Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office announced Friday that the state has released $470 million to 302 school districts, charters and county offices of education to fund the Golden State Pathways program.
The program allows students to “advance seamlessly from high school to college and career and provides the workforce needed for economic growth.”
“It’s an incredibly historic investment for the state,” said Anne Stanton, president of the Linked Learning Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates giving youth opportunities to learn about careers.
Both the state and federal governments previously made big investments in preparing students for college or career at the K-12 level, but the Golden State Pathways program is different in that it challenges school districts, colleges, employers and other community groups to create “pathways” — or a focused series of courses — that prepare K-12 students for college and career at the same time. These pathways aim to prepare students for well-paying careers in fields such as health care, education and technology, while also ensuring that they take 12 college credits through dual enrollment courses and the A-G classes needed to apply to public four-year universities.
“By establishing career technical pathways that are also college preparatory, the Golden State Pathways Program provides a game-changing opportunity for California’s young people,” State Superintendent of Public Instruction Thurmond said in a statement.
The Golden State Pathways are an important part of the new master plan for education — Newsom’s vision to transform career education in California — which is expected by the year’s end.
The state is distributing the vast majority of the funding — $422 million — to enable schools to implement their plans in partnership with higher education and other community partners. The remaining $48 million will assist those who still need grants for planning.
All sorts of schools throughout the state — rural and urban, large and small — benefited from the funding.
Schools in the rural Northern California counties of Tehama and Humboldt — whose K-12 enrollment is under 30,000 students — jointly received about $30 million to implement and plan pathways to help students stay on track for college and careers with livable wages.
“That’s a big deal to have that kind of influx going to that many small schools,” said Jim Southwick, assistant superintendent of the Tehama County Office of Education, which plans to expand career pathways in education, health care, construction, manufacturing and agriculture.
Schools in Tehama had previously begun to implement career pathways at the high school level in concert with local employers and Shasta College. However, many students struggled to complete the pathways because they were ill-prepared in middle school, Southwick said.
But one middle school pilot program did successfully introduce students to career education, he added, leading to an influx of funding through the Golden State Pathways that will expand the program to other middle schools.
Long Beach Unified, the fourth-largest district in the state, received about $12 million through the Golden State Pathways program. District spokesperson Elvia Cano said the funding will provide counseling and extra support for students navigating dual enrollment, Advanced Placement courses, college aid, externships and other work-based learning opportunities.
The district also plans to increase access to dual enrollment through partner Long Beach Community College and to create a new pathway in arts, media and entertainment at select high schools.
Advocates are celebrating the governor’s commitment to the program despite the uncertainty surrounding the budget this year.
Linda Collins, founder and executive director of Career Ladders Project, which supports redesigning community colleges to support students, said, “It’s an impressive commitment at a time that it’s desperately needed.”
Newsom said in a statement that this funding will help students even if they don’t go to college , saying it “will be a game-changer for thousands of students as the state invests in pathways to good-paying, high-need careers — including those that don’t require college degrees.”
Grading in most classrooms remains tied to rubrics devised by individual teachers and rooted in century-old practices. Recently, amid a broader national trend, grading systems in schools have come under increased scrutiny as educators and policymakers debate the best ways to support students. This movement further gained traction during the Covid-19 pandemic as educators tried new grading approaches to help students.
Traditional grading systems assess students through tests, homework and projects combined into a single class grade and other more subjective factors, such as behavior, attendance and classroom participation.
Standards-based grading, however, measures academic achievement without considering these subjective metrics. Standards-based grading measures academic achievement against specific content standards, offering students multiple opportunities to demonstrate knowledge. It still involves assigning grades, but these grades are based on students’ mastery of the content, making the process more transparent and individualized.
For example, when a friend of mine was in a math class that used standards-based grading, he was assessed on specific learning targets, like solving quadratic equations, without considering participation or behavior. In a traditional grading system, his final grade comprises quizzes, tests, homework, participation and behavior. As such, a poor test score early in the semester could significantly impact his final grade. On the other hand, in standards-based grading, he had multiple opportunities to retake tests and demonstrate improved understanding, so his final grade reflected his highest mastery level. Traditional grading boosted his grade with attendance and participation points, even if he didn’t fully understand the material. Standards-based grading showed his actual academic achievement.
While there isn’t any national data, individual states across the U.S. have begun to adopt standards-based grading. A 2021 statewide survey in Wyoming revealed that over 63% of middle schools and 35% of high schools had either started or fully implemented standards-based grading. In Delaware and Mississippi, schools have actively worked to support the use of high-quality, standards-aligned instructional materials in K-12 classrooms.
Districts in California, including Lindsay Unified District in Tulare County, moved towards standards-based grading systems. High schools in Oakland are also transitioning to a more objective assessment system, emphasizing a gradual and inclusive approach to grading reform.
In my district, Dublin Unified, individual teachers instituted standards-based grading on a trial basis, but nine months ago, the district discontinued its standards-based grading system, impacting almost 13,000 students.
However, despite an overwhelming 85% of the student body voting in favor of standards-based grading practices, the school board discontinued the practice districtwide, preventing teachers from using any form of standards-based grading.
The rationale behind the board’s decision was simple: Trustees believed that standards-based grading decreased academic rigor and harmed students’ chances of success beyond high school by introducing a new grading system. Their concerns, primarily driven by parental pressure, focused on how the grades of high-performing students could fluctuate because of the introduction of a new grading system.
I acknowledge that standards-based grading was a new concept and could pose a risk to the perception of the academic achievement of high school students. (I was sympathetic, too; I am all too familiar with the competitive nature of high school.)
But I think the concerns about standards-based grading hindering academic progress are misguided. For traditionally high-performing students, this grading system allows these students, like all others, to focus on mastering concepts and skills. Instead of promoting memorization to pass tests, students are assessed on their ability to understand concepts, allowing the performance of these students to remain strong even under this new system. If anything, standards-based grading boosts academic performance, evidenced by a study that found that students in schools using standards-based grading were nearly twice as likely to score proficient on state assessments compared with those in traditional grading systems.
Our district’s push to switch to a standards-based grading system ultimately collapsed through misinformation and a lack of teacher training. This perceived lack of support made teachers feel they had to choose between supporting individual student needs and maintaining academic rigor, even though that wasn’t necessary.
Had our district provided more support for parents and teachers, we could have developed effective curriculums that help students and maintain rigor. Larkspur’s multi-year transparent process with teacher training and parent seminars allowed a smooth transition from traditional to standards-based grading. Similarly, in New York City, districts successfully shifted to the new system after training teachers and having town halls with parents.
