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  • Tougher rules for pre-kindergarten rattle districts, cloud program’s future

    Tougher rules for pre-kindergarten rattle districts, cloud program’s future


    Photo courtesy of Garden Grove Unified

    This is the third in a series of stories on the challenges impacting California’s efforts to offer high-quality instruction to all 4-year-olds by 2025.

    This past school year, 4-year-old Yoshua would’ve been home, watching TV or playing on his tablet if he hadn’t been enrolled in Garden Grove Unified’s transitional kindergarten (TK) program, according to his mom, Briseida, who asked that her last name not be used. 

    “Learning the English language, learning how to start writing his name, learning colors and numbers, knowing that he goes to school with his classmates and can talk and play with them, knowing that his teacher will teach him new things,” Briseida said in Spanish in a district video about the importance of TK, an additional year of public education prior to kindergarten. “All of that has been very positive for us because if he had stayed at home, he would not have learned any of those things.” 

    The large, urban, nearly 40,000-student Garden Grove school community includes immigrants with many families who do not speak English at home. So, those TK students are exposed not only to academic content but also a full year of the English language, said Gabriela Mafi, superintendent of Garden Grove Unified School District, in which English is not the primary language of 63.6% of students. 

    Sending 4-year-olds to TK benefits students as well as their families. For example, enrollment for Noel allowed his mom, Celeste Monroy, time to seek employment and enroll in classes to learn English, she said in the school district video. 

    Many parents in the northern Orange County community cannot afford private preschool, which can cost thousands of dollars annually, nor can they accommodate a half-day program, such as many offered by the state’s public preschool programs. 

    TK has been gradually expanding to reach all the state’s 4-year-olds by the 2025-26 school year, and each school year, more 4-year-olds become eligible. 

    In 2023-24, children who turned 5 between Sept. 2 and April 2 were eligible. Districts had a choice to even enroll younger 4-year-olds ahead of the phased timeline, such as  Noel — who has a birthday after April 2 and would turn 5 by June 30, the end of the school year.

    Planning ahead, Garden Grove Unified staffed its classes to comply with the state requirement of 24 students per class size average and a 1:12 adult-child staffing ratio, getting that average to just under 21 students with one teacher and an aide. 

    Then, the state established new rules just months ahead of the 2023-24 school year. 

    Such “last-minute changes” at the state level complicate school district operations and impact students locally, superintendents say.

    During the budget process in summer 2023, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation creating a new category for kids participating in TK ahead of the state’s timeline, changing the birthday cutoff dates, lowering TK requirements for classes with those students and applying fiscal penalties for noncompliance. 

    The legislation added an “early enrollment” distinction for 4-year-olds with birthdays after June 2. Students with June 3-30 birthdays were to be considered early enrollment children, requiring stricter guidelines. 

    Prior to the legislative change, there were no special provisions for the enrollment of students who turned 5 before the school year ended on June 30.  

    For the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years, any class with an early enrollment child must meet a 20-student class size maximum and a 1:10 adult-to-student ratio, or face penalties. 

    Districts were left with a difficult decision for a school year starting in less than two months: Retain the students they’d enrolled and try to comply with the stricter requirements; face penalties if and when they can’t adhere to the more restrictive regulations; or turn away families. 

    According to superintendents, the state’s last-minute changes illustrate the disconnect between state-level decisions and local implementation and exemplify the state’s lack of understanding of the needs of families, disproportionately impacting districts trying to meet those needs.  

    “We make commitments to our families and then now have to either undo them or incur something punitive because we tried to serve our communities the best we possibly can,” said John Garcia, superintendent of the 22,000-student Downey Unified, an urban/suburban school district in southeast Los Angeles County.

    Why enroll younger students?

    The need to offer early childhood education, generally believed to benefit disadvantaged children, was at the heart of Garden Grove and Downey Unified decisions to accept younger cohorts of children for TK sooner than the state’s timeline. 

    Families in both districts were unable to afford fee-based preschool or work due to a need for child care.  

    “If he wasn’t given this opportunity to go to TK, he would have either been in day care/preschool, or I would’ve had to quit work and not be able to financially provide for my family,” a Garden Grove Unified parent shared regarding their child for a district document about the impact of TK. 

    TK not only saves on child care costs that burdened families but, according to educators and experts, also builds a strong educational foundation and bridges the opportunity gap between low-income families and affluent ones — gaps more prevalent in high-poverty districts. 

    Enrolling younger students sooner meant a full year of instruction before kindergarten, Garcia said, adding that Downey Unified kindergarten teachers notice a difference in those who gain an extra year of schooling. 

    In high-poverty districts specifically, that additional year gives the kids “an opportunity to have a head start on kindergarten,” Mafi said. “And those are the kids who need it the most, which is why many high-poverty districts chose to accelerate TK faster.”

    About 81% of students in Garden Grove and nearly 70% in Downey Unified are classified as low income, based on January data of unduplicated student counts. In contrast, high-wealth districts may not have had the need to offer TK sooner because their families can afford to pay for private preschool, Mafi said. 

    “This is the message I feel they’re telling us: ‘Poor kids — they don’t need to be helped, to have the same quality of a pre-kindergarten experience like their more affluent peers.’ And I don’t think that’s the message they should be sending.”

    Even though low-income students could benefit more from early childhood education, such children have lower preschool enrollment, the Public Policy Institute of California found. 

    Research shows that high-quality preschool leads to students being prepared for school with improved behavior and learning skills and higher academic performance in math and reading once enrolled, all of which can help bridge the gap between students from high-poverty and high-wealth families. 

    “All we’re trying to do is address the opportunity gap,” Mafi said. 

    Trailer bill changed birthday cutoffs, requirements

    In July 2021, legislation to expand TK passed, phasing in 4-year-old students until all are eligible by 2025-26. 

    Based on the 2021 legislation and continued guidance in 2023, districts could enroll TK students ahead of the state’s timeline as long as they turned 5 by the end of the school year, defined as June 30.  

    January-February 2023: For the 2023-24 school year, many school districts started TK registration, including for students who would turn 5 by June 30, 2024 — a choice aligned with legislation and state guidance available to districts at the time.

    There were even younger 4-year-olds with July or August birthdays, who would not turn 5 during the school year and would not be eligible for TK until 2025-26, based on the 2021 legislation.  

    January 2023: Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget proposed a way to fix that by allowing districts to use local dollars to enroll children with July and August birthdays, “a welcomed proposal” that remained in the May revisions, a Los Angeles Unified spokesperson told EdSource.

    June-July 2023: Lawmakers reached a compromise to allow the younger 4-year-old students as long as classrooms adhere to stricter requirements. 

    July 2023: The governor signed SB 114, an education budget trailer bill, which created lower statutory requirements for the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years for school districts serving newly-defined “early enrollment” children, 4-year-olds with summer birthdays during and after the school year (from June 3 to Sept. 1).

    “We believe that this compromise was vastly preferable to the alternative of disenrolling families, who would have had to scramble for alternative education and care options for their 4-year-old children,” Newsom administration officials said. 

    San Diego Unified, which had been supportive of efforts to include all 4-year-olds, and Los Angeles Unified were not privy to the compromise between legislative leaders and the Newsom administration, but they were pleased that the result allowed schools to serve students they had already enrolled, spokespersons from the districts said. About 14% of LAUSD TK students have summer birthdays between June 3 and Sept. 1.

    Other districts that were enrolling students ahead of the state’s timeline, but within the previous legislation language, had registered students with June 3-30 birthdays. 

    “It’s that June 3rd to June 30th — that is the date change … making them early enrollment kids,” Mafi said. “No one ever said that before in the last four years.”

