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Cabrillo College dental hygiene faculty, students allege toxic work and learning environment
An anonymous source finishes up paperwork after a day of working at their dental office on June 23. (Amaya Edwards — Santa Cruz Local/CatchLight Local)
APTOS >> A toxic work environment. Excluded from official department meetings. Discouraged from reporting misconduct.
Heather Lawler served as director of Cabrillo College’s dental hygiene program from 2021 to 2025 and described a culture of toxic management from the top-down that worsened over time. She alleged college administrators regularly yelled at her, excluded her from faculty meetings, stalled necessary equipment repairs and asked students to falsify misconduct reports against her.
Her experiences were not isolated. Santa Cruz Local spoke with nine current and former faculty, staff and students, all of whom alleged problematic behavior by college administrators who retaliated against those who raised concerns, discouraged reporting misconduct and disregarded rules required by state law.
Earlier this year, a state investigation into the program found eight violations, resulting in a three-year probation that risks Cabrillo’s ability to prepare future students for licensure.
Four Cabrillo College administrators denied the allegations of misconduct in a 90-minute interview with Santa Cruz Local on Wednesday.
The former Dean of the School of Health and Public Service, Heidi Weber, resigned on Sunday. She declined to comment on this story. College administrators said she resigned voluntarily and declined to comment further.
Administrators also noted they could not speak to private personnel or student matters, including closed or ongoing investigations.
“We as the college take all employee complaints very seriously,” said college spokesperson Kristin Fabos. “All complaints received from dental hygiene faculty and staff from 2023 to the present were reviewed and investigated, or are in progress in accordance with applicable college policies and procedures.”
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After an increasingly tumultuous final year leading Cabrillo’s dental hygiene program, Lawler resigned on Jan. 19, 2025. Others in the program watched Lawler be targeted by administrators. Michelle Rico, a former instructor and technician in the program, said some administrators spread rumors about Lawler, questioning her credibility and leadership.
Lawler said the final straw was when administrators allegedly directed staff and students to disregard parts of the dental hygiene student handbook, which laid out program-specific student conduct and educational requirements. Some of the dental hygiene student handbook’s policies are required by state law — ignoring them could have risked Lawler’s license to practice in California.
“I cannot manage a program where we’ve said we’re not going to follow the laws that govern us,” Lawler said.
Multiple people confirmed they were told to disregard certain procedures in the student handbook, prompting confusion and concerns from students, faculty and staff over what qualified as misconduct.
Vice President of Instruction Travaris Harris denied that the handbook was suspended and said some parts of it were superseded by the college’s broader Student Rights and Responsibilities Handbook. He and other administrators did not acknowledge the lack of clarity voiced by students, staff and faculty.
Cabrillo’s dental hygiene program has one full-time director, three classified staff and 13 part-time faculty. One of the state law violations found during the Feb. 12 site visit was that the program’s clinic was consistently understaffed.
Rico resigned from the program on Dec. 12, 2024, after administrators allegedly asked her to take on IT responsibilities for the program that were not part of her job description, without additional compensation.
She also alleged administrators would mislead her and other staff about how to officially report misconduct and was not notified whether reports were being investigated.
“It just got to be too much and anything you said could be turned on you,” Rico said. “It was a very toxic atmosphere.”
Vice President of Human Relations Angela Hoyt said the position is responsible for providing day to day technical support for dental hygiene hardware, software and equipment, and denied that the role changed during Rico’s tenure.
Other faculty shared similar stories of miscommunication and a lack of transparency by administration beyond the student handbook confusion, and requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. They said multiple faculty in the program had been reprimanded by administrators for speaking up about the program not adhering to state dental hygiene laws.
Another instructor referenced meeting notes that describe current program director Faye Khoury and Weber, the former dean, discussing strategies to remove faculty they don’t like, including asking students to file complaints. Other current and former instructors said they have overheard similar conversations, and that complaints of any kind can be harmful to faculty’s records at Cabrillo and for future jobs.
“It can’t go on the way it’s been going,” one instructor said. “The administration is just setting people — faculty as well as students — up for failure.”
Khoury denied seeking or encouraging complaints from students against specific faculty or staff, and said her conversations with students have focused on their education. She said she has listened to student’s concerns when raised and encourages students to use official college processes.
Fabos said the allegations of retaliation are false.
“Our faculty and staff both have union representation, so if that were to happen, they’ve got union representatives to advocate for them and address those issues,” Fabos said.