The transition to standards-based grading or similar systems requires a shift in grading practices and a cultural and perceptual shift in how we view education and student success. It demands robust teacher training, practical communication with parents and students, and a collective commitment to redefining academic achievement. We must provide teachers, students,and parents with the necessary resources to succeed in these new grading paradigms. If we truly want to make education more equitable, districts must put their money where their mouths are and fully support our educators in this significant shift.
I hope the adults responsible for decisions regarding our schools and education can set aside partisanship and genuinely reassess grading practices. Because equity has never been, nor will it ever be, the enemy of achievement.
•••
Aakrisht Mehra just completed his junior year in the Dublin Unified School District.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
While big corporate media are falling all over themselves trying to placate Trump, one guy says “Nope, won’t do it.” Bruce Springsteen.
The head of CBS News and the producer of “60 Minutes” quit rather than agree to settle with Trump, who sued “60 Minutes” for $10 billion for editing its interview with Kamala Harris. Trump called it election interference but he surely knows that interviews are always edited down. Besides, he won the election. Shari Redstone, who is the CEO of Paramoubt Global, which owns CBS, needs federal approval for a corporate merger that will net her billions. Will she stand up to Trump? Not likely.
Brian Stelter of CNN reported that The Boss is not afraid of Trump. Trump is going nuts. He thinks he should be able to intimidate everyone.
Andrew Kirell writes: Bruce Springsteen has no surrender. For the first two nights of his Europe 2025 tour, Bruce delivered scripted remarks railing against a “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous” Trump administration. And after both shows, he was the subject of Trump’s fury on social media. Following the first night, Trump called the Boss a “dried out prune” and demanded he “KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT.” After the second show, the president threatened a “major investigation” into Springsteen (and Beyoncé and Oprah Winfreyand Bono).
Last night in Manchester, England, Springsteen went for round three. He did not mention Trump’s tirade; instead, he repeated the speeches verbatim and sent a clear message by switching up the night’s opening song. This time it was “No Surrender.”
>> This morning, Springsteen dug in even further, surprise-releasing a six-song live EP recorded the first night of the tour, including most of his anti-Trump speeches.
>> Neil Young jumped into the fray on Tuesday to call out Trump’s threats against Springsteen and other musicians. “I am not scared of you. Neither are the rest of us,” Young wrote on his website. “STOP THINKING ABOUT WHAT ROCKERS ARE SAYING. Think about saving America from the mess you made.”
At the University of California, Irvine, the basic needs center offers a food pantry, housing support and more to meet students’ basic needs.
Photo: UCI Basic Needs Center
Few college students participate in the state’s CalFresh food program despite being eligible, according to a report published Tuesday by the University of California’s California Policy Lab.
The report’s authors found that CalFresh eligibility and students’ subsequent enrollment in the program depended significantly on which institution of higher learning they attended, age, housing situation, and other factors. The school they were enrolled in was often connected to the level of outreach they received informing them of the food benefits program and whether they received a certain financial aid grant that made them eligible for CalFresh.
“California in the last few years has been increasingly focused on this channel of potential support for college students. It’s one of the pieces that students can paste together to put together a financial package that allows them to go to college,” said Jesse Rothstein, report co-author, about the CalFresh program.
CalFresh, once known as food stamps, is designed to provide money for groceries for California residents, making it a significant support program for low-income students. College students are typically eligible for CalFresh if they meet the regular rules that everyone, whether a student or not, must meet, in addition to at least one of more than a dozen exemptions. Understanding the long list of eligibility criteria specific to students has long been seen as a significant barrier for students, according to the report.
“But because CalFresh is run by a different agency — it’s not part of the education system — I think it’s hard for students to navigate,” said Rothstein, Carmel P. Friesen Professor of Public Policy and Economics at UC Berkeley and the faculty director of the California Policy Lab’s UC Berkeley site.
The data for the report was collected by the UC’s California Policy Lab from four institutions: California Community College Chancellor’s Office, University of California Office of the President, California Department of Social Services and California Student Aid Commission.
In gathering data from these four agencies, the authors developed a database connecting college enrollment numbers, monthly CalFresh participation records, and annual federal financial aid (FAFSA) details.
The data points to differences in eligibility and take-up rates between students in the California community colleges and the UC campuses as well as which students actually enroll to receive the benefits if they are eligible.
Data from the fall of 2019, the semester immediately prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, provides one of the clearest examples. During that time, the data showed a significant discrepancy between students who were eligible for CalFresh versus those who applied to receive the food aid — and further disparities depending on whether students were enrolled in a community college or a UC.
They found that 20% of community college students, 33% of UC undergraduates and 7% of UC graduate students were likely eligible for CalFresh. Yet just 26% of eligible community college students, 22% of eligible UC undergraduates, and 27% of eligible UC graduate students actually enrolled to receive CalFresh benefits.
The authors suggest a few reasons for the discrepancies.
First, UC students are less likely to live at home with their parents, increasing their chances of being eligible for CalFresh.
Second, students in the community colleges are overall less likely to be eligible for CalFresh. This is because “the version of the Cal Grant given to UC students qualifies many of them for CalFresh eligibility, but the version given to CCC students does not,” per the report’s authors.
And, finally, the UC has increased outreach efforts to enroll more eligible students into basic needs programs like CalFresh. This would explain, the authors wrote, why the take-up rate among UC undergraduates has increased substantially since 2017, while the same rate among community college students has declined.
The authors note that they can only provide data estimates in the report because the multiple eligibility determination factors may be captured inaccurately, although errors were likely insignificant and “our estimates are a good approximation of the share of students who would be found eligible under individualized determinations.”
A deeper look into data from the fall of 2019 highlights important details, including:
The Central Coast’s UC Santa Barbara had the third-highest eligibility rate at 37% but the highest take-up rate at 37%
Of the community college regions statewide, the Central Valley had both the highest eligibility rate at 29% and the highest take-up rate at 33%, while the Bay Area had the lowest eligibility rate at 15% and the lowest take-up rate at 20%
Black and Latino students were more likely to be eligible than white or Asian peers regardless of the institution attended
When it came to actually enrolling in CalFresh, Black and Latino students were more likely to do so if attending a UC, but Latino students were less likely to enroll in the program if attending a community college
Students over the age of 23 had higher take-up rates than those 23 years and younger at both institutions
Some of those details were expected given the history of outreach out of certain institutions. Santa Barbara County and UC Santa Barbara, for example, have long worked toward smoothing out the process for students to both determine their CalFresh eligibility and to apply for the program.
Other details, such as the low take-up rates in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, highlight the potential need for additional outreach in regions with increasingly high housing and cost of living expenses. Among community college students in Los Angeles, just 5% of the population were both eligible and participating in CalFresh during the fall of 2019. That number is 3% during the same timeframe in the Bay Area.