    The differences are significant 

    The state’s authorization for the youngest group of TK students came with stricter requirements.  Specifically, the 2021 guidelines required a regular TK class to have an average of 24 or less, measured across the school, with an adult-to-student ratio of 1:12.  The 2023 rules require a TK class with early enrollment kids to be measured individually and held to a 20-student maximum with a 1:10 ratio. 

    The stricter ratio for classes with early enrollment kids is more closely aligned with 1:8 staffing practices in early education at licensed child care centers, private preschools and state preschool programs and the 1:10 ratio at Head Start. 

    But combined with the 20-student max, the requirements exceed guidelines of other programs serving 3- and 4-year-olds,  statewide organizations, county education offices and superintendents from LAUSD, Fresno, Oakland, Garden Grove, Downey, Westminster and La Habra City unified school districts said in a March letter.

    The California state preschool programs allow class sizes of 24 with a 1:8 ratio, according to the letter, which urged legislators to eliminate penalties and  give districts time to reduce ratios for the early enrollment students. 

    Photo courtesy of Garden Grove Unified School District
    Photo courtesy of Garden Grove Unified

    Prior to the 2023 change, students born between April 3 and June 30 were considered regular TK students without different requirements. The trailer bill made those born June 3 to June 30 early enrollment kids.

    Garden Grove didn’t disenroll the students, who’d already been promised a spot. 

    Serving 1,736 TK students, the district had classes with an average of 21 students, well below the 24-student average enrollment requirement for regular TK but above the stricter 20-student requirement for any class with an early enrollment student. 

    Garden Grove estimated their penalties at around $58,000 per class with an early enrollment child. The fines could total $3.1 million.

    A penalty on kids that districts aren’t paid for: ‘double penalty’

    Districts are also reeling from what they say will be a double penalty: The state pays them nothing for early enrollment kids, yet will fine them for not meeting the stricter guidelines.

    School districts receive average daily attendance (ADA) funding for TK-12 students through the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). The state determined at what point the 4-year-olds would generate the funds based on its timeline of students eligible to enroll. 

    Three categories of TK students — age-eligible, early admittance and the new early enrollment — exist. Age-eligible students in 2023-24 had birthdays prior to April 2, falling within the state’s timeline, and generated funds from the first day of school. 

    Those enrolled ahead of the timeline with birthdays until June 2, considered early admittance kids, generated funding when they turned 5.  

    The newest category of students — early enrollment kids with birthdays after June 2 — did not generate funding at all. Before the change, districts enrolling students with June 3-30 birthdays could generate state funding once they turned 5. 

    “We’re going to take a penalty for students that we’re not getting revenue for in the first place,” Garcia said about districts educating students without the funding. “It’s unjust.” 

    But what can be done now? 

    The summer 2023 legislative changes for the 2023-24 school year didn’t leave enough time for many districts to comply with the stricter requirements. 

    Still, some refused to turn away families, knowing they’d incur penalties. And unless further legislative action is taken this summer, those districts could be penalized millions of dollars for not meeting the tougher requirements. 

    Existing legislation does not allow districts that are caught out of compliance to avoid penalties; however, the penalty can be waived through the legislative process, relief that Garden Grove and Downey Unified have been seeking for the 2023-24 school year. 

    Assembly Bill 2548, proposed by Assemblymember Tri Ta of northwestern Orange County, would waive the 2023-24 penalties on districts offering early TK.

    In a letter to legislators, the Association of California School Administrators, the California Association of Suburban School Districts, Small School Districts’ Association, county education offices and school districts supported the legislation because the 2023-24 school year was weeks away from starting when the July 2023 trailer bill implemented the early enrollment regulations. In all, nearly 50 school districts, not including multiple districts represented by county education offices, supported the proposed waiver. 

    The Early Care and Education Consortium, according to a bill analysis completed by the Legislature, argued against the bill because it “disregards the legislative intent” in enacting the 1:10 ratio and 20-student max for classes with early enrollment students, which ensure student safety. 

    The bill to waive the 2023-24 penalties failed to make it out of committee. 

    Another option to address penalties for the 2023-24 year is through budget trailer bill language, which can make the penalties effective after a certain date or exempt districts from penalties imposed.

    The existing draft of this year’s education trailer bill does not include changes for TK penalties. 

    Impacting students, now and in the future

    Downey Unified had 70 early enrollment students spread across about 15 classes. 

    “We could have pulled these kids out of this classroom, moved them to other schools in our district, but we just didn’t feel that was right,” deputy superintendent Roger Brossmer said. “That was just not something we were willing to put our kids and our families through.” 

    The impact of maintaining enrollment: about $1 million in possible penalties. 

    Going Deeper

    An audit of this school year can be conducted now that the school year has ended but any fiscal penalties won’t be accessed until after the state education department reviews the audit findings, something that may not occur until the spring semester of the 2024-25 school year. 

    The district would lose funding from the Local Control Funding Formula in the amount of its penalties —reducing services for students, Brossmer said. 

    Because the penalty is accessed up to a year later, Downey Unified officials questioned the intent of the penalty, which takes money away from students. 

    “What is the value of a penalty after the year has already commenced and been funded?” said Robert McEntire, assistant superintendent of business services. “We have served these children, so who benefits from this penalty? This doesn’t help anybody.” 

    Fiscal penalties for noncompliance are a common practice in education. Violations for LCFF unduplicated pupil counts, K–3 grade span adjustments, instructional time, the Expanded Learning Opportunities Program and TK can result in penalties following audit findings, according to the state education department. 

    The penalties ensure “effective accountability,” California Department of Education Communications Director Elizabeth Sanders said. 

    “Penalizing districts is never our goal,” she said. “The related penalties (for TK requirements) … are to ensure that there’s appropriate and effective support of students. The goal is never to collect a penalty; it’s to support and ensure compliance with what kids need.” 

    To Downey Unified leaders, the resulting penalties from the 2023 trailer bill legislation punish districts for trying to meet the needs of their families.

    As a result, for the 2024-25 school year, Downey Unified will not enroll students with birthdays after June 2. 

    “There are another potential 70 students out there with birthdays between June 3 and June 30 that we are not going to have in our schools because we are reticent as a result of what’s happened,” Garcia said. “We don’t feel like we’re able to fully serve our community to the best we can because of the experience that we’ve gone through this year. And that’s disappointing.” 





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  • Jennifer Berkshire: What’s Next for Vouchers: Champagne or Storm Clouds?

    Jennifer Berkshire: What’s Next for Vouchers: Champagne or Storm Clouds?


    Jennifer Berkshire has both good news and bad news about vouchers. The idea of public funding for religious and private schools had some big wins this year, especially in Texas. But most vouchers are subsidizing kids who never attended public schools; that’s a feature, not a bug as it creates strong support for the giveaway among the highest-income people. But, lo! The real cost of have the state pay for everyone’s tuition is beginning to get the attention of taxpayers. And that could cause a backlash against welfare for the wealthy. Florida is already paying $4 billion a year for vouchers. Will taxpayers object?

    She writes:

    Champagne corks, storm clouds—I’m mixing my metaphors here. But as we survey the steaming wreckage of the 2025 state legislative sessions, both are present in spades. Let’s start with the popping corks: the school voucher movement really did notch some big wins this year, adding Tennessee, South Carolina, Idaho and the biggest prize of all, Texas, to the list of states with “education freedom.” Now add in the sneaky move to slip a voucher program that is really a tax shelter for the wealthy into the tax code and it’s easy to feel despondent, and not just about the future of public education. 

    Listen in on the debates that played out in these states, though, and you’ll come away with a very different view. As the economy sours and the tide of red ink rises, alarm bells are sounding and a backlash is brewing.

