Briana Munoz felt forced to take seven courses last semester to graduate on time and protect her financial aid status.
Courtesy, Briana Munoz
California State University trustees voted Wednesday to expand grants to fund the full cost of tuition and living expenses for students who show they need it to attend college.
The decision is the first step in a commitment the trustees made to students last fall that at least a third of revenue from a 6% annual tuition hike would go to financial aid.A more detailed plan will be presented to the board in May.
Over the five-year period of the tuition increase, more than $280 million will go toward financial aid, increasing total funding to the State University Grant to $981 million by the 2028-29 school year.
About 87% of Cal State students have their tuition fully or partially covered by grants and aid. Yet, some students still struggle with the cost of attending college due to living expenses such as food, housing and transportation.
Although there is regional variation of housing and food costs, total attendance costs statewide range from $22,000 to $32,000 annually. Nearly 40% of CSU students rely on loans to make up the difference between financial aid and actual costs.
“The fact is tuition as the price of admission is not what keeps students away from CSU,” trustee Julia Lopez said. “Almost nine out of 10 students get some sort of tuition grant, but it’s other costs.”
The trustees favored giving students stipends, once their tuition costs are met, to cover their expenses, with the expectation that students would work less and graduate sooner. The State University Grant has traditionally been used to cover tuition. The stipends would be up to $5,000 and prioritize students with the greatest needs.
The trustees also voted to create consistent financial aid measurements and communications for students and their families after learning of significant differences across the 23 campuses, making it difficult for families to compare financial aid offers.
But there is one immediate challenge CSU is facing in its financial aid improvement goals – the current national rollout of FAFSA simplification. The new, simplified Free Application for Federal Student Aid application was delayed from Oct.1 to Dec. 31. Colleges and universities received notification on Tuesday that they wouldn’t receive students’ financial aid information until March, squeezing students who generally have until May 1 to select a college.
Nathan Evans, CSU’s vice chancellor for academic and student affairs, said the problems with the new FAFSA may be even worse for California.
Students who are permanent residents or U.S. citizens, but who have an undocumented parent, are unable to complete the new application because the system requires a Social Security number for each parent or guardian. Parents without Social Security numbers are also locked out of contributing to existing FAFSA forms.
Evans said leaders from CSU, the University of California, the community colleges, and the state’s independent colleges met earlier this week with the California Student Aid Commission to plan potential workarounds.
Another complication for CSU’s financial aid plans – the scheduled expansion of the Cal Grant, which aids the state’s low-income students – was expected to also begin in 2024-25. But the Legislature must first approve funding. CSU’s institutional aid numbers to students would depend on the amounts students receive in other federal and state aid.
“This is a year like none other,” Evans said. “There are some additional complexities this year, given that not only has the application been revamped, but calculations are changing … so there is a lot of unpredictability in the process.”
Community college leaders will once again attempt to offer bachelor’s degrees in nursing, renewing a fight with the state’s universities over whether expanding to the two-year sector eases California’s nurses shortage or increases competition.
The bill, authored by state Sen. Richard Roth, D-Riverside, would allow 15 yet-to-be-selected community college districts that already provide associate degrees in nursing to offer bachelor’s degrees in the field.
While California State University has yet to take a position on Roth’s bill, it’s clear the system has a stake in whether community colleges are allowed to serve students who may otherwise attend CSU or private school programs.
The majority of bachelor’s and advanced nursing degree programs are taught by independent and private colleges, which hold about 51% of the market. Statewide, there are 48 bachelor’s degree nursing programs. At least 17 Cal State campuses and six University of California campuses offer a bachelor’s or master’s nursing program within their systems.
Enrollment in bachelor’s nursing programs has also increased statewide, with much of the growth in the private sector. In 2021, 9,179 new students entered these programs — nearly 2,500 more than the previous year, according to a 2023 state nursing board report conducted by UC San Francisco. Meanwhile, fewer students are enrolling in associate degree nursing programs, which are mostly at public community colleges.
“The workforce need has only grown,” said Kaylie Schmidt, a spokesperson with the Community College League of California, a nonprofit organization advocating in favor of the bill, SB 895. “We have nursing shortages like we’ve never seen before, and many of our districts are in communities that have workforce shortages.”
Schmidt said in some areas of the state, nursing students will leave their smaller communities that are in desperate need of health care professionals and migrate to other regions that offer them an opportunity to pursue the bachelor’s nursing degree.
Some estimates show that California is facing a shortage of about 36,000 licensed nurses — a need that is expected to grow “substantially by 2030,” said Andra Hoffman, a trustee for the Los Angeles Community College District. “This tremendous gap continues to widen as current nursing baccalaureate degree programs have demand greater than their enrollment capacity,” she said.
This isn’t the first time the community colleges have pushed the Legislature to approve offering nursing baccalaureate degrees. Ten years ago, the state’s community colleges began offering bachelor’s degrees in certain programs and at specific colleges to address unmet workforce needs. Back then, community college leaders warned that nursing shortages would continue if California didn’t allow the community colleges to offer nursing degrees. The state approved the pilot community college bachelor’s degree program but excluded nursing because state law bars the colleges from offering programs already offered by the universities.