The development of a new dataset
The report included data from millions of students who attended UC and community college campuses between the 2010-11 and 2021-22 school years. While the report’s authors were largely focused on the most recent data, they included previous years’ data that was consistent across the four agencies they had data sharing agreements with — and this happened to take them as far back as the 2010-11 school year.
The bulk of the project took about four years to complete, according to Rothstein, who noted that this project took “longer than most” he’s worked on in his career. The team first needed to execute data sharing agreements between each of the institutions included in the report and then clean it up to ensure accuracy.
“It’s really beyond the ability of the individual agencies to do this kind of project,” said Rothstein.“It just takes too long and requires too much collaboration between agencies.”
Notably missing from the institutions that shared their data was California State University, which is the nation’s largest four-year public university system.
The CSU “was more reluctant” to share their data, said Rothstein, and his team decided to move forward without that system’s information. He noted that his team plans to work on another edition of the report in which they hope to be able to include CSU data.
“Our hope is that by kind of developing long-term relationships with the agencies we can build the trust that’s required to do this kind of project,” said Rothstein. “We can also build the kind of specialized knowledge of the individual data sets that makes it possible.”
The story has been updated to reflect changes made to the report by the California Policy Lab.
Participants in a Climb Together networking event that provides an opportunity for students to build connections and make contacts.
Credit: Courtesy of Climb Together
A recent study found a whopping 85% of jobs are filled through relationships. Imagine a network of successful professionals eager to hear about your career goals and guide you through the professional maze. As new grads begin looking for jobs, it’s important they understand the power of social capital — the connections you make that become your golden ticket past the crowded applicant pool.
Unfortunately, access to networks isn’t evenly distributed. Elite universities often help students cultivate social capital simply by having students engage in so many activities — a cappella clubs, dance, secret societies, dorm life, parties, group projects; these are all ways peers build meaningful relationships that open doors for life.
Those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are at a severe disadvantage because these kinds of activities are not always available or accessible. Time is our most precious commodity, and students who need to work to make ends meet have far fewer opportunities to build relationships.
Here’s the encouraging news: Research shows that “weak ties,” or casual acquaintances, can be just as valuable as close friends in securing job referrals. This means students don’t need years of deep connections — they can build a powerful network by honing their relationship-building skills.
Community colleges, vocational programs and even high schools can become social capital incubators, leading the way to unlocking social capital by teaching their students to build professional relationships and then broker access to alumni from their institutions. Imagine students learning the art of conversation: asking insightful questions, actively listening and crafting compelling requests. They can then practice these skills by connecting with industry professionals and/or alumni. This targeted approach, less time-intensive than building deep friendships, equips students to navigate the professional landscape with confidence.
Educational institutions can help students build social capital and improve their job prospects through several strategies:
Assemble a dedicated team: Engage stakeholders across leadership, faculty, staff and career services to develop and implement a social capital building strategy. This team can reach out to alumni and associated professionals, inviting them to participate in a program that helps graduating students with their job search. As the program grows, it can expand to multiple educational and professional tracks.
Offer targeted classes: Institutions should provide courses that teach students how to build and leverage social capital effectively. The curriculum can cover topics such as developing personal narratives, self-advocacy, discovering connections, LinkedIn engagement, crafting effective emails, follow-up techniques, and the art of conversation. Hands-on practice is crucial for students to gain confidence in engaging professionals and making asks for introductions or referrals.
Facilitate connections: After assessing learner readiness, institutions can match job seekers with alumni and other connectors. This facilitates the formation of new relationships and broadens job referral opportunities. Recognizing that relationship-building and job-searching are skills that need to be learned, institutions should provide guidance and support throughout the process.
By helping students broker access to professionals, higher education will also be able to address a growing concern: student disillusionment about attending college. Students invest in education expecting career opportunities, but recent graduates (especially those of color or from low-income backgrounds) face higher unemployment rates than before the pandemic. New grads have consistently fared worse than other job seekers since January 2021, and that gap has only widened. The latest unemployment rate for recent graduates, at 4.4%, is higher than the overall joblessness rate and nearly double the rate for all workers with a college degree.
These numbers are even lower for students of color and students from low income backgrounds. This disconnect highlights a need to bridge the gap between academic preparation and real-world employment.
This paradigm shift in how institutions prepare students for the workforce creates a win-win: Students gain valuable connections, alumni stay engaged with their alma mater, and institutions see higher graduation rates and lower loan defaults.
Our education system needs a refresh. It’s time to recognize that preparing students for the future workforce goes beyond just technical skills. By prioritizing social capital development, schools and workforce programs can level the playing field, creating a more diverse and skilled talent pool for businesses.
Let’s empower all students to navigate their career paths, not get lost in the application maze. They hold the key — the social capital key — to unlocking their full potential.
•••
Nitzan Pelman is the CEO of Climb Together, a nonprofit working with schools and workforce programs to teach students the art of building social capital and developing relationships and the founder of Climb Hire, a national nonprofit that blends relationships and social capital with in-demand skills to help overlooked working adults break into new careers.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
An unprecedented glimpse into policing in California schools
EdSource filed public records requests with hundreds of California public schools to obtain nearly 46,000 incident logs documenting calls to police from and about 852 schools. Here’s what we found and the data we gathered.
I hav several friends who were attacked while working at public schools in CA. Our law enforcement officers are not allowed on campus of schools unless an emergency.
The principal and vice principal are not allowed to make kids responsible. The kids can do anything, throw things at teachers, talk when teachers are trying to teach, calling teachers names, sexual harassment, and that’s why teachers are leaving CA. Another issue is CRT … Read More
I hav several friends who were attacked while working at public schools in CA. Our law enforcement officers are not allowed on campus of schools unless an emergency.
The principal and vice principal are not allowed to make kids responsible. The kids can do anything, throw things at teachers, talk when teachers are trying to teach, calling teachers names, sexual harassment, and that’s why teachers are leaving CA. Another issue is CRT and sex offenders using girls bathroom and sports changing rooms and showers. One big mess. Sex offenders not made responsible. DAs paid off by Soros.
Middle schooler allegedly attacks classmate twice, choking him severely. Police recommend attempted murder charges to district attorney.
School staff calls police to report squirrel with injured leg in school courtyard.
Unknown man in swimsuit briefs adorned with Australian flag trespassing at high school pool. Lifeguard sees a man follow boys 9 and 12, into the locker room. Man strips, pulls back the shower curtain to see the boy and asks: “Does this make you uncomfortable?” Man flees. Police list indecent exposure and lewd acts as possible offenses.
Officer dispatched to investigate ringing school alarm. Burnt English muffin found in teachers’ lounge.