    Let’s start with a quick trip to my neighboring state, New Hampshire, where a familiar series of events has transpired. Now, in the Granite State, vouchers are known as Education Freedom Accounts, and they were sold to notoriously thrifty Yankees as a way to save money as students abandoned “government schools” for less expensive private religious schools, home schools, microschools. But nothing of the sort happened, leaving taxpayers to foot the bill for thousands of students who’d never attended public schools. Meanwhile, New Hampshire’s revenue situation has been deteriorating rapidly thanks to yet another round of slashing taxes on businesses. 

    All of which adds up to some pretty bleak math as the state must now figure out how to pay for an expensive—and expanding—school voucher program even as New Hampshire’s budget pie keeps shrinking. Which is how GOP lawmakers seem to have landed on the worst of both worlds: an austerity budget that slashes funding for the state’s public higher education budget in order to pay for the cost of further undermining the state’s public education system. (If you’re wondering why this recipe sounds familiar, you’re thinking of Indiana, star of a recent episode of Have You Heard, and a cautionary tale about what happens when a state expands school choice while simultaneously cutting school funding and divesting from public higher education.)

    Different state, same story

    While the libertarian paradise known as New Hampshire may be unique, the dynamic playing out here is the same as in virtually every state that has now adopted school vouchers. 1) Ever-shifting goal posts regarding the purpose of these programs? Check. 2) Ballooning voucher costs as states now pick up the tab for students already attending private schools? Check. 3) Deep tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations, meaning less revenue to spend on public education and other social programs? Check. 

    Consider Louisiana, which last year enacted the so-called LA GATOR program—short for Giving All True Opportunity to Rise. Now if you know anything about the recent history of school vouchers in Lousiana (spoiler: not good!), this is the time for a chuckle of the bitterest variety. What IS rising rapidly is the program’s cost—nearly $100 million in its second year, estimated to reach as much as $520 million as the program scales up. But when Governor Jeff Landry tried to collect the cash from lawmakers, something interesting happened. They said no, or at least, not so much. 

    “I was not remotely expecting that,” [Senate President Cameron] Henry said about Landry seeking an extra $50 million for the program. “Somehow there was a misunderstanding, which we will rectify.” Despite Landry’s request, Henry said he will hold firm to spending roughly the same amount as vouchers cost this school year: $43.5 million “It will be no more” than that, he said, “because that was the original agreement.”

    And it wasn’t just Louisiana. Over in Missouri, lawmakers axed their governor’s request for $50 million to scale up the voucher program known as MoScholars. The GOP senator behind the move offered a simple explanation. “I want to make sure that we’re fully funding our obligation to public schools before we start spending 10s of millions of general revenue dollars on private schools.”

    If you’re wondering what’s going on, the answer is fairly simple. As voucher programs have ballooned in size and cost, they’ve become a bigger target, especially in states where they’re now hoovering up state funding at the expense of the public schools—which are still attended by most children in every state. And years of tax slashing in these same states is exacerbating what we might call the ‘pie’ problem. Factor in the worsening national economic forecast and things look even more dire. Texas, which is now on the hook for $1 billion a year to pay for vouchers, plummeting oil prices due to Trump’s tariffs is likely to lead to a recession as soon as this summer. 

    Theory of change

    As regular readers of this newsletter know, I’m an avid reader of conservative treatises. As I type, I’m surrounded by anti-public-education screeds by Pete Hegseth, Kevin Roberts, Betsy DeVos, and Corey DeAngelis. It’s the last one, Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools, that has proven to be a particularly useful guide to our times. How, for example, did school choice for the very wealthy become the civil rights cause of our times? Dr. DeAngelis explains:

    “Allowing politically advantaged groups to benefit from the program is also a smart way to keep the policy protected for years to come.”

    You see, there’s a theory here: that as monies grow scarce and one state after another devolves into a pitched battle over what’s left, the richest and most connected will fight the hardest to keep what’s theirs. For a preview of what this looks like, I recommend a pitstop in West Virginia, where lawmakers just wrapped up another session by shoveling money at tax cuts for the wealthy and school vouchers, while cutting programs that help people get clean water, find work after struggling with addiction and get child care. Oh well…

    But for the theory of change to work, people have to want to live in a West Virginia-like reality, and I’m not at all convinced that that’s the case. Don’t believe me? Let’s head to Florida, which school choice proponents like to point to as a model for the rest of our states, and which now spends $4 billion a year on vouchers. Since the state made the program available to even the wealthiest Floridians, surprise, surprise, they’ve leaped at the opportunity to have tax payers pay their children’s private school tuition:

    More than 122,000 new students started using vouchers for the first time in the 2023-24 school year, and nearly 70 percent were already in private school, many in some of Florida’s priciest institutions.

    But Florida is also an example of the bad math, and shoddy assumptions, that drive the push for school privatization. As public education advocate and blogger extraordinaire Sue Woltanski has been tirelessly documenting, vouchers are indeed succeeding in defunding Florida’s public schools:

    This isn’t because the money follows public school students fleeing to private options, but because, when families, whose children are ALREADY in private schools, are offered a tax-funded discount for their private school tuition, they flock to apply, and private schools encourage it.

    As Sue keeps pointing out, the big flaw in the school choice lobby’s theory is that Florida’s public schools aren’t going away. A state that used to brag about how little it spent on its students is now funding two parallel education systems: “one for the nearly 3 million students still enrolled in public schools, and another for the hundreds of thousands already in private or home education, all out of the same funding formula.”

    So what gives? The GOP’s solution is to slash funding for popular programs in public schools: AP, IB, CTE. When I asked a reader in Florida what he thought was motivating the lawmakers, he saw a longer-term conspiracy at work. Get rid of programs that parents care about and eventually they’ll abandon their local public schools. But that assumes that these parents are powerless and that lawmakers can eviscerate programs and institutions that matter to them without paying a price. I’m not so sure. 

    A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting Sarasota to speak to a group called Support Our Schools. SOS is a phenomenal advocacy group, and in partnership with a youth-led group that’s “organizing school boards to fight fascism, protect democracy, and build power from the ground up,” they’re having a real impact in a community that’s been ground zero for the right-wing takeover of public education. I headed south anticipating that my hosts would be despondent over the state of Florida and the nation, but what I found was the opposite. These local activists were energized, convinced that their cause—defending and strengthening public education—is finally breaking through. In their words, the situation for Florida public schools is now so dire that it’s impossible to ignore. 

    Throughout my visit, one theme echoed repeatedly. A backlash is coming. It can’t come soon enough.



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  • $10 billion school construction bond headed to Nov. 5 ballot: what’s in it?

    $10 billion school construction bond headed to Nov. 5 ballot: what’s in it?


    Construction site at Murray Elementary in Dublin Unified in 2022.

    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    Legislators are poised to place a $10 billion construction bond for K-12 schools and community colleges on the Nov. 5 statewide ballot. If voters agree, the money will replenish a pool of state matching money that ran dry for building new schools and for fixing old ones – benefiting many districts.

    With 34 authors and co-authors, Assembly Bill 247, laying out the details of the bond, is expected to pass easily. It will receive a hearing today, only two days after it was made public after weeks of negotiations. The Assembly and Senate are expected to approve it on Wednesday, the deadline for final wording for November initiatives.  Approval will require two-thirds majority support.

    “California urgently needs a statewide school bond to repair dilapidated and unsafe school facilities and to invest in our children to meet 21st century educational and workforce needs,” stated Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance), chair of the Assembly Education Committee and primary author of AB 247.

    The last school construction bond, passed in 2016, was for $9 billion. Since then, needs have piled up. The Legislature has added a new grade, transitional kindergarten, and appropriated $4 billion to turn schools into community schools, demanding more space for services, from tutoring to mental health. Increasing threats from flooding, heat, and fires raise the need for climate-resilient responses, from shade structures to energy and air conditioning upgrades.