Kendall Sooter, spokesperson for the Cabrillo College Federation of Teachers, declined to comment on any grievances filed from the department.
Former and current faculty members said they reported administrative misconduct to the college’s human resources department and the union, but said reports went nowhere and they were not notified of any updates.
Santa Cruz Local spoke with nine current and former faculty, staff and students, all of whom alleged problematic behavior by college administrators. (Amaya Edwards — Santa Cruz Local/CatchLight Local)
Impacts to student educationMultiple students from the class of 2025 alleged that conflict between administrators and faculty affected their learning environment, with managerial strife leading to students being neglected.
The former students requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. They said there was a lot of tension between fellow students in their cohort, with classmates filing misconduct reports against each other. These reports were made either directly to administrators or through the college’s official Just Report It system.
Students filed multiple reports against classmates in the cohort’s two years at Cabrillo, alleging sexual harassment, bullying, vandalism and intimidation.
Despite the reports, the students said administration failed to follow up with them, downplayed their worries and suggested they were reporting false accusations.
One student alleged there was a meeting in which Weber encouraged the cohort to “just drop” the misconduct reports. At a state board meeting on March 27, Harris referenced the students charged with intimidation and said they “didn’t do what they were accused of doing.”
Harris and the other administrators declined to comment on the student investigations.
Santa Cruz Local reviewed an audio recording of a meeting about the dental hygiene program on May 10, 2025, involving students, some faculty and staff, and at least three administrators. In the recording, an administrator says they have been inundated with false reports and suggested the school could cancel the program’s unofficial graduation celebration, or “pinning ceremony.”
“The pinning ceremony can get taken away if there continues to be any type of false accusations made because that is also a violation of our code of conduct,” the administrator says in the recording.
Another administrator is heard in the recording suggesting the school could “pull somebody’s diploma” as punishment for students who disrupt the ceremony.
During the Wednesday interview with Santa Cruz Local, college administrators declined to comment on this specific meeting but said they host multiple meetings about available support resources and proper reporting procedures for students, faculty and staff across campus.
“On a regular basis, people from my team, including Samantha and others, might be asked by a dean or a faculty director, chair, etc., to come and support a program because there might be challenges,” Hoyt said.
Former students said they felt the meeting was a threat from administrators, dissuading them from reporting further misconduct.
“I honestly felt very hopeless,” one student said. “I actually felt like the school was failing me and my other classmates, to actually protect us.”
Moving the program forwardCabrillo is working to address the eight violations identified by the state board earlier this year. Inspectors have visited Cabrillo six times since the board was created in 2019 — once in 2019, three times in 2024 and twice this year.
Harris said all conversations over the past weeks between the college and the state board have been positive, and that the board complimented them for the work they’ve done so far to address the violations. He said the college is working on hiring a second full-time faculty for the program to address the staffing gap.
“I fully expect that some of the violations will be resolved as a result of the work we’ve done to give them the information that they requested and also our great conversations,” Harris said.
Anthony Lum, executive officer for the state board, agreed that Cabrillo appears to be “diligently” addressing the violations. The state’s dental hygiene clinical exam was eliminated in 2024, so Lum stressed the importance of holding educational programs to a high standard.
“We rely on the individual schools to uphold their professionalism, ethical boundaries, and procedures to graduate high quality students,” Lum said.
The program’s 20 students graduated on Monday, and Lum said the board confirmed that all students completed requirements and are eligible to apply for a California dental hygiene license.
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Our Climate Models Are Missing Something Crucial
This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
For decades, climate scientists have issued warnings about positive global warming feedbacks, vicious cycles in the Earth system in which rising temperatures from burning fossil fuels beget more warming. The best tools we have to understand these feedback mechanisms are climate models, which simulate how the atmosphere, oceans, and land will respond under different emissions scenarios. Many feedbacks, like the loss of sea ice as the planet warms, are well-accounted for. Others, such as changes in cloud cover, remain far more uncertain but are still included in models. Feedbacks in which ecosystems emit more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere are so complex that they are often left out entirely.
For example, how much more carbon dioxide will be emitted as wildfires increase? How much more methane will bubble up from fermenting wetlands or seep from thawing permafrost? Remarkably, these so-called warming-induced emissions are poorly represented or absent from the most influential climate models—that is, those that inform the assessments of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Fires and permafrost melt have caused northern tundra to become a source of emissions, after acting as a sink for millennia.