SB 895, which would change that law, is expected to be heard by the Senate Education Committee on April 10.
Rehman Attar, Cal State’s director of health care and workforce development, said CSU has not taken a formal position on the bill but welcomes the Legislature to fix the problems like clinical placements and faculty shortagesin nursing education within all three systems.
Registered nurses are not legally required to have a bachelor’s degree to practice. But a growing number of employers and health facilities require registered nurses to have, or be in pursuit of, a bachelor’s degree. A 2010 Institute of Medicine report recommended that the proportion of registered nurses with bachelor’s degrees increase to 80% by 2020. Meanwhile, in California, a 2021 Health Impact report found more than 54% of the state’s hospitals preferred hiring nurses with bachelor’s degrees.
A common misconception is that increasing the capacity of BSN-trained nurses at CSU would solve the nursing shortage, Attar said.
Instead, the problem is much larger than that, he said. Solving it means increasing more capacity for students to get clinical training and hiring more faculty to teach the courses for the community colleges and the universities.
“That’s a big limiting factor and a bottleneck for us to increase capacity,” Attar said.
Both associate degree and bachelor’s degree nursing programs require practical experience, or clinical education, in health care settings. But many health care facilities have a limited number of spots available to offer that experience to students. Creating new nursing programs would only add more students competing for that limited space. Attar said some universities outside of the CSU system also pay or incentivize for clinical placement spots for their students. Getting students into clinical training is an additional challenge all colleges face. Attar said CSU doesn’t pay or incentivize health care facilities for clinical placement spots because the practice isn’t equitable or fair for all students.
Schmidt said the bill would use clinical space already offered to these community college districts. Would that mean students within a single community college are facing greater competition against each other for clinicals? Schmidt said it would be on the community college to determine how it wants to use the clinical space it has between students earning an associate degree and a bachelor’s degree.
A separate bill authored by Roth, SB 1042, plans to address the clinical placement problem by requiring health facilities to work with public and private nursing programs to attempt to make the necessary number of placements available to them to meet the schools’ demand.
Statewide, there has been growth in nursing programs offering bachelor’s degrees. According to a 2023 report from the California Board of Registered Nursing, the number of bachelor’s programs in the state increased from 43 in 2020 to 48 in 2021. However, that 20% growth in programs took place in the private sector.
Alex Graves, vice president of government relations for the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities, said the organization has not taken a formal position on SB 895, but they do have concerns about it exacerbating the challenge of finding faculty for bachelor’s nursing programs.
“The reality is if there are additional courses that are going to be required for community colleges to offer BSN programs, it will likely mean there will be additional faculty demands coming for those programs,” he said. “That will just make it all the more difficult for all of us to find those folks to fill those positions in our programs.”
Encouraging qualified nurses to teach in both associate and bachelor’s degree programs has been challenging for nearly all programs because colleges and universities can’t compete with the salaries nurses make working in health care settings.
Although faculty vacancy rates have fluctuated over the years, in 2022, the state nursing board reported a 12.1% faculty vacancy rate — the highest it had been in 10 years. Many colleges have compensated by hiring more part-time nursing faculty, but that hasn’t diminished their need for more faculty overall. The board found nearly 70% of nursing programs reported faculty working “overloaded” schedules, of which 94% reported paying their faculty extra for the additional work.
“We’re fortunate enough that we have doctoral programs that focus on creating nurse educators,” Rehman said, speaking for the CSU system. “But again, that pipeline gets restricted at the associate’s and bachelor’s degree level, so if we’re not able to increase that pipeline of students to become nurses, it restricts us in terms of producing nursing faculty, as well.”
Rehman called it a “domino effect.”
“When we’re able to address these core fundamental nursing issues of clinical placement — and just starting with that — that’s going to start alleviating some of the pains that we find with faculty,” he said.
Addressing the constraints on clinical placements and the shortage of nursing faculty are the best ways to get more nurses into the profession, Graves said.
Instead, Graves said there are better examples of collaboration between community college and university nursing programs that provide a clear path for students to achieve their bachelor’s without compounding the faculty and clinical placement challenges. Those examples are in concurrent enrollment or associate degree to bachelor’s nursing degree programs.
Partnerships
The number of associate degree programs partnering with bachelor’s degree nursing programs has also increased. Private universities and some Cal State campuses have formal concurrent enrollment nursing programs with community colleges that allow students to earn both degrees simultaneously. The state nursing board reported such partnerships have increased over the last 10 years from 50.8% in 2012 to nearly 60% in 2021.
CSU has more than 10 such partnerships across its campuses and wants to add more.
“These ADN to BSN pathways have been really helpful,” Rehman said. “We’ve been able to streamline our curriculum with the community colleges to really reduce the time to graduation. … We’re also having coordination with our clinical placements.”
The partnerships could be an alternative to allowing community colleges to offer the bachelor’s degree directly.
That collaboration with the community colleges creates better clinical placement schedules to get students in and out of the program more quickly. Traditionally, it can take a nursing student up to six years to complete their bachelor’s degree. However, the associate-to-bachelor’s nursing partnerships reduce that time to three to four years, allowing more students to graduate, Rehman said.