    The bond will allow districts to use the money for all of those purposes and seek a supplemental grant to construct or renovate transitional kindergarten classrooms and build gyms, all-purpose rooms, or kitchens in schools that lack them. The bond would also set aside $150 million to remove lead from school water.

    School districts must pass bonds through property taxes to take advantage of state subsidies. Critics have long charged that the formula for matching money—60% of any qualifying cost of a modernization project and 50% for new construction—has sharply disadvantaged school districts with low property values per student. With larger tax bases and the ability to spread the tax burden, property-rich districts can issue larger bonds, gobbling up a disproportionate share of the state-matching money.

    The state’s $10 million bond will use a slightly different formula, offering a little more to districts with lower property rates.  But the system will remain largely intact – and unconstitutional, said reform advocate John Affeldt, managing attorney for the public interest law firm Public Advocates. In February, it filed a complaint with state officials, threatening a lawsuit on the grounds that the facilities program discriminates against students in low-wealth districts and denies them an opportunity for an equal education.

    The bill’s authors have slightly modified the distribution formula. A sliding-scale system will give districts with high rates of low-income students and, to a lesser extent, low assessed property per student as much as an additional 5 percentage point match: 65% for renovations and 55% for new construction.

    Public Advocates recommended using assessed property value per student, which it says is the most important variable when measuring capacity to raise local money to modernize schools, as the yardstick to determine the size of districts’ state match.

    The bill creates a point system for rewarding extra money that emphasizes the percentage of low-income students, foster children, and English learners in a district. Affeldt said it likely will award Los Angeles Unified, with a high rate of poor students but above-average property tax wealth per student, extra undeserved state money.  

    The maximum 65% match won’t help property-poor districts, from 3,500-student Del Norte Unified in the rural north to 46,000-student San Bernardino City Unified, highlighted in Public Advocates’ complaint. Districts like these districts would need an 80% to 90% state match to raise enough money to fix critical conditions and add facilities that property-wealthy districts take for granted – but there cannot be enough funding for them as long as every district is guaranteed a 60% state match, Affleld said.

    Public Advocates will consult the residents and community organizations it represents in property-poor districts about what the next step will be, Affeldt said. “But what I can say is the Legislature could not have written a better roadmap to get sued.”

    The $10 billion bond will be divided as follows:

    $8.5 billion to K-12. Of that:

    • $3.3 billion for new construction, which will include seismic retrofits, climate measures, preschool and health facilities, and replacement of unrepairable school buildings at least 75 years old; 
    • $4 billion for modernization, which would include replacing portables at least 20 years old and $115 million carved out for the lead in water abatement;
    • $600 million for qualifying charter schools;
    • $600 million for career technical education facilities.

    $1.5 billion for community colleges.

    The $8.5 billion will cover only a portion of districts’ needs, and more than $3 billion may already be spoken for. The State Allocations Board keeps a list of approved projects that have not received funding. As with past state construction bonds, the bill would put these projects at the front of a new line; they’d get first dibs on the new money.

    Funding for the state bond will be distributed, as in the past, on a first-come, first-served basis for those districts that can navigate the complex application process. Here, too, critics say favors large districts, which have full-time facilities staff who are well-versed in the system, and small property-wealthy districts that can afford consultants.

    The authors of AB 247 have included two provisions to mitigate this. It will send the California Department of Education $5 million to provide technical expertise for completing applications for priority schools in small districts — those with fewer than 2,500 students with low assessed value per student and high numbers of low-income students.

    Additionally, the bill calls for setting aside 10% of the new construction and modernization money for small districts and front them a piece of their expected award for grant management. However, the set-aside applies to all small districts, including property-wealthy districts that could consume a big share of the 10% total.

    In another nod to fairness, the bond will expand financial hardship assistance in which the state covers the full cost of projects for districts too small to issue a bond; since 1998, these districts have received about 3% of state bond money. Eligibility would increase from a maximum of $5 million in bonding capacity to $15 million.

    California has no regular or consistent method of helping with school facilities. Since 1998, when the current formula for sharing state bond proceeds took effect, voters have approved $54 billion in bonding. A string of successful bond approvals was broken in 2020 when voters defeated a proposed $15 billion bond measure, which, by bad luck of the draw, was Proposition 13. Voters may have confused it with the anti-tax measure of the same number in 1978.

    Prop. 13 would have given CSU and UC $4 billion of the total. A bill competing with AB 247 would have, too. Weeks of negotiations settled with a smaller bond and no money for the universities. And that cleared the way for a separate $10 billion non-education bond that will appear on the Nov. 5 ballot. It will focus on climate change, with funding to shore up defenses against wildfires, floods, and rising sea levels.





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  • Summer school offers new teachers a chance to experiment

    Summer school offers new teachers a chance to experiment


    Courtesy: Kati Begen

    Are you a new teacher? If you can, teach summer school! 

    No, your district did not pay me to say this; there is a method to my madness. Summer school gets a bad rap. Its portrayal in movies doesn’t help either. It’s not just a sweaty classroom full of students who are defiant and rude. In my experience, these are students who just need to fix the mistakes they made in the school year. Summer school should be seen as an opportunity for students and teachers. Teaching summer school can be an extremely beneficial choice, especially for new teachers. 

    When I was a new teacher, I found volunteering to teach summer school provided me unique opportunities to experiment. In summer school, you can:

    Play around with instructional strategies: In the world of teaching, there is a visceral fear of your lesson “bombing.” This fear is what often keeps us from trying new things. During summer school, you have a little more grace. Typically, the classes are smaller, students come in with some background knowledge (if it’s credit recovery, they have already taken the class), and summer school just has a different feel to it. Have you wanted to try an A-B text edit (where students have two different copies of the same article and must decide which words are correctly used)? Socratic seminar? Maybe a specific lab? Doodle notes? 

    Try it now! Get feedback from the students and see if there is something you need to change. Then, write down notes on how the new strategies fared in the summer school setting. Once the new school year comes around, you have a list of strategies you have vetted and that work. 

    Try new classroom management strategies: I have taught primarily in middle and high school. Even though middle and high school students are close in age, they require different management strategies. 

    Surprisingly, my high school students love ClassDojo, a classroom management tool/app, despite its typical audience being elementary school students. I wouldn’t have known this if I hadn’t tried it with my summer school students. Do you want to try flexible seating? Fun claps for an attention signal? Student shout-out wall? Try it during summer school.

    If you teach secondary school, you only see your students for one period a day during the school year. In summer school, you see the same group of students for the whole day. You now have the advantage that elementary teachers have. You can try a strategy, work out any kinks with it, and implement it in your class come fall. 

    Try out a new grade level: When I began teaching, I was fully invested in staying in the middle school world. When the opportunity arose for me to teach a high school class over the summer, I was scared. It seemed like a different beast. Ultimately, I ended up loving teaching high school, and a few years later, I moved up to teaching high school freshmen. This shift wouldn’t have come if I hadn’t tried it out during the summer session. So often, we find our niche and stay there. This is a nice, comfortable place if that is what you are looking for. Sometimes, we want change. Often, we see good teachers leave the profession. I wonder if they might have stayed if they had just tried a different grade level. 

    I can’t speak for all school districts, but in my experience, summer school made me a better teacher. There are different opportunities out there as well. Maybe you only teach one session? Can you try a different content area? Different school site or even district? There are even online summer schools. The opportunities are as endless as is the potential growth you can acquire. 

    Teaching can be extremely difficult, so try something new to bring the spark back into your career!

    •••

    Kati Begen is a high school biology teacher, doctoral candidate and author of “Thriving During Your First Year of Teaching.”

    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.