From Crescent City, Weed and Alturas in the far north to Calexico and El Cajon nearly 800 miles south, all along the Pacific Coast, across the sprawling Central Valley and up into the High Sierra and down into the Mojave Desert, police are dispatched to California schools thousands of times on any given day classes are in session.
Reasons are myriad: Students bringing guns and knives — and even a spear and a bow and arrow — to school, sexual assaults and “perversion reports” and fights. Then there are lost keys, malfunctioning alarms, and dogs — even cattle — loose on school grounds. Once, police were called for help with a swarm of bees.
Calling the Cops Investigation
Editor’s Note: This is the first in a continuing investigation into school policing in California.
Monday: San Bernardino County: growing hotspot for school-run police
Local reporting: Emma Gallegos (Kern County), Lasherica Thornton (Fresno), Mallika Seshadri (Los Angeles and San Bernardino County) and Monica Velez (Oakland)
Project manager and editor: Rose Ciotta, Investigations and Projects Editor
Database design, data gathering, scraping, cleaning: Daniel J. Willis, Thomas Peele and Justin Allen
Website design: Justin Allen
Graphics and website design: Yuxuan (Sunny) Xie
Social media, photo editor: Andrew Reed
Copy Editor: Chuck Carroll
Cops rush to reports of students attempting suicide and overdosing on drugs, bullying, sexual assault and unwanted touching. They surveil high schoolers leaving campuses for lunch. They break up fights between parents over spots in elementary school pickup queues. They haul drunken adults from the stands at school sporting events. They once investigated a teacher’s claim that someone stole $10,000 from her classroom desk.
Mostly the call logs capture the anguish of youngsters with mental health challenges, victims whose nude photos are showing up on social media for all to see and parents turning to school administrators to deal with it all.
The data offered a raw, first-blush look at why school staff summon cops, reasons that sometimes lead to juvenile and adult arrests.
All incidents included in the police logs largely remain out of public view due to state laws that shield juveniles and allow police to withhold information on investigations. As a result, the data collected as a representative sample of the state is also clearly an undercount of what routinely occurs in California schools.
An EdSource analysis found that nearly a third of all calls for police were for incidents deemed serious. After consulting police experts, EdSource tagged the data with a definition for serious incidents as those that reasonably required a police presence. Included among serious incidents are those tagged as violent, which include anything involving a violent act, including self-harm.
The share of serious incidents increases to 4 out of 10 when police patrols are set aside. They make up about a third of all records, but most have little detail on what police were doing at or near the school.
The analysis also showed that high school students in districts with their own police departments are policed at a higher rate than in districts that rely on municipal police and sheriffs.
School police calls across California
Four years after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, igniting a national revolt and the defund-the-police movement, only about 20 of California’s 977 public-school districts made significant changes to school policing.
Most that acted ended contracts with municipal police departments to post cops — commonly called school resource officers — in schools. And three districts that made changes reversed course and brought police back after short hiatuses.
EdSource’s investigation sampled records showing calls from and about schools to city and school district police departments and county sheriffs. In some cases, officers stationed in schools dispatch themselves to a problem by radioing their dispatcher. Schools without campus police often call 911. Typically, police record their activity as “patrol” or “school check,” vague descriptions that raise questions about the use of public resources.
Whenever a school resource officer ran along a corridor, one hand on a radio microphone, or a sheriff’s deputy raced along a country road with lights and sirens on to reach a distant rural school, they contributed to what data showed is a vast, continuing police presence in California’s pre-K to 12 public education, EdSource found.
The records resurfaced a debate lingering years after Floyd’s killing about how much policing schools need and if deploying armed officers does more harm than good.
Similarly to police debates at the municipal level, school policing can be polarizing. Across California, the issue emerges as a political divide, with some seeing the police as necessary to ensure safety and others seeing them as agents of racial injustice.
In 2021, the ACLU of Southern California issued ascathing report that recommended an end to school policing in the Golden State, calling it “discriminatory, costly, and counterproductive.” In schools with regularly assigned cops, students across “all groups” were more likely to be arrested or referred to law enforcement, researchers found.
A 2020 University of Maryland study published in the journal Criminology and Public Policy, found school districts that increased policing through federal grants “did not increase school safety.” Researchers recommended improving safety through “the many alternatives” to police in schools.
In California, school policing is “a structure. It’s part of the budgets, it’s part of the vocabulary of the schools. It’s part of what the expectation is from the parents and the students,” said Southwestern Law School professor Jyoti Nanda, who has researched school policing for 25 years and calls it “completely unnecessary,” adding, America is the lone civilized country where it is practiced.
In rural California, school policing is seen as routine, allowing students to become “comfortable interacting with someone in a uniform, wearing a badge, and carrying a gun, so that as they grew older, they see those people as a friendly face, a resource that they could go to as opposed to someone that they should be afraid of,” Tulare County School Superintendent Tim Hire told EdSource. The practice is spreading in Tulare, where three small districts recently agreed to share a resource officer to travel among them.
Such decisions are often couched as safety matters, a vigilant effort to prevent the next school shooting and avoid the failure of Uvalde, Texas police to stop the gunman who slaughtered 19 students and two teachers in 2022.
When state Assemblymember Bill Essayli, R-Riverside, introduced legislation in February to require an armed police officer in each public school with more than 50 students, he described the need in base terms: “We need good guys and girls with guns, ready to act.”
Essayli’s idea is “a step backward,” Assembly Education Committee member Mia Bonta D-Alameda, said at a hearing where the bill died in April. “We know it to be true that there’s a disproportionate impact on Black and brown students when police officers are in schools.”
A matter of local control
The state Department of Education offers no guidance or best practices, calling policing a local matter, a spokesperson said. There’s little consistency statewide in whether police are deployed in schools. Nineteen school districts have their own police departments, including Los Angeles Unified, which refused to release its police call data, some with only a handful of officers.
Los Angeles Unified cut its police department’s budget by 35% in 2020 and banned officers from being posted in schools. Following reports of escalating violence, the district recently reinstated police to two schools through mid-June. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho had informed the school board that he was planning to return police to 20 schools, but he got community and trustee backlash.
Oakland Unified disbanded its police department in favor of non-police staffers to keep peace in schools and respond to emergencies. Principals were trained on when to call city police only as a last resort. Still, data shows eight of the district’s 18 traditional middle and high schools combined to call city police 225 times, with nearly half of them serious, between Jan. 15 and June 30, 2023. Reasons include assault with a deadly weapon, suicide attempts, battery and terrorist/criminal threats.
Retired Long Beach and San Diego school Superintendent Carl Cohn, who served on the California State Board of Education from 2011 to 2018, said Oakland’s model of deploying people to talk students through peaceful resolutions of disputes can work. In the early 1990s, he ran the Long Beach schools anti-gang task force, hiring people with “street cred,” including former gang members.