“It’s a win-win, and we’re always looking to grow it,” he said. “We’re going to continue to keep on trying to grow it and make it more accessible to all of our community college partners.”
Preschool students build a structure from plastic interlocking tubes.
Credit: Allison Shelley for American Education
Author’s original hed: As Universal Preschool Access Expands to Reach More Families of Color, So Do Inequitable Practices Such as Racial Bias, Exclusionary Discipline and Lack of Cultural Representation, Leading to a Crisis for Black Boys
As California progresses toward universal preschool access, the need increases for training, hiring and retaining early childhood male educators who are racially and ethnically representative of the children in their classrooms. A study examining preschool teachers’ implicit biases and expulsion rates found that teachers spent significantly more time watching Black children, especially boys, than other-race children when anticipating problematic behaviors. Further, researchers found that public preschool teachers’ systemic use of exclusionary discipline, such as suspensions and expulsions, disproportionately impacts Black children, with Black boys being expelled more than anyone else.
In efforts to reduce the number of suspensions and expulsions, last year the California Department of Education released a bulletin announcing new requirements for the California State Preschool Program (CSPP) that no longer allowed contractors to suspend, expel, or coerce parents and guardians to pick children up early from school due to their behavior. This is a step in the right direction. However, not all California preschool programs are funded by the state program and, therefore, many do not have to abide by those guidelines.
As a Black woman and a credentialed early childhood educator for more than 15 years in San Joaquin and Sacramento counties, I’ve witnessed Black children aged 3 to 5 years old be sentenced to in-school or out-of-school suspension because a teacher lacked the necessary skills or cultural competencies to work with them. I would often be the one who other teachers would send their children to when they were struggling. Though I did not have any extra or special training, I was often able to successfully help children reset and return to their classrooms at peace. Once, I worked with a Black male teacher who was more effective than I in this aspect, especially when dealing with boys.
Overall, our success was evidence of the mutual understanding and respect that the same-race teacher-child dynamic has. Perhaps from the child’s perspective, there’s a familiarity in our looks or mannerisms. Whatever the reason, such experiences speak to why Black children need educators who they can identify with.
As it stands, in many places the public preschool curriculum, like that of the public K-12, has long ignored Black history and culture. The state preschool curriculum framework developed by the California Department of Education in alignment with the K-12 Common Core State Standards attest to this. Writers of the California Preschool Learning Foundations, Volume 3, History-Social Science admit that “the developmental research on which these foundations are based is full of studies of English-speaking, middle-class European American children” and that “fewer studies focused on children who speak other languages or come from other family, racial, or cultural backgrounds.”
Training and hiring teachers and staff who represent the racial and cultural communities they serve is beneficial because they connect better with the students through incorporating culturally relevant pedagogy, which is generally not offered in typical school curriculum. This was my approach upon opening a child care facility specifically for Black families. I found that children engaged more with the learning content when they could relate to it. For example, children expressed an increased interest in reading materials and spent more time in the classroom library browsing through books when they saw characters they could identify with. And the boys in my program took a special liking to my teenage son.
We cannot ignore the fact that Black children are disproportionately suspended and expelled from preschools. It’s also true their communities are underrepresented in the curricula and with regard to same-race educators. For better social and academic outcomes for this vulnerable group, early childhood educational spaces need more Black male teachers.
This is a call for state agencies and schools to put resources into the community by training and hiring educators who reflect the student population they serve. This is a call for families and community members to volunteer their time at local preschools and early childhood centers.
With universal preschool access becoming a reality in California, the rest of the country is sure to follow. To support all preschool children, diversifying the teaching workforce is of the utmost importance right now.
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Sajdah Asmau is owner of an African-centered child care facility. She is in her first year as doctoral student in education student at UC Davis and serves as a Public Voices fellow on Racial Justice in Early Childhood with the OpEd Project in partnership with the National Black Child Development Institute.
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.
Early this year, the California Department of Health Care Access and Information introduced the new Certified Wellness Coach program, aimed at improving the state’s inadequate capacity to support growing behavioral and mental health needs in California’s youth.
The program is part of the historic five-year, $4.6 billion state-funded Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative, of which the Department received $278 million to recruit, train and certify a diverse slate of mental health support personnel, or certified wellness coaches, in schools and community-based organizations across the state.
Sharmil Shah, assistant deputy director of the California Department of Health Care Access and Information.
According to Sharmil Shah, assistant deputy director of the California Department of Health Care Access and Information, certified wellness coaches work under a care team of licensed clinicians and professionals in pre-K, K-12 and post-secondary school settings. Most coaches have relevant associate or bachelor’s degrees in social work and human services and are trained in nonclinical behavioral health support.
Shah says the program strives to become a long-term response to a long-term crisis in California — that rates of anxiety and depression among the state’s children shot up by 70% between 2017 and 2022, and that following the COVID-19 pandemic, many adolescents experienced serious psychological distress and reported a 20% increase in suicides.
As part of a five-year initiative’s broader push to redefine student success, the program builds on research that behavioral interventions also improve academic performance and attendance in schools. In fact, anxiety, depression and mental health are the top health-related drivers of absenteeism since the onset of the pandemic, according to the Los Angeles Trust for Children’s Health. Simply put, students who feel better do better in school.