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  • If undocumented parents lose Medi-Cal, California kids could suffer, advocates say

    If undocumented parents lose Medi-Cal, California kids could suffer, advocates say


    A family gets information at Fort Miller Middle School’s Health and Wellness Fair in Fresno.

    Photo courtesy of Eric Calderon-Phangrath

    Children’s health advocates are sounding alarm bells about Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposal to freeze public health insurance enrollment for undocumented adults. 

    They say the move will put those adults’ children at risk of poor health care and well-being.

    California has gradually expanded Medi-Cal, the state’s health insurance for low-income people, to undocumented immigrants, including those with temporary status such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. First, undocumented children were included in 2016, then young adults 19-25 in 2019, then seniors 50 and older in 2022, and finally those ages 26-49 in January 2024.

    Before the expansion, undocumented immigrants only qualified for Medi-Cal in emergencies, during pregnancy, and for long-term care. California is paying for the expansion on its own, without federal dollars.

    Now, faced with a deficit, Newsom is proposing to freeze new enrollment in Medi-Cal for undocumented immigrant adults and charge current undocumented enrollees a $100 monthly premium starting in 2027.

    The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have been pressuring states like California to stop providing benefits to undocumented immigrants, saying tax dollars should not be used for people who are in the country without permission.

    In announcing the proposed cuts, though, Newsom said they were to balance the budget. He said his beliefs have not changed. He touted his promises to expand health care to all, regardless of immigration status, both as mayor of San Francisco and governor of California.

    “It’s my value. It’s what I believe, I hold dear. I believe it’s a universal right. And I have for six years championed that,” Newsom said. “This is a tough budget in that respect.”

    He said there are now 1.6 million undocumented adults enrolled in Medi-Cal, about 5.3% of total enrollment.

    “Our approach was not to kick people off and not to roll back the expansion, but to level set on what we can do and what we can’t do,” Newsom said.

    Though undocumented children would not be affected directly by the changes, advocates say that restricting health insurance for undocumented adults will affect their children, the vast majority of whom are U.S. citizens. An estimated 1 in 10 California children have at least one parent who is “undocumented” or has temporary protections from deportation, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty.

    “We are disheartened,” wrote Avo Makdessian, executive director of the First 5 Association of California, an organization that represents the state’s county commissions supporting children in the first five years of life, in a statement released after Newsom’s announcement of his revised budget. “When Medi-Cal coverage is scaled back for adults without legal status, children in those families suffer. Decades of research are clear: Healthy parents lead to healthy kids.”

    Ted Lempert, president of the nonprofit organization Children Now, said, “Children Now is deeply concerned with the proposed cuts to Medi-Cal.”

    “We urge the governor and Legislature to consider that when parents lose coverage, kids are less likely to get the health care they need, so the proposal to hurt parents hurts kids as well,” Lempert said.

    Mayra Alvarez, president of The Children’s Partnership, an organization that advocates for children’s health equity, said studies show that when parents become eligible for Medi-Cal, they are more likely to learn about health insurance options available to their children and enroll them.

    “This ‘welcome mat’ effect can lead to a noticeable increase in the number of children covered by Medi-Cal or similar programs, even without changes in their individual eligibility,” Alvarez said. “Conversely, when a parent or family member is sick and unable to work or provide care, kids suffer as a result.”

    Dolores, 65, is a grandmother who enrolled in Medi-Cal under the expansion for undocumented immigrants. She said losing it would affect not only her but also her children and grandchildren. She did not share her last name because of fear of immigration enforcement.

    Months after enrolling three years ago, Dolores suffered a stroke. 

    “If I hadn’t had Medi-Cal, I don’t know how I would have gotten health care,” she said in Spanish. “It helped me then, and it is still helping me so much.”

    Her enrollment in Medi-Cal has also helped her family, including her grandchildren, who live with her, she said. At a health center in Victorville, she has been able to take nutrition classes and Zumba, and she has learned about healthy foods to cook for her family. She said her 4-year-old granddaughter follows her every move, exercises with her, and has benefited from her grandma’s improved health.

    “You know children are like sponges — everything they see, they absorb,” she said. 

    Dolores said she could not afford to pay $100 a month for Medi-Cal, as proposed by Newsom. She has lived in the U.S. for more than 30 years, but after the stroke, she has not been able to return to work.

    Alvarez added that when state residents are uninsured, that creates other costs in emergency health care.

    “Cynically discriminating against our state’s immigrant communities by rolling back Medi-Cal eligibility is not only unconscionable, but doing so will only result in costs being shifted elsewhere,” she said.

    Alvarez recommended that the governor and Legislature balance the budget in other ways, such as “closing corporate tax loopholes and making the wealthy pay their fair share, drawing down reserves that exist for times like this, and scaling back spending in more appropriate places, such as the state’s bloated prison budget.”





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  • Michael Hiltzik: RFK Jr. is a Danger to Public Health

    Michael Hiltzik: RFK Jr. is a Danger to Public Health


    Michael Hiltzik, columnist for The Los Angeles Times, explains why Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is himself a danger to public health. Why did Trump pick him? RFK Jr. is neither a medical nor a scientific researcher. He has made his mark in public as a conspiracy theorist and a publicist for the idea that vaccines cause autism and other illnesses.

    Hiltzik writes:

    Americans have become woefully familiar with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the purveyor of flagrant misinformation about medical treatments. And with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the minimizer of health crises such as the spreading measles outbreak. And with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the antivaccine crusader.

    Now let’s meet Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the promoter of a costly, time-consuming and distinctly unethical order for testing vaccines. “All new vaccines will undergo safety testing in placebo-controlled trials prior to licensure — a radical departure from past practices,” HHS announced in a May 1 statement. What it didn’t say was that the “departure” is “radical” because it’s shunned by medical authorities as a bad thing.

    Just this week, Kennedy’s agency doubled down on this order with the appointment of Vinay Prasad, an oncologist at UC San Francisco, as head of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, the division at the Food and Drug Administration that oversees vaccine testing.

    Prasad was a strident critic of the Biden administration’s approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, including the COVID vaccines. In a blog post in late April, he called for clinical testing of COVID boosters, along the lines of Kennedy’s order. Prasad succeeds Peter Marks, a widely respected expert who resigned from the FDA in March after clashing with Kennedy.

    “I was willing to work to address [Kennedy’s] concerns regarding vaccine safety and transparency,” Marks wrote in his resignation letter. “However, it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”

    The HHS announcement about Kennedy’s demand for placebo-controlled trials was unclear about how it defined “new vaccines.” But his previous claims about vaccine safety have made clear that he’s referring not only to first-generation vaccines for diseases, but also boosters and expanded formulations. That’s an important point, as I’ll cover in a moment.

    The antivaccine camp, of which Kennedy has long been a leader, has pushed the claim that most childhood vaccines haven’t been adequately tested for safety because they haven’t been subjected to placebo-controlled trials — and therefore may be unsafe.

    “Except for the COVID vaccine, none of the vaccines on the CDC’s childhood recommended schedule was tested against an inert placebo, meaning we know very little about the actual risk profiles of these products,” Kennedy’s spokesman at HHS, Andrew Nixon, asserted in connection with the order.

    Both components of that claim are misrepresentations.

    Let’s take a closer look, starting with some rudimentary points.

    The testing that Kennedy and Prasad advocate are randomized control trials. They’re correct in asserting that so-called RCTs are the gold standard in clinical testing of drugs and vaccines.

    RCTs typically involve at least two groups of subjects: One receives the medicine in question and another — a control group — receives something else, such as a placebo, a concoction that’s designed to resemble the medicine but is essentially inert, with no evident effect on the disease. The placebo may be an injectable saline solution, or water, or a sugar pill.

    Kennedy, like other antivaxxers, is deceptive in saying that the safety of vaccines should be questioned if it hasn’t been tested against an “inert placebo.”