They “could stop instantly what was going on on a campus by their mere presence,” Cohn said. “Their credibility with youngsters that might be on the verge of gang affiliation was really powerful.”
Yet Cohn’s “not on board with this notion of ‘let’s abandon the school police altogether.’ It’s the type of thing where ultimately there’s enough bad things from time to time happening that the safety of children has to be front and center.” Police must be well-trained, and school officials must cooperate with them, he added.
Shutting down the Oakland Unified police department of 11 officers and changing its policing culture is tough and ongoing, said a leader of a racial-justice group that pushed for the change.
“There’s still the ideology of policing that exists on campus and is embedded in the infrastructure of schools that we’re also up against,” said Jessica Black, a Black Organizing Project activist. “The criminalization of young people, implicit bias, and anti-Black racist practices” still need to be confronted.
It was only after Floyd’s murder that Dr. Tony Moos, a physician, learned that her four children who had each attended high school in the affluent Santa Clara County city of Los Altos had “negative interactions” with school resources officers “that they’d kept to themselves,” she said.
Moos was motivated to act and got the city to examine school police practices and make changes.
After hearings that included a Black high school teacher saying a resource officer had once pushed her to the ground, the city pulled police from the high school. The city also replaced its police chief in 2022. The new hire, a Black woman, came with much-needed experience.
Out of public view
California law grants police wide powers to withhold documents, including investigatory records, requested under the Public Records Act without revealing how many such records are being withheld. Many departments withheld from EdSource some — or even all — of the school calls they received.
The same is true about what information police can reveal in news releases or public statements about individual school incidents, especially involving juveniles. The public is often then not informed about police activity in schools.
That means that the serious incidents — weapons, death threats, rapes, assaults, fights, drugs — that police are responding to in 3 out of 10 calls often remain confidential.
Police in Crescent City, Del Norte County, for example, didn’t release information about the attempted murder of a student at Crescent Elk Middle School by a classmate who allegedly repeatedly choked him on Jan. 23, 2023, until EdSource asked about the incident more than a year later.
When EdSource asked police in Avenal, Kings County to elaborate on a call record of a late-night report of “shots fired” at the city’s high school, a lawyer responded claiming the information was exempt from disclosure.
“The problem is that (the exemptions) apply to virtually everything law enforcement does. They never expire. So, every police report is potentially covered by the investigatory records exemption,” said David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, an open government group. The lack of disclosure of police activity in schools makes it all the harder to determine what the correct level of policing should be, he added.
Given the importance of the issue, the lack of information is troubling, Loy said. The debate over school policing “should be held on the basis of full and complete data and not driven by anecdote.”
A day of policing
The one-day record of police responding to a school for serious incidents was 10, the data sample shows.
That was May 17, 2023, at Burroughs High School in the Sierra Sands Unified School District in Ridgecrest, a desert city of 28,000 in eastern Kern County near Death Valley.
The first occurred at 8:38 a.m. when a school resource officer arrested a student for battery and released him to his parents. District Assistant Superintendent Brian Auld, who’s in charge of security, told EdSource the student “didn’t even go to the police station.”
That was followed at 9:09 a.m. by reports of two students who appeared to be under the influence of drugs. They were evaluated and returned to class. Another report of two students apparently under the influence came in at 10:26 a.m. One student was impaired and released to their parents, Auld said.
Less than 10 minutes later, the resource officer responded to a student in “mental distress” who was taken for a psychological evaluation.
At 1:23 p.m., police were alerted to a terrorist threat that ended up involving a student threatening to beat up someone, Auld said.
About 20 minutes later, two girls began fighting in art class.
One grabbed what Auld called “an art project” — apparently a ceramic object — and allegedly swung it at the other girl’s head. Police called it assault with a deadly weapon, arresting the aggressor. “Deadly weapon sounds like a knife or a gun. The officer made the decision that (the object) could have done serious bodily harm,” Auld said. “I’m not downplaying it.”
At 3:14 p.m. a report of disturbing the peace came in. No details were provided.
At 10:26 p.m, a vandalism report to the police turned out to be benign — police found that soon-to-graduate seniors had decorated the school with toilet paper.
Ridgecrest is “a unique, isolated community” near a military base. The school district considers its relationship with the police as a successful partnership, Auld said.
District officials “have some, or even total, discretion regarding whether or not an arrest is made,” he added. The district has 15 counselors, mental health therapists and a registered behavioral therapist, Auld said. It’s also implementing restorative practices and social-emotional learning to “change behaviors before they result in suspensions, expulsions and arrests.”
The Kings of calls
The most total call and dispatch records in the data for one school that relies on calling 911 was Lemoore High School, in Lemoore, a city of 26,600 in Kings County with 471 calls over a nearly six-month period.
Lemoore police, which refers to school police as youth development officers, provided scant detail on the reasons for the calls, listing hundreds in records as premises checks.
In an interview, Lt. Alvaro Santos, who supervises Lemoore’s school policing, attributed the numbers to the department’s practice of having all available officers “drop what they’re doing” during the times students arrive at school and leave for lunch and later go home, basically surrounding the buildings, some on side streets out of view of students.
“They’re around the school. They could be either parked on a side street or they could be driving by looking for vehicle code violations or anything that would pose a danger to the students,” Santos said. He said the schools are near a main road through the city and that there are concerns about drunk drivers in the area.
More serious calls
Sampled data shows that middle schools have a higher rate of serious incidents reported to police than high schools. At Cesar Chavez Middle School, in East Palo Alto, 41% of calls to police reported violent incidents, threats and sexual misconduct, data shows.
In one of two calls that East Palo Alto police labeled “perversion report,” a student allegedly used a phone to make “a TikTok” of another girl using the restroom, according to a recording of a heavily redacted 911 call to police from a school official. Police refused to release any details.
Fresno’s Gaston Middle School is in a neighborhood plagued by violence, gangs and drugs, all of which follow students through the school doors, both police and Fresno Unified Superintendent Bob Nelson said.
A patrol car for a Fresno Unified student resource officer sits outside of Gaston Middle School and its health clinic. Credit: Lasherica Thornton / EdSource
“I would love for there to be no acts of any physical harm on another person, but that’s impossible,” Sgt. Anthony Alvarado said.
Fresno Unified has been debating what level of policing to have in its schools for several years. In 2020 police were pulled from the district’s middle schools but remained in high schools. After several violent incidents, police were returned to some middle schools in 2022 and the rest in 2023.
School “feels like a prison”
The daily presence of Kern High School District police at Mira Monte High in Bakersfield “feels ghetto,” sophomore Jose Delgado said.
The school “feels like a prison. It’s like they don’t trust us at all.”