EdSource interviewed Shah about the new wellness coach program. Her remarks have been edited for length and clarity.
Describe the Certified Wellness Coach program. What can young people expect from the new wellness coaches?
Certified wellness coaches are meant to be an additional, trusted adult on a school campus — whether it’s an elementary school, middle school, high school or a college campus. This is a person that young people can turn to in times of need. Coaches would offer preventive and early intervention services and are intended to support a child or even a 25-year-old before a severe behavioral health need arises.
Some of the things that a parent or a child might see are classroom-level presentations, supporting school counselors with [mental health] screenings, individual and small group check-ins, wellness education and referrals to advanced behavioral health providers in times of crisis, among many other services.
What are the two types of wellness coaches, and how are their roles different?
There is a Certified Wellness Coach 1 and Certified Wellness Coach II. The Certified Wellness Coach 1 offers entry-level behavioral health supports, such as structured curriculum, to small groups or classrooms, which are focused on wellness promotion and education, mental health literacy — understanding the language of mental health — and life skills. They also support screenings for young people, connect them to behavioral health resources and professionals. If it becomes apparent that someone has a more significant need for behavioral health services, they’ll do a warm hand-off to a higher level of care.
The Certified Wellness Coach II provides a little more in-depth prevention and early intervention support to children and youth. They provide structured curriculum for groups or classrooms that’s focused on enhancing awareness of common behavioral health conditions like depression, anxiety. The Certified Wellness Coach II can help young people overcome maladaptive thinking patterns, distraction strategies and emotional regulations, and are able to do higher level interventions than a Certified Wellness Coach 1.
To support a mental health screening, a Certified Wellness Coach 1 can give the child some information about it, but they won’t administer the questions. The Certified Wellness Coach II can actually facilitate a screening process, be in the room and get everything set up, but they must still all be under the guidance of a school counselor who has qualifications to administer the screening and ask the questions, for example.
Why was it important to implement the program at all levels of schooling — from early education to community college?
It’s essential for children and youth to get help earlier on in the continuum of care, especially before a crisis arises. We believe that by supporting them at a younger age, we can provide them with the tools and skills to support their behavioral health and build resilience as they age. Wellness coaches can support youth through all the different changes, not only as related to age, but to life in general. We start at a very young age and then continue to an age where they can actually remember and hold onto the skills that they’ve learned.
How did the pandemic shape your vision for the program?
For students, we saw increased levels of anxiety, depression, social isolation, a disruption in their education, economic difficulties, and, of course, a lot of loss and grief. Children and adolescents lost family members who did not survive the pandemic. From research, we knew that there was already a youth mental health crisis in the state of California. The pandemic exacerbated it.
One system alone cannot address these challenges, but the school system is where all the kids are. There’s just not enough school personnel to address the need across the state. Through the development of this workforce, we hope that we can complement the incredible work that the educators are already doing by being a partner in their students’ health. Our wellness coaches can focus on social isolation, anxiety, feelings of sadness, and feeling connected and able to talk to somebody.
In a 2022 survey, about 55% of teachers said they would retire earlier than planned due to burnout from the pandemic. Could wellness coaches help relieve some of that ongoing burnout?
I was a PTA president, and I was in those environments in which I saw that there’s a child in the classroom that clearly looks like they need behavioral health services, and the teacher is spending maybe 90% of his or her time on that student, and the rest of the [students] are just kind of running around in circles. The current counselor-to-student ratio in California is about 1 to 464. It’s impossible, and it’s nearly double the recommended ratio. As the staff that spends the most time with students, the burden of supporting student behavioral health often falls on the teacher. That’s just not sustainable. That’s not helpful for the teachers, and they can’t do their job. By adding additional behavioral health professionals on campus, like wellness coaches, we can hopefully alleviate some of that burden and allow teachers to focus on the academic success of their students.
How will certified wellness coaches serve youth from multilingual or multicultural backgrounds? Will coaches reflect the demographics and experiences of their school’s student body?
Equity and effective access to care is a cornerstone of our programs. We have been recruiting diverse candidates to become wellness coaches and making sure that we adequately address cultural responsiveness and humility as part of their training. We have done very extensive marketing and outreach campaigns that use a variety of channels and messaging to get to as many populations as we can, including underserved and underrepresented communities.
We also selected our employer support grant awardees, mostly schools and some community-based organizations, based on geographic spread, to make sure that all 58 counties were represented and could hire coaches. And then we also provided special consideration to Title 1 [low income] schools, organizations whose staff speak multiple languages, and organizations that support Medi-Cal students. And then we had two scholarship cycles to support students who wanted to become wellness coaches. We [will support] their tuition and living expenses, especially for those who came from different backgrounds or didn’t have a lot of resources.
We are also partnering with California community colleges, which offer resources and support for underserved and underrepresented populations to enter the wellness coach system. What we found in our research is that 65% of their students were classified as economically disadvantaged. So we’re already addressing those groups.
And as part of our certification requirements, we’re focusing on specific degrees such as social work, human services and addiction studies, which already include cultural responsiveness and cultural humility as part of their key learning outcomes. What we’ve heard anecdotally from a lot of young people is that, “I don’t see myself in the people that are helping me or serving me,” and we want them to feel safe and comfortable with the person that they’re talking to.