A new study from a group of leading climate researchers suggests this information gap could make it even more difficult for nations to limit the rise in global average temperatures to well below 2 degrees C, the target set by the Paris Climate Agreement. The study found that emissions from natural systems could add as much as 0.6 degrees C to the rise in global average temperatures. That’s in line with earlier work that suggests such emissions could shorten by 25 percent the amount of time it takes to exceed 2 degrees C of warming. Shortcomings in climate modeling, scientists warn, could lead countries to overestimate how much fossil fuels can be burned before breaching climate targets.
“If you’re not including all the emissions going into the atmosphere, you’re hamstrung from the get-go,” says Brian Buma, a climate scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. “People are recognizing that the longer we go without taking these emissions into account, there’s just going to be a bigger gap.”
“Four decades ago, the scientific community was saying we think there are going to be these surprises in the Earth system as the planet warms,” says Benjamin Poulter, the lead scientist at Spark Climate Solutions, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that aims to identify climate “blind spots,” include them in policy frameworks, and assess the best way to deal with them. “Now, we’re starting to see these feedbacks become the reality.”
The biggest sources of warming-induced emissions are wildfires, wetlands, and permafrost—all of which have shown recent indications of rapid change. Since 2001, global carbon emissions from wildfires have increased by 60 percent. In 2020, researchers reported an alarming spike in the concentration of methane in the atmosphere, attributed partly to wetter conditions expanding wetlands in Africa and Asia and partly to warming temperatures, which accelerate the rate at which plants decompose in water.
Colder regions are seeing some of the fastest shifts: The 2024 Arctic report card found that wildfires and permafrost melt have caused the northern tundra to become a source of emissions, after acting as a sink for millennia. Hotter, drier conditions fuel Arctic wildfires, while thawing ice allows microbes to more rapidly decompose soil organic matter, releasing both CO2 and methane.
The challenges are exacerbated, experts say, by a lack of data from remote places, from the Congo basin to Siberia.
Those regional changes add up to global trends. In 2023 and again in 2024, record heat reduced the land carbon sink—the difference between the amount of CO2 emitted and the amount of CO2 absorbed by all terrestrial ecosystems—and contributed to a record jump in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. In 2025, the land sink appears to have recovered to its previous strength, although tropical forests in Southeast Asia and South America flipped from sink to source due to deforestation, wildfires, and more decomposition.
Like 2023 and 2024, 2026 will be an El Niño year, with elevated Pacific Ocean surface temperatures that are expected to boost global temperatures. These events are associated with hot, dry conditions in the Amazon, which can amplify wildfires and weaken the region’s carbon sink. The heat can also slow photosynthesis and increase the rate of decomposition in other tropical ecosystems.
Researchers are alarmed by these changes. “We’ve been worried about this for a long time,” says Rob Jackson, an environmental scientist at Stanford University and the chair of the Global Carbon Project, an international consortium of researchers tracking flows of carbon through Earth systems. Yet climate models have largely set the problem of warming-induced emissions aside: Of the 11 Earth system models used in the most recent IPCC assessment, none included warming-induced emissions from all of the main sources—wildfire, wetlands, and permafrost. Five included wildfire; just two included permafrost.
That’s largely because of the difficulty of the problem: The scientific challenge amounts to predicting the response of every ecosystem on Earth to warming temperatures. “It adds computational processing time, complexity, and there’s no good agreement about how to represent wetland emissions, permafrost, wildfire,” says Poulter. Modeling all of these emissions requires simulating diverse, nonlinear processes that behave in ways that can be difficult to predict. The basic modeling challenges are exacerbated, experts say, by a lack of monitoring in hard-to-access ecosystems, from Siberia to the Congo basin.
Just how much warming might be missing from the picture? In the new study, Poulter and a group of colleagues from leading climate modeling groups used a simplified climate model to estimate the volume of emissions that might be expected from these sources under a range of scenarios, using past estimates of the scale of the feedback for each source of warming-induced emissions. They then modeled how much those emissions would raise temperatures on top of the contribution from human emissions.
If humans quickly rein in their emissions, the researchers found, emissions from forests, wetlands, and other ecosystems might amount to anywhere between zero additional degrees and 0.4 additional degrees C this century, an amount that would accelerate warming due to human emissions by up to 60 percent.