    That brings us to the ethics of clinical testing, and why Kennedy’s policy is so dangerous.

    Testing a vaccine against a true placebo is ethical and proper when it’s the first treatment for a disease for which no other safe and effective treatment exists. That’s not the case, however, when a known treatment does exist — say after a vaccine has been shown to be safe and effective and has become the standard of care.

    As vaccine specialist Paul Offit of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has explained, subjecting new versions of those vaccines to placebo-controlled testing — giving some subjects the new vaccine and the control subjects no treatment, would be unethical, because it would require depriving the placebo group access to a known treatment. That was the conclusion of an expert panel assembled by the World Health Organization in 2014.

    Offit, in a 2023 rejoinder to Kennedy’s appearance on a Joe Rogan podcast, in which he claimed that drug companies “never do placebo-controlled trials,” pointed to what may be the most famous vaccine trial to illustrate this point.
    That was the nationwide trial of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine. In 1954, 420,000 first- and second-graders were given the Salk shot, and 200,000 got a shot of salt water. Salk objected to the trial’s design. Smaller trials had established the safety and efficacy of his vaccine, so the plan meant depriving 200,000 children of immunity to a disease that was paralyzing 50,000 children a year and killing 1,500.


    As Offit noted, in the full trial 16 children died from polio; all were in the placebo group. So were 34 of the 36 children paralyzed in the course of the trial. “These are the gentle heroes we leave behind,” Offit wrote.


    Now let’s examine Kennedy’s order as it applies to modern vaccines. As the veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski has pointed out, contrary to the assertion by Kennedy’s spokesman, almost none of the vaccines on the current childhood vaccination list is a first-generation vaccine warranting placebo testing. (An exception is Gardasil, which safeguards against human papilloma virus.)

    They’re upgraded preparations of vaccines that themselves underwent placebo-controlled trials, or formulations aimed at new variants of the targeted disease, or shots that inoculate against several diseases all at once.

    To demand that every new formulation be tested against an inert placebo would mean turning back the clock to reproduce trials that may have taken place decades ago, but resulted in the licensing of the original vaccine after safety and efficacy were established.

    That means it would have been unethical to test the new version against a saline control, because the control group would be deprived of any effective treatment. “The bottom line,” Gorski writes, “is that, if you trace back the history of the vaccines developed for a disease like, say, measles, you will eventually find the RCT testing the first effective vaccine against it and that vaccine will have had a placebo control.”
    He’s right. In a tweet thread, vaccinologist Peter Hotez traced back the history of several vaccines to their initial RCTs.

    What makes Kennedy’s order especially cynical is that designing and implementing a clinical trial is an extraordinarily complex, costly and time-consuming process. As a team of Canadian researchers observed in a 2018 Nature article, a full-scale Phase 3 clinical trial — the level at which drugs and vaccines are studied for safety, efficacy and dosing — requires as many as 3,000 participants and can take as long as four years.

    In an online posting last month, Prasad ridiculed “the mainstream media” for being upset about the idea that COVID boosters should in effect receive full randomized clinical trials before approval. He took particular issue with an article by Helen Braswell of STAT asserting that such a requirement might well delay approval of a vaccine targeting a new COVID variant until it was too late to protect users from that variant. Prasad called the argument false because “the virus spreads year round.”

    Is that so? At the height of the pandemic, new COVID variants sometimes appeared within months of one another. The virulent Delta variant, for example, appeared in the spring of 2021 and was overtaken by the Omicron variant, which also caused severe disease, that November.

    Delays in rolling out vaccines to combat newly emergent disease strains and variants could cost millions of lives. Under existing vaccine approval protocols, the COVID vaccines prevented as many as 20 million deaths globally within a year after they were introduced early in 2021.

    Prasad’s new job will put him in charge of developing vaccine testing policies and overseeing the design and approval of clinical trials. I asked him via email what policies he would pursue, whether he was in alignment with Kennedy’s approach, and how he expected vaccine developers to reconcile the costs and time constraints of undertaking clinical trials on the scale he advocates with the imperatives of public health. I didn’t receive a reply.

    So far, the Kennedy regime at HHS has lived down to the worst expectations of his critics. His devotion to unnecessary testing of vaccines that have already shown their safety and efficacy is only one aspect of a comprehensive assault on public confidence in science-based medicine.

    In a recent appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, Kennedy dismissed the severity of the current measles outbreak and denigrated the effectiveness of the measles vaccine. The current outbreak of 935 cases is by far the worst in the U.S. since 2019, when 1,274 cases were recorded; at the current rate, we are on the path to nearly 3,000 this year.

    Kennedy has promoted almost useless nostrums against measles, such as vitamin A, while describing vaccination as a personal choice. That’s devastatingly wrongheaded. Kennedy confuses “medicine” and “public health.” The former concerns itself with the individual; the latter with the community. Vaccine policy belongs in the latter category because vaccines are most effective when the effort is communitywide.

    Measles is among the most contagious diseases known to humankind, which means that communal vaccination is crucial. Professionals have concluded that a 95% vaccination rate is the minimum required to protect the most vulnerable, such as infants, from infection; as of 2024, the U.S. vaccination rate among kindergartners had fallen from 95.2% in 2019-20 to 92.7%.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which falls within Kennedy’s jurisdiction, says the decline in measles vaccinations leaves 280,000 kindergartners at risk. Two children in the U.S. already have died from a disease that was thought to have been eradicated in the U.S. in 2020; Kennedy doesn’t seem concerned that the toll on his watch is poised to get much worse.



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  • A hearing, a unanimous vote and a preview of litigation over a school construction bond

    A hearing, a unanimous vote and a preview of litigation over a school construction bond


    Oakland Unified recently completed construction of new academic buildings at Fremont High with funding from a previous bond measure.

    Courtesy of Oakland Unified

     A Senate Education Committee hearing Monday produced a unanimous vote in support of a $10 billion school construction bond initiative for the Nov. 5 statewide ballot. It also provided a preview of what likely will be the arguments over an anticipated lawsuit challenging how the state shares funding from state bonds with school districts.

    The public interest law firm Public Advocates charges that the bond that Californians will vote on will perpetuate a system that will award districts with the highest property values the most state money and harm students in low-wealth districts. It opposes Assembly Bill 247, providing the language for the ballot initiative, and has threatened to sue unless there are substantial changes to the funding arrangement.   

    “Our property, poor district space, face an uphill battle in struggling to raise matching funds due to low property values, often the result of decades of systemic discrimination and underinvestment in communities of color,” Gary Hardie, Jr., a school board member in Lynwood Unified, located east of Los Angeles, and a representative of the  California Association of Black School Educators, told the senators. “This just isn’t unfair; it’s morally unacceptable.” Public Advocates cited Lynwood’s plight in a complaint it filed with state officials in February.  

    The chairs of the Senate and Assembly Education Committees, both primary authors of the bill, disputed the characterizations, pointing to the bill’s changes to the allocation system, which they said make the funding system fairer.

    “It just breaks my heart to hear some of the over the top rhetoric that they’re (Public Advocates) are using,” said Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, responded. “If our goal is to serve the greatest good, the greatest number of socioeconomically disadvantaged students are in those districts that they’re calling wealthy like Los Angeles Unified, Oakland Unified, Long Beach Unified that lined up in support of this measure.”

    The bill would increase the state’s share of matching money by as much as 5 percentage points, to 65% for renovations and 55% for new construction. It would expand the number of “hardship” districts with property tax bases too small to issue bonds, qualifying for 100% state aid.