Where are you in the rollout of the program?
In February 2024, we launched the certification program for wellness coaches. As of Sept. 17, we have certified 383 coaches, and that number is steadily growing. We’ve done so much outreach and engagement and social media blips and radio ads, because we need to be able to reach the young people where they are. As of August, the Department executed 64 21-month grant awards of $125 million to employer support grants for schools and community-based organizations to hire wellness coaches. That will fund the placement of more than 1,500 certified wellness coaches between this school year and next school year. And then, also, in August, we awarded 99 individuals with scholarships totaling about $2.8 million for those pursuing degrees with which they apply to become a certified wellness coach.
How can the program address broader post-pandemic issues such as chronic absenteeism and declining school enrollment?
We’re hoping that wellness coaches will strengthen young people by providing them with a safe place to share their fears and teaching them the skills necessary to cope with life’s challenges. We believe that equipping them with these skills will decrease absenteeism, help them focus on their schoolwork and also be able to have them integrate themselves into the school environment. Young people with behavioral health conditions are sometimes isolated, bullied, made fun of and may not even like school as a result of all of those things that are going on. If they have a safe place, a safe adult, a safe person that they can talk to about some of the feelings they have, they will be happy to come back to school, look at it as a place of learning and a place to make friends.
What kind of challenges do you foresee in keeping the program running and successful?
Sustainability. Everything runs on the mighty dollar. We are in the final years of the [Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative] right now, and we can use those funds to sustain the program for probably another year or two. We are actively partnering with the Department of Health Care Services, and other state departments, to make certified wellness coaches’ services billable through Medi-Cal [and commercial insurance], which will support sustainable financing in our schools [beyond the five-year initiative].
Extensive research has demonstrated that students who feel like they belong in schools perform better in the classroom and have better rates of attendance. This not only benefits the student, but it also potentially benefits the schools in retaining coaches, as school finances are based in-part on school attendance.
What kind of feedback have you received about the program?
I had a student who said, “I didn’t really feel like there were a lot of places to go to, even though they had help available. I didn’t trust people to confide in.” You never want people to feel like they have nowhere to go or that they’re alone. This was a student who would then become a wellness coach. Another student who became a wellness coach said that she didn’t feel there was enough support when kids needed help where she lived. She said, “If I’m struggling, I want to know there’s someone there for me if I genuinely need it.” She said she’s had really hard days, but being able to open up and talk about it makes the world seem a little more colorful. It makes her feel lighter on her feet.
We had some parents indicate that wellness coaches are a great way to give back to the community, because they’re giving back to our future, our children. It’s helping them be productive members of society and be the best version of themselves.
This is the fourth in a series of stories on the challenges impacting California’s efforts to offer high-quality instruction to all 4-year-olds by 2025.
Transitional kindergarten for all 4-year-olds has been touted as a way to boost declining enrollment and offer universal preschool. One major roadblock: Some districts just don’t have the space.
Some districts do not have room to accommodate additional transitional kindergarten, or TK, classes at all schools. Others, especially those in less affluent areas, lack the resources to add toilets and playground equipment made for 4-year-olds. A lack of state funding makes the problem worse.
“We’re going to see inequitable outcomes as a result of the inequitable access to appropriate facilities for transitional kindergarten,” said Jessica Sawko, education director at Children Now, an advocacy organization. “The state needs to continue to invest in the facilities that it has asked school districts to create.”
Some districts, such as Oakland Unified, are losing potential TK students because they don’t have space at all schools. Some elementary schools in Oakland don’t have any TK classrooms, and many have only one. As a result, some children end up on waitlists for their preferred school, and families are opting to wait until kindergarten to enroll their children.
Oakland district spokesperson John Sasaki acknowledged in an email that “there is a general capacity issue as we build out TK-appropriate classroom spaces,” noting that demand also varies between schools.
“School A may have 100 applications for 24 seats and school B may have 15 applications for 24 seats. Those families for school A may not go to school B because it’s far away, etc. and so it’s less that we weren’t able to accommodate, and more about family choice and preference,” Sasaki wrote.
Emily Privot McNamara applied for her 4-year-old son to attend transitional kindergarten in Oakland as soon as the district opened enrollment in 2023.
She was hoping for her son to attend his neighborhood school, Montclair Elementary, less than a two-minute drive from their house. Her neighbors told her getting into Montclair for kindergarten was easy for their children, since the district gives priority to students who live in the neighborhood.
But getting into TK there was different. Montclair has far fewer TK classrooms than kindergarten classrooms; in 2023-24 the school enrolled 28 students in TK, compared to 90 in kindergarten. McNamara’s son didn’t get into Montclair or Thornhill Elementary, another nearby school. Instead, the district offered him a seat at Emerson Elementary, more than 3 miles from their house and a 10-minute drive each way.
The McNamaras considered sending their son to Emerson for TK and then moving him to Montclair for kindergarten, but felt that would be too many transitions.
“We’d had several years of shifts and changes. We wanted to start consistency. The idea was once we got into TK, we could stay there a number of years,” McNamara said.