Under a more pessimistic scenario, in which human emissions peak around 2060 and then decline, they found emissions from ecosystems could raise temperatures from between 0.2 to 0.6 degrees C. The lion’s share of the uncertainty stemmed from how researchers estimated ecosystems would respond to warming, rather than from the choice of warming scenario or any inherent ambiguities in the models.
“You can’t turn a wrench on a wetland,” Jackson says. But there are ways warming-induced emissions might be addressed directly.
Keeping the rise in average global temperatures well below 2 degrees C is already a huge challenge. “Something like these warming-induced emissions makes that harder,” says Chris Jones, a climate scientist at the UK Met Office working to integrate these emissions into climate models. Warming feedbacks could also add to the danger of overshooting Paris Agreement goals, given that they may not be reversible, he says. While a coal-fired power plant can be replaced with renewables, he explains, melting permafrost will continue to melt after a certain amount of warming.
To put the scale of the problem into perspective, the researchers estimated that by 2100, the annual contribution of warming-induced CO2 emissions could be equivalent to those from today’s power and building sectors, which together make up about half of global CO2 emissions due to direct human activities. Warming-induced methane emissions could be almost equivalent to today’s annual fossil methane emissions from Asia and North America combined, they found.
Now that the signal of these emissions has emerged, researchers say it is essential to get a better grip on how they work and what they mean for the future of the climate, and to get countries to start counting them. “We can quantify and measure these emissions, but then we also need to develop an accounting framework so that we can do something about them,” says Poulter.
Since launching last fall, Spark’s program on warming-induced emissions has connected more than 20 independent modeling groups from around the world to add those emissions to models, improve measurements, and explore ways to potentially reduce those emissions. “There’s a community of people now that are building this field,” says Poulter. Their aim is to make robust projections that can be used in the next IPCC climate assessment and thus play a role in global climate policy.
Work on the assessment is already underway, with a final report due by late 2029. The modeling work also feeds into efforts to improve measurements of ecosystems—to understand how they are changing and what role warming is playing. Modelers can identify gaps in observations and make decisions about where limited resources should be placed.
Scientists aim to make projections that can be used in the next IPCC assessment and thus play a role in climate policy.
One of the first projects coordinated through Spark’s warming-induced emissions campaign is the installation, by a team at the University of California, Los Angeles, of dozens of methane sensors at wetlands in central Africa, which are known to be major emitters of methane. Another measurement effort led by Jackson focuses on improving measurements of wetland emissions in the Amazon. In both regions, Jackson says there is a lack of data on baseline CO2 and methane emissions, which are essential to making reliable future projections. This also makes it challenging to know what is driving the change in emissions: Is it wetlands growing with more precipitation, or is it a warming-induced increase in microbial respiration, or other factors?
Unlike a leaky natural gas well, Jackson says, “you can’t turn a wrench on a wetland.” But there are ways that warming-induced emissions might be addressed directly.
Bronson Griscom, an ecologist and founder of a natural climate solutions company called Ceiba Earth, sorts ideas for addressing warming-induced emissions into three buckets. The first promotes the continuation of projects that will work even as temperatures rise. For example, reforestation efforts in temperate woodlands might actually see more growth and therefore more carbon storage with elevated CO2. Fuel reduction efforts, such as thinning and conducting controlled burns, will also reduce emissions.
The second bucket contains tweaks to existing projects to account for future warming. Teams working on restoration in the Amazon, for example, might consider picking tree species that are more resilient to hotter temperatures, says Griscom, something researchers are already experimenting with.
The third bucket of ideas addresses warming-induced emissions directly. In the Arctic, Cansu Culha, an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia, is looking to slow the melting of permafrost by applying insulating “blankets” of vegetation to permafrost slumps, where the land is releasing carbon most rapidly. Jackson and other researchers have considered ways to manage wetlands to reduce the amount of methane they generate by changing cycles of wetting and rewetting, altering water chemistry to influence microbial activity, or reconnecting them with seawater. Managing a natural wetland in this way is complicated and controversial, but some of the approaches have been tested with success in rice paddies—another major source of methane.
Researchers and policymakers who are trying to tackle emissions say they would benefit from a clearer picture of feedback mechanisms as the signal of warming-induced emissions begins to emerge from the noise. “People are seeing this stuff happening,” says Buma. “It’s in front of their eyes.” Climate modelers are scrambling to catch up.
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