    Nicole Ochi, deputy managing attorney of Public Advocates, dismissed the changes as insignificant.  “They will do nothing to reverse the regressive distribution of state bonds, nor will the minor changes to the financial hardship program address the punitive and burdensome nature of that system,” she said. “A sliding scale of 60 to 65% is not a meaningful equity adjustment. This is equity in name and not substance.”

    Public Advocates proposed a much bigger sliding scale, with no guarantee under the current system that all districts receive at least 50% matching aid for new construction and 60% for modernization. Instead, districts with the lowest assessed property values per student, including Lynwood, San Bernardino City, and Fresno, would get a 95% match from the state, with a 5% local share; property-rich districts, like Palo Alto, Santa Clara, and Santa Barbara, would get a 5% state funding for a 95% local contribution.

    Ochi said Muratsuchi was conflating low-income demographics with low property values. Primarily low-income students attend Fresno, San Bernardino, Oakland, and Los Angeles. But Oakland and Los Angeles benefit from commercial and industrial wealth, with above-average assessed property per student. Their match from the state would decline slightly under Public Advocates’ proposal.

    Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton, chair of Senate Education, countered the assertion by Public Advocates that the widely supported school facility program, created in 1998, is unconstitutional. “The program’s framework is built on equity and fairness and, over time, it has evolved. It’s been updated to better serve California’s diverse school districts,” he said.

    He said the revised program’s “balanced approach provides additional support to high-need districts while maintaining a sustainable and broadly supported funding model statewide.”

    The committee voted 7-0 to back the bill, which the full Senate and Assembly are expected to pass on Wednesday. Public Advocates has yet to decide its next move, but it said nothing in the latest bond proposal has led it to change its position. 

    The article was clarified on July 5 to make it clear Sen. Josh. Newsom disagrees with the assertion that the school facility program’s funding formula is unconstitutional.





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  • Budget would require districts to post plans to educate kids in emergencies

    Budget would require districts to post plans to educate kids in emergencies


    The burned remains of the Paradise Elementary school on Nov. 9, 2018, in Paradise. Blocks and blocks of homes and businesses in the Northern California town were destroyed by a wildfire.

    Credit: AP/Rich Pedroncelli

    Starting next March, California school districts will be required to post a plan on their websites outlining how they will provide instruction to students within 10 school days of an emergency that keeps children from attending classes. They should also make contact with students and families within five days of the emergency. Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the education trailer bill as part of the 2024-25 budget.

    The plan must be operative by July 1, 2025. 

    Local educational agencies — school districts, charter schools and county offices of education — that do not develop an instructional continuity plan as part of their school safety plan will not be eligible to recover lost state attendance funding if schools close or a significant number of students are unable to attend because of an emergency.

    In a separate action, the trailer bill also addresses chronic absenteeism by authorizing school districts to provide attendance recovery programs during school breaks, weekends or after school, to allow students to make up for up to 10 days of school missed for any reason. Beginning next July, districts that offer the programs will be able to recover state funds lost when students in the program were previously absent from school.

    The legislation comes four years after California schools closed for more than a year because of a worldwide pandemic. Since then, chronic absenteeism rates have more than doubled. Wildfires and flooding also have closed schools across the state with increasing frequency in recent years.

    “Given the effects of public health emergencies and the significant and growing number of natural disasters that the state has faced in recent years, there is an increased need for local educational agencies to provide instructional continuity for pupils when conditions make in-person instruction infeasible for all or some pupils,” according to the trailer bill.

    The instructional continuity plan must describe how districts will provide in-person or remote instruction to students, including potentially temporarily reassigning them to other school districts. Students who are reassigned during an emergency will not have to comply with any residency requirements for attendance in that district. 

    Penalties removed

    The legislation has changed dramatically since the May budget revision, which would have given districts five days to offer students instruction after an emergency, and penalized them financially if they didn’t. 

    The revisions are due, in part, to heavy opposition from a coalition of nine education organizations, including the California Teachers Association, California School Boards Association and California County Superintendents.

    “There are countless instances where the physical infrastructure and human capacity necessary to comply with this requirement does not exist: roads, landlines, internet connectivity, access to devices, access to shelter, family and staff displacement, etc.,” said California County Superintendents in a May letter to the chairs of the Senate and Assembly budget committees. “When this occurs, a LEA may find it impossible to offer remote instruction.”

    Derick Lennox, senior director for governmental relations and legal affairs for the association said, “There was the feeling that the state does not understand the challenges that schools face to locate and serve the basic needs of their students and families during a serious emergency.” 

    As an alternative, the coalition asked for a proactive planning process without financial penalties, and lawmakers agreed, Lennox said.

    El Dorado County Superintendent of Schools Ed Manansala said that the proactive, constructive tone of the new legislation is more productive than the punitive tack legislators took in the original version.

    Manansala said it isn’t feasible to expect schools to deliver instruction 10 days after schools close in an emergency.

    El Dorado County has had at least 70 wildfires of varying sizes between 2004 and 2023, the largest being in August 2021, according to CalFire. It burned 221,835 acres and razed Walt Tyler Elementary School in Grizzly Flats.

    “We had teachers and students that were being displaced out of their communities,” Manansala said. 

    Mendocino County Superintendent of Schools Nicole Glentzer first experienced the extended closure of schools in 2017 when a fire burned 36,000 acres.

    Glentzer, who worked at nearby Ukiah Unified School District at the time, had to evacuate her home. She moved into the district office and went to work making decisions about school closures. The district’s schools were closed for five days.

    Since then, the county on the state’s north coast has been ravaged by numerous fires, including two of the nation’s largest, which together burned more than 1.41 million acres in multiple counties in 2018 and 2020.

    Schools in Mendocino County also have been closed recently because of flooding and power outages.

    Glentzer said that while she is satisfied with the revamped language in the legislation, she cringes when she hears that small districts, with small staffs, are expected to come up with plans similar to larger districts. The Mendocino County Office of Education will help the 12 school districts in its county by providing sample plans and templates, she said.

    Attendance recovery

    State chronic absentee numbers have skyrocketed from 12.1% in 2018-19 to 30% in 2021-22, according to an analysis of California data. Chronic absenteeism rates are determined by the number of students who miss at least 10% of school days in a given year.

    Attendance recovery programs like the one required by the new legislation can help districts reduce their chronic absenteeism and regain the average daily attendance funding lost when students miss school. The programs must be taught by credentialed teachers and be aligned to grade-level standards and to each student’s regular instructional program, according to the legislation.

    Attendance recovery programs can be funded through the Expanded Learning Opportunities Program at school sites where the after-school or summer enrichment programs are being offered and operated by the school district.

    “In my mind, it’s a whole theme that the administration and Legislature are going for, around addressing chronic absenteeism — one of the top issues facing students today,” Lennox said. “And, they basically outlined a few different strategies to do it.”





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  • Federal Judge Blocks Shutdown of Department of Education

    Federal Judge Blocks Shutdown of Department of Education


    When Trump promised to shut down the U.S. Department of Education during his campaign, he must have known that he couldn’t close down a department without Congressional approval. Everyone else knew it. He brought in wrestling entrepreneur Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education to preside over the Department’s demise. He never sought Congressional approval.

    Elon Musk’s DOGS team did the dirty work, laying off half the Department’s employees, some 1300 people.

    The most severely affected offices were the Federal Student Aid office, the Office for Civil Rights, and the Institute for Education Sciences (which oversees federal research and NAEP). The IES was eliminated, leaving future administrations of NAEP in doubt and disemboweling the government’s essential historic role in compiling data about education.

    But today a federal judge ruled that the shuttering of ED was wrong and that everyone laid off should be rehired. Bottom line: a President can’t close a Congressionally authorized department by executive order.

    WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order to shut down the Education Department and ordered the agency to reinstate employees who were fired in mass layoffs.