So the McNamaras declined the spot at Emerson and kept their son in private preschool, paying $1,900 a month for tuition. They stayed on the waitlist for Montclair but were never admitted.
McNamara’s son is one of 143 children who applied to transitional kindergarten in Oakland Unified in 2023-24 but ultimately chose not to enroll, according to Sasaki. That number is equivalent to about 12% of the district’s total transitional kindergarten enrollment that year.
TK enrollment has been lower than expected statewide. According to the California Department of Education, 151,491 students were enrolled in TK in the 2023-24 school year, far below projections. The Learning Policy Institute had estimated that between 159,500 and 199,400 would enroll.
A lot of districts, on paper, they’re under-enrolled. However, the devil’s in the details. … Is there potential extra space where it’s actually needed? And what’s the condition and quality of those spaces?”
Jeff Vincent, Center for Cities+Schools
Oakland Unified and Alum Rock Unified in San Jose are both trying to use empty space creatively, revamping previously closed elementary school campuses and converting them into early childhood centers to serve both TK and younger students in preschool. Oakland gives priority at this center and another early childhood center to students who come from neighborhoods with schools that don’t have a single transitional kindergarten classroom. Yet the situation in Oakland, where some schools are under-enrolled, while others have waitlists, shows that expanding TK is more complicated than simply filling empty classrooms with 4-year-olds, said Jeff Vincent, who co-directs the Center for Cities + Schools at UC Berkeley and has done extensive research on school facilities.
“A lot of districts, on paper, they’re under-enrolled,” said Vincent. “However, the devil’s in the details on that, right? Is there potential extra space where it’s actually needed? And what’s the condition and quality of those spaces, and what would it take to turn them into TK-appropriate classrooms?”
A problem statewide
According to a February 2023 Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) budget brief, 25% of districts said they did not have adequate classroom space to meet projected transitional kindergarten enrollment. Similarly, a survey conducted by the California Department of Education and analyzed by the Learning Policy Institute found that 18% of school districts did not have enough classroom space for transitional kindergarten expansion, and more than a third cited facilities as the biggest challenge.
That report found that school districts will need 946 additional classrooms to enroll all projected transitional kindergarten students in 2025-26. TK has been gradually expanding since 2022 to reach all the state’s 4-year-olds by the 2025-26 school year.
One of the challenges for districts is the requirement for transitional kindergarten classrooms.
State guidelines for TK and kindergarten classrooms are more stringent than for classrooms for older children. New classrooms must include bathrooms with toilets sized for young children, and be at least 1,350 square feet. Renovated classrooms must be at least 1,250 square feet. In contrast, classrooms for grades 1-12 must be at least 960 square feet.
Victoria Wang, one of the authors of the report, said some districts told the Learning Policy Institute that the lack of classrooms has made it difficult to offer full-day TK and that they are instead offering half-day morning and afternoon TK sessions in the same classrooms, in order to accommodate more students. Parents who need a longer program to meet their child care needs are unlikely to enroll in half-day TK.
Many districts cited not being able to provide bathrooms connected to classrooms as a challenge.
“If they don’t have a bathroom that’s in the actual classroom space, a staff member will need to walk with the child to go to the bathroom,” Wang said. “That’s just an additional layer of challenge staffing-wise.”
In San Juan Unified, near Sacramento, lack of classrooms “has been a concern,” said spokesperson Raj Rai. In 2023-24, 16 of the district’s 28 transitional kindergarten classrooms had waitlists, and about 249 students who applied eventually declined to enroll in TK at the schools where they were assigned, she said. The district has been offering spots in state-subsidized preschool to some families on the waitlist.
San Diego Unified and San Francisco Unified also had waitlists at some schools, but they would not share how many of the children who applied did not enroll.
Some districts that wanted to expand to more 4-year-olds faster than the state’s phased timeline for TK expansion could not because of facilities constraints, Wang said. The state required schools to offer TK to all 4-year-olds who would turn 5 before April 2 in 2023-24, and to all 4-year-olds who would turn 5 before June 2 in 2024-25, but districts could enroll younger children if they had room and met stricter rules: a 1:10 adult-child ratio and a maximum class size of 20.
A spokesperson for Garden Grove Unified in Orange County said the district had to place 84 children who were younger than the TK birthday cutoff on a waitlist this year; 25 had been pulled from the list as of mid-September.
Inequitable access to funding
Districts are often forced to choose between renovating current classrooms, demolishing, then reconstructing new transitional kindergarten classrooms, or purchasing portables, said John Rodriguez, facilities planning director for Central Unified, a 16,000-student district in Fresno County.
“What do you do when there’s growth?” he said. “And where’s the money going to come from?”
This year, overall facilities funding was cut by $500 million to address the budget shortfall, and funding set aside for transitional kindergarten facilities has run out. The state had provided $490 million in grants to construct or retrofit early education facilities, including for TK, in 2021-22 and $100 million in 2022-23, but that funding was “oversubscribed,” the LAO budget brief found. Additional promised funding of $550 million for TK facilities was first delayed to 2024-25, then to 2025-26, and ultimately was eliminated from the budget altogether.
