whose learning environments were most disrupted by the pandemic. This is especially so for the youngest students, who aren’t yet old enough for most standardized testing.
Enrollment decline and the ‘streetlight effect’
During the pandemic, public school enrollment in grades K through 12 fell by 1.2 million students. These declines were concentrated among kindergarten students and in schools that offered only remote instruction.
Similarly dramatic enrollment losses among even younger learners erased a decade of progress in boosting preschool education enrollment.
These declines indicate that the pandemic caused students to miss instructional time or undertake disruptive school switches, often in their developmentally critical early years.
However, school officials list early-childhood programs among the least popular use of available federal funds and provide no indication of targeted academic-recovery efforts for younger or truant students.
This is an example of what scholars call the “streetlight effect,” in which people focus their attention on easily visible evidence – such as the test scores available for older, currently enrolled students – rather than other relevant data that are more obscured and harder to identify.
And long lags in national data reporting mean little is yet known about the learning environments of the disproportionately young children whose families avoided public schools during the pandemic. Currently, official federal statistics do not even provide basic data on private school or home-school enrollment beyond 2019.
Where the kids went
My research, done collaboratively with The Associated Press and data journalists at Stanford University’s Big Local News, addresses this issue.
For our analysis, we gathered state-level data on public, private and home-school enrollment for the school years from 2019-20 through 2021-22. We also used U.S. Census Bureau estimates to identify the school-age population in each state over this time period. These combined data provide insights into where the students who avoided public schools went and what it means for the nation’s academic-recovery efforts.
Complete data aren’t available in every state, but we have good data on more than half of the school-age population in the U.S. at the onset of the pandemic. These states also experienced public school enrollment declines that are representative of the national trend.
Some students, particularly the youngest, clearly turned to private schools during the pandemic. In the 34 jurisdictions with available data, private school enrollment grew by over 140,000 students between the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years. However, this increase only explains a modest amount – roughly 14% – of the corresponding decline in public school enrollment.
A more surprising finding is the robust growth of home-schooling during this period. An early Census Bureau survey reported that home-schooling increased soon after the pandemic began. Our data show this initial increase endured into the 2021-22 school year when most public schools returned to in-person instruction.
In the 22 jurisdictions with data, home-school enrollment increased by over 184,000 students between the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years – a 30% increase. For every additional student enrolled in private school over this period, nearly two entered home-schooling. This sustained growth in home-schooling explains 26% of the corresponding losses in public school enrollment.
Roughly a quarter of the public school enrollment loss simply reflects the pandemic decline in the number of school-age children in the U.S. However, people moving to new homes during the pandemic means this demographic impact varied considerably by state. In states like California and New York, which saw their overall populations fall dramatically, the percentage declines in public school enrollment were at least six times those in states like Texas and Florida, where populations grew.
New questions for academic recovery
These findings raise several new questions about what help American students will need to get their education back on track. For instance, researchers know little about the learning opportunities available to children who switched to home-schooling, or the effects of this choice on families.
Our data is also unable to locate more than one-third of the students who left public schools. That could mean that some children are not going to school at all – or that even more families started home-schooling but did so without notifying their state.
A third possibility is that the pandemic led more families to have their kids skip kindergarten. Our data indirectly supports this conjecture. The unexplained declines in public school enrollment are concentrated in states that do not require kindergarten attendance, like California and Colorado.
What we do know is the pandemic’s learning disruptions occurred disproportionately among the nation’s youngest learners.
Our work to understand and respond to this situation is just beginning. One possible response is to refocus some federal funding on the broad use of early screening tools to reliably identify – and address – learning setbacks years before students are old enough to take the current battery of standardized tests, which often begins in the third grade. Policymakers can also do more to locate students who are missing and to understand the educational needs of those outside the light of conventional data systems.
Thomas Dee, Barnett Family Professor, Stanford University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
New images of Saturn from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope herald the start of the planet's "spoke season" surrounding its equinox, when enigmatic features appear across its rings.
The cause of the spokes, as well as their seasonal variability, has yet to be fully explained by planetary scientists.
Saturn and its rings fill the view. Saturn has yellow, reddish-brown, and tan stripes. Saturn's rings are tilted slightly, allowing us to see ring bands along with the wide dark band called the Cassini Division.
Like Earth, Saturn is tilted on its axis and therefore has four seasons, though because of Saturn's much larger orbit, each season lasts approximately seven Earth years.
Equinox occurs when the rings are tilted edge-on to the Sun. The spokes disappear when it is near summer or winter solstice on Saturn. (When the Sun appears to reach either its highest or lowest latitude in the northern or southern hemisphere of a planet.)