    U.S. District Judge Myong Joun in Boston granted a preliminary injunction stopping the Trump administration from carrying out two plans announced in March that sought to work toward Trump’s goal to dismantle the department. It marks a setback to one of the Republican president’s campaign promises.

    The injunction was requested in a lawsuit filed by the Somerville and Easthampton school districts in Massachusetts and the American Federation of Teachers, along with other education groups.

    In their lawsuit, the groups said the layoffs amounted to an illegal shutdown of the Education Department. They said it left the department unable to carry out responsibilities required by Congress, including duties to support special education, distribute financial aid and enforce civil rights laws.

    In his order, Joun said the plaintiffs painted a “stark picture of the irreparable harm that will result from financial uncertainty and delay, impeded access to vital knowledge on which students and educators rely, and loss of essential services for America’s most vulnerable student populations.”

    Layoffs of that scale, he added, “will likely cripple the Department.”

    Joun ordered the Education Department to reinstate federal workers who were terminated as part of the March 11 layoff announcement.

    The Trump administration says the layoffs are aimed at efficiency, not a department shutdown. Trump has called for the closure of the agency but recognizes it must be carried out by Congress, the government said.

    The administration said restructuring the agency “may impact certain services until the reorganization is finished” but it’s committed to fulfilling its statutory requirements.



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  • Puppetry is far more than child’s play for young learners in Oakland

    Puppetry is far more than child’s play for young learners in Oakland


    Trevor Aguilar, a 6-year-old, narrates his own story with a puppet while playing with Jacqui June Whitlock, a puppet education specialist at Children’s Fairyland in Oakland.

    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    Puppetry is more than just child’s play at Children’s Fairyland, Oakland’s iconic storybook theme park. Small children have been stimulated by the wonders of live performance at the Storybook Puppet Theater since 1956, but now they will also be exposed to arts education programming specially crafted for preschool learners. A new puppet education initiative, Puppet Playdates, takes hands-on learning to the next level.

    Once upon a time comes alive for a new generation every Thursday after the 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. puppet shows, when children are cordially invited to a nearby meadow to make friends with marionettes after the curtain falls.

    Amber Rose Arthur
    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    On a recent morning, Amber Rose Arthur, 5, wasted no time breathing life into the unicorn puppet, its sparkles glittering in the sun. Every so often, she gently nudged other children with the unicorn’s horn to bestow them with magic powers. In the interests of total disclosure: She gave this reporter some enchantment too.

    “They don’t get enough arts in school anymore, so events like this are great,” said her father, Gregory Arthur, watching as the little girl explored the craft of puppetry and social interactions in one fell swoop.  “It stimulates the brain more than a lot of other things. It gets them to think and learn, and it makes them smile.”

    Nestled on the shores of Lake Merritt, this bewitching arts education program invites children to learn the magic of puppetry while immersing themselves in classic fables including James M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan,”  Frank L. Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz” and Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.” This program also lays the groundwork for a proposed puppet education program that will pay visits to early-learning classrooms in Oakland Unified School District (OUSD).

    “Fairyland is designed to inspire a young child to have a great imagination,” said Joy Peacock, client and community relations director for the PNC Foundation, the philanthropic arm of PNC Bank, which is partnering on the puppet-based early-learning program. “It’s not all laid out there for you, like in TV. You have to rely on your own imagination. Puppetry is very interactive, it’s very tactile, it’s very creative.”

    Coming out of the pandemic, Fairyland held focus groups with local teachers to pinpoint what kinds of activities would be most beneficial for the preschool cohort, and the takeaway was that children today need more social-emotional learning as well as more exposure to the creative impulse. Enter puppets. 

    “One of the things that actually made me really sad is that the teachers were saying the children are losing their imagination,” said Maria Rodriguez, manager of the puppet theater. “They’re losing their ability to make believe. For me, you know, I can’t imagine life without imagination, so I was just like, oh goodness. We need to help inspire the children to learn how to make believe. We want to help them to light that spark.”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01ZRaXTZKcM

    That’s basically Jacqui June Whitlock’s calling in life. A former transitional kindergarten teacher with a background in theater and an affinity for puppetry, this is her dream gig. She studied child development in college and the art of shadow puppetry in Bali. She has encountered more than one child who was too afraid to express themselves, until she handed them a puppet. Suddenly they found their voice.

    “For me, this has been like a lifelong career. Incorporating social-emotional learning with puppetry, that’s my bread and butter,” said Whitlock, a puppet education specialist. “Something wonderful happens when you hand a child a puppet. Puppets are a great conduit for storytelling and learning without putting any pressure on the child.”

    Whitlock is a master at teaching through play. Holding court with a cavalcade of puppets, from rabbits and dragons to cats, after a recent performance of “Peter Pan,” she relishes helping children spin yarns of their own. 

    “I’ve been dreaming of doing a program like this for years. It’s amazing that we finally have the funding to do it,” she said. “In America, we tend to think of puppets as simple toys for children, but really there’s so much more to puppetry. Many other cultures think of them as more than that. They can be a very complex tool.” 

    At the play dates, she helps guide groups of pint-sized puppeteers as they learn and play. If a child has a puppet pretend to bite her, for example, she inquires whether the puppet is hungry, opening up a dialogue with the child. But she always wants the kiddo to lead the way. 

    “They weave their own story,” said Whitlock, who crafts a lot of her own puppets by hand. “You’re not really telling them what the story is, they’re telling you.”

    Empowering children to express themselves is particularly critical right now, experts say, because this generation missed out on so many formative experiences because of school closures and other pandemic disruptions. The arts can be an effortless way to boost special emotional learning, she says, through the kind of make-believe games that children are naturally drawn to. 

    Jacqui June Whitlock, a puppet education specialist at Children’s Fairyland in Oakland, teaches through puppet play and imagination.
    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    “Teachers were saying that they were seeing a lack of imagination or a lack of pretend play happening in their classrooms, noticing that children weren’t interacting as much,” she said. “And puppets are an excellent tool for cultivating that pretend play, also just communicating with each other, it’s sort of like a conduit for your personality … It just makes it so easy for them to communicate with each other and break down that barrier.”

    Puppets can play a role in helping children communicate on a deeper level, experts say, by externalizing their emotions onto the inanimate object. The puppet becomes a proxy that helps kids process hard situations, grapple with fears and explore their feelings through metaphor.

    “One of my favorite things that I’ve observed is that puppet playtime creates a lot of interaction between the grownup and the kiddo,” said Whitlock. “It’s like time slows down for them. Also, I put in a bench recently, so now I’m also seeing a lot of elders, and I love the interactions between grandparents and their littles. It’s very nurturing.”

    Of course, puppetry can also fuel expressions of pure escapism, encouraging little children to create their own big adventures. 

    “Children and puppetry go hand in hand, because kids have no trouble suspending their disbelief, and endowing the simplest props with life,” said Carey Perloff, former artistic director of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater and a longtime puppet proponent. “Puppets are a direct conduit to the imagination. Because they can be realistic or totally abstract, they invite audience members to project their own idea of character and circumstance onto a piece of fabric or some papier mache, and thus to transform it into something magical.”

    Trevor Aguilar finds joy in using his imagination with a dragon puppet.
    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    Trevor Aguilar, for one, celebrated his sixth birthday by weaving a tale of intrigue with his new fuzzy friends. He narrated an adventure in which the grandmother puppet saved the townspeople from the evil machinations of the fire-breathing dragon puppet. The last child at the puppet play date, he didn’t seem to want the fun to end. 

    Indeed, some children become so enamored of the marionettes that they make a point of paying a visit to Whitlock and her buckets of puppets every time they visit the park. 

    “I’ve got my regulars, which is so great,” said Whitlock. “They know exactly what they want. ‘OK, I’m here. I’m getting the raccoon puppet today.’ ”





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