“It puts at risk the ability for school districts who do not currently have the right facilities to provide those proper learning environments,” Sawko, from Children Now, said.
The ability to build new classrooms or renovate old ones is often tied to a district’s property wealth, said Sara Hinkley, California program manager for the Center for Cities + Schools at UC Berkeley.
“The only way for districts to do real facility upgrades, like adding bathrooms and reconfiguring a number of classrooms, is by getting capital funding, which means going to their voters or tapping into an existing bond measure, and districts have really different capacities to do that,” said Hinkley. “If they have less property wealth, they just have less ability to tap their voters to pay for those kinds of things.”
Julie Boesch, the administrator for small school district support in Kern County, said some of the county’s small districts don’t have the classrooms to serve transitional kindergartners at all sites, so they bus them all to one school, sometimes far from home. Other superintendents have said they may not offer transitional kindergarten at all, she said.
She said one small school district north of Bakersfield is constructing a new building for transitional kindergarten but could not afford a new playground. Another district was approved for some state funding for a new TK building but had to put it off because it could not afford its portion. The district did not qualify for the state to pay the full share because its total assessed property value was just over the current $5 million limit. That limit for a district to qualify for full financial help would be increased to $15 million in assessed property value if voters pass Proposition 2, the state construction bond.
“People are really struggling with figuring out what to do and having enough money when they do get funding,” Boesch said. “The frustrations are real.”
Winters Joint Unified School District, a small district serving about 1,500 students in Yolo County in the Central Valley, had to divert funds planned for other facilities to meet the urgent demand for TK classroom space. According to Superintendent Rody Boonchouy, voters passed a bond measure in 2020 to address major maintenance issues, including adding a multipurpose room to an elementary school. But then, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation to expand TK to all 4-year-olds.
“It was a big, ‘Uh oh, what do we do?’ Everything came to a halt and everything shifted toward, ‘How do we ensure we have capacity for TK as it expands?’” Boonchouy said.
After a long process that included a demographic study and analysis of all facilities needs, the district is using some of the bond money to build four transitional kindergarten classrooms in a dedicated wing of the elementary school, with its own playground. The district was also able to do some maintenance at other schools, but it no longer has funds for the planned multipurpose room.
Without that bond money, the district wouldn’t be able to build new TK classrooms at all, a situation Boonchouy knows many other districts face.
“Ideally, in a perfect world,” Boonchouy said, “that legislation (expanding transitional kindergarten) would have come with money to build facilities for it.”
Cindy Crisanto, an ironworker apprentice, says the child care benefit is “a lifesaver” that allows her to pursue a career in construction. She is one of the few women ironworkers on the construction site at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles.
Credit: Courtesy of Cindy Crisanto
After bouncing around in several job paths, including retail sales, office receptionist and warehouse worker, Cindy Crisanto has begun a potentially lucrative career as a welder and ironworker — a field with very few women.
She made that switch with the aid of a new state apprenticeship program that provides child care funds during her on-the-job training, helping her to overcome an obstacle many women face in trying to enter the construction trades while also raising a family.
Crisanto — a single mother of two elementary school-aged boys — is receiving about $800 a month in state subsidies for child care expenses, a part of a push to bolster the ranks of women and other underrepresented people into such male-dominated jobs as plumbers, electricians, carpenters and welders. She is now in her first year of an apprenticeship program run by an ironworkers union local in connection with Cerritos College, a community college near Los Angeles.
“It makes a huge difference. It’s a lifesaver,” Crisanto, 36, of Los Angeles, said of the subsidy. The money is particularly helpful because the very early work hours at construction sites make it hard to find and otherwise afford child care at schools and regular centers, she and others explain. Under the apprenticeship with Ironworkers Local 433, she begins working at 6:30 a.m. installing window and elevator structures at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art under construction south of downtown Los Angeles.
The child care subsidy is part of a wider campaign spearheaded by Gov. Gavin Newsom to expand apprenticeship opportunities in many different fields for Californians usually not pursuing college degrees.
The goal is to enroll a half-million Californians in state-supported apprenticeship programs by 2029 — a huge increase from the approximately 84,000 in 2018 when Newsom announced the effort.
The related child care funding comes from the Equal Representation in Construction Apprenticeship Grant (ERICA), for which the state has appropriated a total of $15.6 million over two years. A participant in pre-apprenticeships — readiness programs that often get them up to speed in math and general work skills — can receive up to $5,000 a year for child care. Those, like Cristano, in the next step, the actual paid on-the-job apprenticeships, can get up to $10,0000 annually.
Officials and labor experts say the child care money represents a new strategy after past efforts to diversify the trades by gender showed little progress. The program is supposed to help “women, non-binary and underserved communities interested in a rewarding career in the building and construction industry,” according to the state Division of Apprenticeship Standards. (Men are eligible as well, but they are not the prime target.) The child care grants became available last year from the state budget and are distributed via labor unions, nonprofit organizations and colleges chosen in a competition.
Another nearly $9 million is earmarked for campaigns to recruit more women, to run career fairs and to offer workplace training.
The goal is to turn those women, many of whom barely made ends meet in the past, into skilled construction professionals earning close to $100,000 a year.