As the autumnal equinox of Saturn's northern hemisphere on May 6, 2025, draws near, the spokes are expected to become increasingly prominent and observable.
The suspected culprit for the spokes is the planet's variable magnetic field. Planetary magnetic fields interact with the solar wind, creating an electrically charged environment (on Earth, when those charged particles hit the atmosphere this is visible in the northern hemisphere as the aurora borealis, or northern lights).
Scientists think that the smallest, dust-sized icy ring particles can become charged as well, which temporarily levitates those particles above the rest of the larger icy particles and boulders in the rings.
The ring spokes were first observed by NASA's Voyager mission in the early 1980s. The transient, mysterious features can appear dark or light depending on the illumination and viewing angles.
"Thanks to Hubble's OPAL program, which is building an archive of data on the outer solar system planets, we will have longer dedicated time to study Saturn’s spokes this season than ever before," said NASA senior planetary scientist Amy Simon, head of the Hubble Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program.
Saturn's last equinox occurred in 2009, while NASA's Cassini spacecraft was orbiting the gas giant planet for close-up reconnaissance. With Cassini's mission completed in 2017, and the Voyager spacecrafts long gone, Hubble is continuing the work of long-term monitoring of changes on Saturn and the other outer planets.
"Despite years of excellent observations by the Cassini mission, the precise beginning and duration of the spoke season is still unpredictable, rather like predicting the first storm during hurricane season," Simon said.
While our solar system's other three gas giant planets also have ring systems, nothing compares to Saturn's prominent rings, making them a laboratory for studying spoke phenomena. Whether spokes could or do occur at other ringed planets is currently unknown. "It's a fascinating magic trick of nature we only see on Saturn – for now at least," Simon said.
Hubble's OPAL program will add both visual and spectroscopic data, in wavelengths of light from ultraviolet to near-infrared, to the archive of Cassini observations. Scientists are anticipating putting these pieces together to get a more complete picture of the spoke phenomenon, and what it reveals about ring physics in general.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.
LUCERNE, Calif. — Traffic on a portion of Highway 20 in Lucerne was slowed for several hours on Friday afternoon after a log truck rolled over and spilled its load, blocked a part of the roadway.
The crash occurred just before 1 p.m. in the westbound lane of Highway 20 at Foothill Drive.
California Highway Patrol officers at the scene told Lake County News that the rollover appeared to have occurred due to a weight shift as the tractor trailer — carrying a load of large logs — was coming through a curve.
They said the truck was headed westbound to Ukiah. At that time, they did not have information on where it had traveled from on Friday.
The truck had rolled onto the passenger side and was blocking the road, while the logs were along the shoulder.
The truck’s driver was uninjured but he appeared shaken. He left the scene with individuals who appeared to be coworkers as the cleanup continued. The CHP said no other vehicles were involved.
A team of Caltrans workers were at the scene clearing the logs from the side of the road and using heavy equipment to place them along the chain link fence bordering Lucerne Elementary on Foothill Drive.
The CHP said the logs had damaged a water main and two utility poles. Power was still on but a Mediacom pole was sheared off. Caltrans signs also were damaged.
Once the logs were moved, the CHP said two heavy duty tow trucks that were on scene will move both the tractor trailer and will deliver the logs to their destination in Ukiah.
Officers said the work was expected to continue for a few hours on Friday afternoon, with traffic control to remain in place.
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Charles Lee Williamson, age 45, of Clearlake pleaded no contest to a charge of lewd acts with a minor, said Deputy District Attorney Rich Watson, who prosecuted the case.
Watson said Williamson also admitted that he had a prior conviction of first degree burglary from 1998 out of Mendocino County which is a strike offense under California sentencing laws.
The charges against Williamson stem from a report that he sexually assaulted a minor multiple times from 2010 through 2020 while living in Clearlake.
The investigation showed that Williamson had access to the minor during the time periods he was not incarcerated.
On Jan. 30, Judge Michael S. Lunas sentenced Williamson to 16 years in state prison.
Lunas’ decision came after denying defense attorney Thomas Feimer’s motion requesting the court dismiss the prior strike allegation.
Even though the prior strike allegation was over 20 years old, Watson argued that the prior strike should still be enforced because Williamson has lived a life of crime since his burglary conviction in 1998.
Williamson’s record included multiple drug and weapons convictions, a felony sexual assault conviction in 2015, and a felony grand theft conviction from 2017.
Conviction for a charge of lewd acts with a minor, which is a violation of Penal Code section 288(b)(1), limits accrual of work time credits to no more than 15% as defined in the penal code.