Still, Delgado said, he understands the need for police, noting a lot of fights at the school. “It’s for the best, but it makes us feel ghetto.”
Data shows 163 police call records at Delgado’s school for the five-and-a-half month period. They describe incidents including assault with a deadly weapon, an irate parent, out-of-control juveniles and resisting a police officer.
Delgado’s sense of school as a prison and not being trusted are among the reasons why the negatives of school policing “completely outweigh the positives,” Nanda, the Southwestern Law School professor said.
The students who police typically interact with “are not the children that are doing well in school,” Nanda said. “Part of why there isn’t an outrage, a global outrage, is because it’s not impacting the people that are in power, the people who have agency.”
Children seeing police in schools can be akin to going to an airport and encountering armed officers at a security checkpoint, said University of Florida education professor Chris Curran, who has studied school policing extensively. “It’s natural to wonder what’s wrong, why are there people with guns?” he said. “You find yourself saying, ‘What do I not know about? What’s this danger that has necessitated assault rifles?’”
No state guidance
When he was a state Assembly member in 2020, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, Assemblymember Mia Bonta’s spouse, clearly came down on the side of removing police from schools when he spoke at a forum after Floyd’s murder.
“It’s just really important to call out this incredible moment,” he said, lauding districts, including Oakland, that ended policing. “There’s a general dehumanization of children of color, a belief that they need to be surveilled and monitored and watched and policed.”
“The outcomes don’t make our students safer,” he said. School policing is “not achieving what we’re seeking,” a video of the forum shows. It was hosted by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond.Credit: Andrew Reed/EdSource
Asked recently if Bonta’s position on school policing as the state’s top law enforcement officer mirrors what he said in 2020, his press secretary replied “no” via email.
Bonta, who’s expected to enter the 2026 governor’s race, “has always believed that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for school safety, and that schools need to work towards data-driven policies that fit their community,” Alexandra Duquet wrote.
“School resource officers can be an important component of ensuring students and school personnel safety,” Duquet wrote. “Their primary focus should be ensuring the safety of all on campus — not discipline — and they be given tools such as implicit bias training that ensure the equitable treatment of all students.”
Thurmond, a declared 2026 gubernatorial candidate, took no position on school policing during the forum. He recently told EdSource he favors “well-trained school resource officers to handle serious situations.” He also called for “more training of school staff so they’re not calling police for something that’s a student discipline matter.”
Thurmond also said that during his time as a member of the West Contra Costa Unified School District board from 2008-2012 he saw police officers help students, calling them “some of the best social workers I’ve worked with.”
State Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, who during Thurmond’s forum praised Oakland’s shuttering of its school police department, said in an interview that school districts should consider alternatives to police the way some cities have started using trained civilians to respond to 911 mental-health-crisis calls.
State Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley.Credit: AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli
“Kids are emotional. Kids don’t have impulse control the way adults should, and to bring an officer in, especially since all of our officers are armed, can, rather than defuse the situation, make it worse,” Skinner said. Kids can act out what they experience at home or on the street, she added.
Skinner, the author of several major police accountability bills, also said she saw value in the data EdSource obtained and published.
Police logs can help officials decide if civilian staff should deal with more school incidents at a time when California’s suffering a police shortage, she said. That could leave sworn officers available for “real public safety needs. We never want to prevent a school from calling 911 if that’s needed. However, there might be some appropriate guidelines or boundaries that cities and schools could work out.”
Stopping a police chase
The executive director of the Alabama-based National Association of School Resource Officers, Mo Canady, a retired cop, said districts would be mistaken to remove resource officers from campuses. Police will always be needed to respond to schools, and “we need for students and faculty to be able to feel like this officer is more than just a law enforcement officer, that they really are another trusted adult in that school environment.” A trained and well-known officer, “may be the person who comes into a situation with the coolest head,” he said.
Loretta Whitson, executive director of the California School Counselors Association, has seen what can happen when police approach a student situation lacking the cool-headedness Canady described.
As a school counselor in the Monrovia Unified School District in Los Angeles County, she once worked with a child who ran away from school multiple times. Finally, an exasperated principal called the police, who chased after the student.
“The principal didn’t stop them. I felt as (officers) went on in their rant this kid is getting more damaged. So, I said, ‘Stop, stop,”’ Whitson said. “We already had a very damaged kid, and this wasn’t helping.” The student was later found to need special education services, she said.
Tom Nolan, a retired Boston police lieutenant turned sociologist who’s taught at several universities and studied school policing, said when law enforcement officers are called into a school situation, “they become the shot callers,” deciding what to do whether it is in the child’s best interest or not. Too often, principals are calling them for minor problems like lost keys and disciplinary matters, he said.
“The research is unequivocal in demonstrating that the police coming into schools, or police being assigned to schools, is almost always a bad idea. It has bad outcomes for children. It has bad outcomes for school safety.”
Nolan said police are not school counselors and shouldn’t play that role. “That’s something that’s a very specific skill set that is attained through years of graduate level study by mental health practitioners and clinicians.”
The California Police Chiefs Association declined to make anyone from its leadership available for an interview. In an email, its executive director described school policing as a matter best discussed at local levels.
Brian Marvel, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, a powerful federation of police unions, wasn’t available for an interview, a spokesperson said. In a statement, Marvel, a San Diego police officer, said cops assigned to schools “play an important role in” schools. They act as “educators, emergency/crisis managers, first responders, informal counselors, mentors, and model the kind of behavior that builds trust and respect between law enforcement and the communities they serve.”
Data shows that sometimes, regardless of who might be available to counsel or advise a student, one may just do something dumb, like putting a death threat in writing.
On June 15, 2023, James Morris, the county administrator who also acts as Inglewood Unified superintendent, received a death threat via email, police call records show. Morris, a veteran administrator, was brought on to lift Inglewood out of years of state receivership because of fiscal woes.
“I can just say, generally, it was a student,” Morris said when asked about the threat. Police took a report, but Morris said he didn’t want charges filed.
“I’ve been doing this for 44 years. It takes a lot to rattle me,” he said. “It was a young person who just needed help.”
Eddie Franklin, the culture and climate ambassador for Oakland Unified, stops a student while they are walking to class and asks how their day is going.
Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource
Across the Oakland Unified School District, the mantra for school staff is to call city police only as a last resort. If a disturbance occurs, they should rely first on in-house staff who don’t carry guns and can’t arrest anyone.
Since voting in June 2020 to disband its police department, Oakland has pursued one goal — to defuse conflict and avoid bringing in police and exposing students to the possibility of arrest. Oakland’s preference is for restorative justice, which emphasizes circle-of-trust interactions to improve how students treat one another.
“Most of the time, it’s just having conversations with them (students),” said Eddie Franklin, a former security guard who is now part of the district’s new police-free staffing. “Let them authentically be themselves, and the goal becomes to chip away at the rough edges they might have.”