Although the aid seems to be encouraging more women to enroll as apprentices, officials say it is too early to determine whether the program will significantly boost the number who persist through the four years or so the paid trainings can require.
Some 37 women are among the nearly 1,200 apprentices in Cerritos College’s ironworkers program run with the union, according to Graciela Vasquez, the school’s dean of continuing education. But that is about 40% higher than before the child care money and the accompanying push to attract more women into the trades, she said.
In the past, female participation in state-authorized apprenticeships across California could hardly have been smaller.
Women comprise only about 10% of the nearly 95,100 current job training apprenticeships that are formally recognized by the state and receive some state money across many industries, according to the Division of Apprenticeship Standards. Even worse, just 3% or 4% of apprentices in building trades such as carpentry, plumbing, ironworking and electrical are women. However, women are strongly represented in a few apprenticeships, mainly in health care, child care and culinary services.
With the child care grants and other funds for recruitment and training, enrollment of women apprentices in construction appears to be moving “in the right direction,” said Adele Burnes, deputy chief of the state apprenticeship standards agency. “We hope to start to see higher percentages in one, two or three years from now.”
Finding and affording child care can be more difficult because of construction fields’ early work shifts and the need sometimes to work far from home. So the grant had to be “a bit more flexible if we really want to help people in the trades,” said Burnes. The subsidies can be used for private babysitters, even friends and family members, with proper proof of the work hours, as well as for day care centers and after-school care.
Crisanto first earned a certificate in welding at a local adult school and was connected to the career apprenticeship, which includes some classes run by Cerritos College. She uses the child care grant to pay a relative who gets her children ready and takes them to school in the morning. That allows her to pursue a career path that is much more fulfilling and well paid than her past jobs.
She and other women say they sometimes face doubts and harassment in a male-dominated industry. But she added, “I love what I do. That’s what keeps me going, seeing I can keep up with the guys and keep learning. I am making something of myself. And this is my reward: my career.”
The subsidies may make a difference, said Felicia Hall, a workforce development manager for Tradeswomen, an organization that recruits women into construction careers and runs apprenticeship readiness programs across California. “That is one thing we hear from all our mentees, even men. Child care is the No. 1 thing that hinders them from completing the program,” she said.
(The apprenticeships are usually run by councils of labor unions and industries, with the state looking over their shoulders.)
In some locations, the overwhelming number of men in a trade has caused more men than women to receive the child care subsidy, officials report. Nevertheless, Jeremy Smith, of the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California, said the funds are especially helpful to keep women on the job and make “their work-life balance much easier.”
Still, with state revenues in decline, it is not certain whether the money will continue to be available after 2025. Women apprentices hope the program survives.
Rocio Campos, an apprentice ironworker, on a recent construction job at the Los Angeles Zoo. Child care subsidies are important for her.Cerritos College
Rocio Campos came to the U.S. from El Salvador at age 10 and now lives in Littlerock in northern Los Angeles County. Since she was a teenager, she held various jobs, including office work, sales, cashier, drafting and design. Sometimes, she took a second job on weekends to help pay bills. Tired of instability and low pay, she tried to enter a nursing program at a community college but wound up on a waiting list because it was overcrowded. Instead, she took a welding class and enjoyed that. That led to an apprenticeship with Ironworkers Local 433 and jobs assembling solar energy panels and windmills.
A divorced mother, she was able to get between $800 and $1,200 monthly in ERICA child care funds that she uses to pay her mother to take care of her two sons, ages 11 and 17, while she is on the job, sometimes out of state. Previously, she paid her mother out of her own wages. The grant “really helped me out a lot,” Campos, 36, said. And she finds on-the-job satisfaction from “assembling things from bottom to top.”
An ironwork apprentice, for example, usually starts earning about $24 an hour, and that goes up to $47 or so over four years by the time they graduate and become a journey person. Some work can be seasonal with unpaid breaks between projects, but overtime pay can be substantial as well.
Dulce Martinez, 34, of San Jose, emigrated from Mexico at age 11 and, after high school, attended community college on and off. She held a series of jobs — from a house cleaner to a school health clerk — and became the mother of two boys, now 10 and 12. But several years ago, her husband, a construction worker and house painter, suffered an on-the-job injury that makes it difficult for him to work steadily.
With the family’s income strained, she began looking around for a better-paid career. Martinez’s father and other relatives are ironworkers, but she never before thought of following in their footsteps. She then saw a Facebook page from the Silicon Valley-based social justice and training organization Working Partnerships USA, recruiting women into construction and technical jobs. She entered a pre-apprenticeship readiness program and used the ERICA funds for several months to pay a relative to watch her boys since her husband was not always available or well enough.
Then in July, she landed her current apprenticeship as an instrumentation and controls technician at the Santa Clara Water District. She is learning to install and fix the water system’s many meters and controls for pressure, chlorine and other factors. She is earning about $85,000 a year, compared with $35,000 at her old school job, and will be getting raises as the four-year apprenticeship proceeds.
Another attraction is that work is less physically taxing than the electrical or plumbing jobs she first considered. “It was something I couldn’t pass up. Physically, I’m going to be OK, and monetarily it’s going to be good for me and my family,” she said.