It’s a strategy credited by the district with drastically reducing the 911 calls to city police from 2,128 during the 2019-20 school year, the last year the Oakland district had its own police department, to 200 in 2022-23.
But an EdSource analysis of data from the police shows a higher number of calls from just eight of the district’s 18 middle and highschools in half a year. The period from January to June 2023 shows those schools made 225 calls, with 105 considered “serious” for reasons including assault with a deadly weapon, suicide attempts, battery and terrorist/criminal threats.
The Oakland data was part of a statewide investigation of school policing across California. EdSource gathered nearly 46,000 police logs of calls from and about 852 schools. The data collection was designed as a representative sample of California schools.
Police track all calls from and about eight of the district’s 18 middle and high schools, while the district’s data captures calls made to police from all 106 schools.
Misha Karigaca, Oakland Unified’s director of student support and safety, could not fully reconcile the differences between the police call logs and the district’s record of internal calls to police for the same time period.
“If a 911 call comes from a cell phone and the call doesn’t get reported to my department, we will not have information about the call which can also account for significant discrepancies,” he said.
Karigaca and Board President Sam Davis acknowledged that while staff are trained when not to call 911 and to report any calls that they make, it doesn’t always happen.“We don’t capture every call in our data as (school) sites are required to notify us if law enforcement comes on campus; but we know of times when this hasn’t always happened,” Karigaca said.
Davis said it’s also possible other staff are calling 911 for nonemergent reasons because “a lot of people reach the end of their rope for all sorts of reasons.”
The Oakland schools included in EdSource’s data are McClymonds, Castlemont, Fremont, Oakland, Skyline high schools and Montera, West Oakland and Westlake middle schools.
“We’re not in a place where we can have completely police-free schools. That is our goal and what we’re working towards, but unfortunately, there are times when we do need police support,” Karigaca said. “It was our conditioning, whatever we needed they (police) would respond. It’s almost similar to our communities and our society — there’s not many other options. Anything that revolves around safety, we’re conditioned to call police.”
In place for two school years, the new police-free plan is being evaluated locally and nationally on whether it is achieving what it set out to do.
The Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank, in describing its study, put Oakland on the “leading edge of an emerging violence-reduction practice” happening in schools across the country, according to Jesse Jannetta, a senior policy fellow at the institute. Study results are expected in August.
Not everyone supports the decision to disband the district’s police department.
Board member Clifford Thompson said it was wrong for Oakland to disband its police department. “There’s little benefit to not having police at schools,” he said. “Totally eliminating the force without having a backup for those who need that type of force, it might not have been the best thing to do.”
Getting to police-free
The Black Organizing Project, a Bay Area community organization focused on racial, social and economic justice, has been advocating for the end of the police department since 2011. It finally happened in June 2020 with a unanimous vote of the school board.
Oakland has had a fraught and violent history of racism and police abuse of Black people for nearly 80 years, which factored greatly into the final push to disband the department following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020.
The city’s Black population increased dramatically during World War II when slave descendants migrated west from Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. Police officers from those states were quickly recruited and stationed in Black neighborhoods. In 1950, a civil rights leader told the state Assembly that Black people lived “in daily and nightly terror” of Oakland police, according to a 1950 State Assembly report. The police department in Oakland Unified was born in 1957.
After more than 60 years of having an embedded police department in Oakland schools, educators, city officials and community partners are working to untangle the decades of policing culture and running its own police department.
There’s no contract or memorandum of understanding with the Oakland Police Department, but the district shares what staff are taught about when to call 911 and how to interact with police.
Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention recently reported to a joint council-district committee on the plan’s progress. The city of Oakland invested $2.4 million in the 2022-23 school year to address violence in schools by creating a School Violence Intervention and Prevention Program and hiring life coaches, violence interrupters and gender-based violence specialists to four comprehensive high schools and three continuation high schools.
Gender-based violence specialists are unique to Oakland, Jannetta said. The specialists have workshops about dating violence, stalking, sexual harassment, sexual assault and commercial sexual exploitation.
Through surveys, officials found these extra staffers have more relatability to students, can focus on individual needs, and alleviate some of this work from teachers.
It’s too early to evaluate whether it is working, but the district is going in a positive direction, said Jessica Black, director of administration for the Black Organizing Project.
Getting to a police-free school environment also faces challenges. City and school officials say violence especially among 14 to 18-year-olds in the city bleeds into the school district.
During the 2022-23 school year, there were more than 600 high school suspensions and two shootings at OUSD high schools, according to the report. One of last year’s shootings was at Skyline High School, and just last month, another shooting occurred during the high school’s graduation that injured three people.
The city’s analysis of school violence puts some of the blame on the heightened crime in the city. According to the report, there’s been an increase in violence on campuses “that is related to community conflicts as well as an increase in instances of non-students showing up at school campuses with weapons to fight students.”
Despite the challenges, the school board has not considered reinstating the district’s police department, Davis confirmed. Oakland Unified Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell declined to comment through a district spokesperson.
When to call police
One of the Black Organizing Project’s goals was to “uproot the security structure,” said Jasmine Williams, development director. With community support, the project pushed to restructure campus police, including getting rid of badges or anything that emulates the police and installing new titles, training, and redesigning the shirts they wear.
“The district is not coming up with this stuff on their own,” the project’s Jessica Black said. “We’re literally pushing the district to think differently.”
Oakland administrators can call for “nonviolent de-escalation support” from staff known as culture and climate ambassadors when there are fights, a student is causing harm to themselves or others, or unwelcome visitors are on campuses, according to the School Administrator Guidance to Police Free Response. There’s a nonemergency line administrators can call to dispose of firearms or illegal drugs, when there’s suspicion of a crime, or during lockdowns. For mental health crises, administrators also have different people to reach out to depending on the situation.
Students can still be disciplined, including suspended, but that’s rarely the first option, Karigaca said. Most of the time, interventions take place.
“It’s offering a conduit of other opportunities, such as a restorative session, once both parties are in a place to have a restorative session,” Karigaca said. “Sometimes it’s going to take a walk or going to a different office; sometimes it’s calling parents or connecting with a community resource.”
District police-free guidelines give a variety of reasons when calling 911 is appropriate: active shooters, fire, medical emergencies, a person with a gun or explosive, bomb threats, serious injuries, hostage situations, abduction or kidnapping, violent crimes, death at a school site, emergency evacuations, or any situation posing danger to health or safety.
Students can be arrested for some of these incidents, Karigaca said, but usually students aren’t arrested as a result of staff calling 911. There are about four to five arrests every school year, and it’s typically because police are arresting students for something they did outside of school, he said.
The district partners with organizations for alternative support, but sometimes they can’t immediately respond, Karigaca said.
“When we call CPS (Child Protective Services) or any other mental health crisis response folks, a lot of times their staff is also under-resourced and they aren’t able to respond,” Karigaca said. “Even they will tell us, ‘Call law enforcement.’”
New titles for security guards
As Eddie Franklin walked down the hallway of Bret Harte Middle School, it was as if every student knew who he was. Most would fist pump him or shake his hand and he knew every student’s name.
Eddie Franklin, the culture and climate ambassador for Oakland Unified, shakes a student’s hand while walking down the hallway. Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource
Franklin has been at OUSD for seven years and used to be a security guard who worked with police and used handcuffs for detaining students. He became a culture keeper four years ago. Now he’s what’s called a culture and climate ambassador.
Franklin said he brings “an unbiased approach” to every situation even if the student is acting negatively. “Your goal is to actually make them (students) see and critically think about what’s in the best interest of both sides.”
Security guards were replaced with culture keepers and culture and climate ambassador who have leadership roles and assist culture keepers when needed, Karigaca said. The main priorities for all roles are to de-escalate violence and create positive relationships with students and staff.
The 63 culture keepers are spread around the district: up to three in middle schools; up to six in most high schools. Five elementary schools also have culture keepers.
When Franklin was a culture keeper, he said his day-to-day work evolved into understanding the different personalities on campus to get a better understanding of student behavior.
“So you don’t overreact when they do some of the things they do,” Franklin said. “But also try to give them an idea of what they can do differently.”
As a culture and climate ambassador, Franklin is deployed to different schools when extra support is needed, Karigaca said. Most of the time, they roam around different schools building relationships.
Franklin said he oversees 13 middle schools and does check-ins with staff to talk about what kind of support they need. A big part is building trust, he said.
When Franklin goes to a school, he said, his goal is “to act like a parent, a positive parent, let them know I actually care about you and support you in whatever you do, and I’m not going to be over the top if I react to something that you did negative.”
To other districts looking at Oakland as an example, Williams, of the Black Organizing Project, said she doesn’t want the message to be “all you have to do is implement a policy.”
“It took us 10 years of fighting to get here, and we are still fighting within the district,” Williams said. “It takes community to have even this much progress.”
EdSource reporters Thomas Peele; Daniel J. Willis and Andrew Reed contributed to this report.
The University of California, Riverside sign on University Avenue.
Credit: UC Riverside / Stan Lim
What does a Cal Grant signify for students embarking on their college journeys? For individuals like me, it embodies an unparalleled opportunity to traverse the realms of academia and pursue aspirations that once seemed shrouded in uncertainty due to the lack of financial resources.
Raised in a first-generation household where the prospect of higher education was esteemed but financially not realistic, attending college initially appeared impossible for me. When my parents discussed college, they explained that despite their desire for me to focus solely on my studies, it wasn’t financially feasible. My parents immigrated when they were 16 years old from a small Zapotec town in Oaxaca, Mexico. My dad works as a fry cook and my mom cleans houses; yet even with their long hours, they struggle to cover their own bills. They could only contribute about $20 every two weeks toward my education.
Qualifying for a Cal Grant made college feel like a possibility.
Unfortunately, we know my situation is not unique. In my work in the financial aid office, where I field countless calls about Cal Grant eligibility, I have heard many students with similar predicaments voice their challenges. Many callers are desperate for assistance with steep tuition fees, housing fees and basic expenses such as food. Some students, even though their parents’ income surpasses the threshold to receive financial assistance, still struggle to afford tuition and rent and must work full time, which often results in missed classes and lower grades. There were numerous occasions where, after I had outlined the annual costs for a student, they opted to withdraw from the university due to the overwhelming expenses.
But there is a beacon of hope for countless aspiring scholars who have long grappled with financial barriers: the Cal Grant Equity Framework, California’s commitment to reforming the Cal Grant to expand access to higher education. Approved in 2022, the framework is a set of strategies to promote equal access to grants for all eligible students, regardless of background or socioeconomic status. It does so by making it easier for students and families to understand what aid they’re eligible for, reducing eligibility barriers, aiming to cover the total cost of college, and more.
But making this happen requires a dedicated push by California’s policymakers to fulfill their promise and fund the framework, communicate to students and families about this opportunity, and monitor its long-term effects.
On May 30, the Legislature included funding in the budget plan to phase in implementation of the Cal Grant Equity Framework — and thereby begin comprehensive Cal Grant reform. The Legislature’s proposal would restructure and streamline the Cal Grant program, aligning eligibility with federal standards; include a cost-of-living adjustment for the new Cal Grant 2 award that would go to community college students, and remove several barriers to access the new Cal Grant 2 and Cal Grant 4 (four-year college) award. The current 2.0 grade point average (GPA) requirement for community college students would still be in effect, but will be phased out over a four-year period. The current Students With Dependent Children grant would start at $3,000 for these newly eligible students, climbing up to $6,000 over the same four-year period as the GPA phase-out. All current Cal Grant and Students With Dependent Children recipients would see no reduction to their financial aid as they will all be grandfathered in during the Cal Grant reform phase-in period. Taken together, this proposal presents a low-cost option to begin the implementation of Cal Grant reform and expands crucial financial aid to students who need it.
By keeping Cal Grant reform in the final state budget this year, California is on a path to opening the doors of opportunity for an additional 137,000 students once fully implemented, further extending the transformative power of higher education to communities that have historically been marginalized. Among these beneficiaries, 11,000 Black students and 95,000 Latino students stand poised to embark on their academic journeys, armed with the tools and resources necessary to thrive in an ever-evolving world.
These reforms come at a critical juncture when California students’ basic needs insecurity has reached alarming levels. While Cal Grants provide substantial assistance, it’s imperative to recognize that covering tuition alone falls short of addressing the needs of many students, who often struggle to secure housing and may lack sufficient access to food. Our universities also have a role to play by leveraging their institutional aid to cover non-tuition costs.
Embracing the principles outlined in the framework, California is taking steps toward realizing the state’s vision of an educational system that is accessible and equitable for all. By actively addressing systemic inequities and providing robust support for underserved communities, California is paving the way for a brighter, more inclusive future in which the transformative power of education is fully harnessed.
The Legislature has now made clear their commitment to putting a down payment on Cal Grant reform in the 2024-25 state budget and the final decision is in the hands of Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Governor, we are counting on you to approve the Legislature’s path forward for Cal Grant reform and the futures of thousands of students.
•••
Carmen Abigail Juan Reyes is a 3rd-year Political Science, Law and Society major at the University of California, Riverside and the UC Student Association’s Fund the UC Vice Chair for the 2023-2024 academic year.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
