Senate Standing Committee on Education

Okay. I'd like to call this meeting to order. Good afternoon, everyone. This is a joint hearing of the Assembly and the Senate education committees together with the Assembly Arts, Entertainment, Sports and Tourism Committee. We are expecting more Members to arrive, but I'd like to welcome everyone that is here now. This is an informational hearing and update from the California Scholastic Federation, or CIF.

I would like to thank the CIF for all of your work in establishing and enforcing standards to promote the well being of all of our student athletes and our high schools in the state of California. Just want to give a quick overview of today's agenda. We're going to be hearing from the representatives of the CIF to give an overview in the first panel. The second panel is going to focus on issues of gender equity and inclusivity.

The third panel is going to focus on health and safety issues related to our student athletes, including heat, illness, concussions, sudden cardiac arrest, and COVID-19. And last but not least, we're going to invite back representatives of the CIF to talk about some emerging issues, including one of my favorites, sportsmanship and fan behavior. Chair Newman. Sir, would you like to say a few words?

It would be strange if I didn't. Good afternoon, everybody. It is my pleasure, as the newly appointed chair of the Senate Committee on Education to welcome the California Interschoolastic Federation today's hearings. I look forward to learning about the good work the California Interschoolastic Federation provides to our young high school athletes. I'm particularly interested to hear about CIF's efforts related to equity and inclusivity. I'll turn it back to Chair Muratsuchi.

Thank you, sir. And I'd like to welcome the chair of the Assembly Arts, Entertainment, Sports and Tourism Committee, Ms. Quirk Silva. Chair Silva. Quirk Silva, would you like to say a few words?

Just looking forward to the presentation. I'll have comments afterwards. Thank you.

All right. Thank you very much. And welcome to all the Assembly Members and senators who have joined us. Would any of you like to say any welcoming remarks? You don't have to, but if you'd like to, I'll just say that I'm looking forward to being part of this session and working with all of you. Thank you.

Wonderful.

Thank you. With that, I would like to invite up our first panel, Dr. Ron Nosetti, the CIF Executive Director, and Mr. Brian Seymour, CIF Associate Executive Director, to give us an overview of the legislative report that will be presented to us today. Welcome, gentlemen. Thank you for I think you have the button. You just need to pull it to your mouth. Perfect.

Thank you for having us here today to speak before all of you. And you thanked us for our work. And we thank you for all that you do in being a partner with us, especially in these recent years during COVID when it was obviously very much a struggle for our student athletes as they were moving through.

And the cooperation that we had with this body, with the California Department of Public Health and with the Governor's office, we were able to bring back high school sports in as safe as manner as possible during those times. And it was important because there were a lot of high school students that sports in California are free for high school students and there were many that could continue playing sports because they were playing club sports and wasn't the case for all of our families.

So I wanted to start by just hoping those times are very much behind us, but saying thank you for everything we're able to do to get our student athletes back out there playing the games that they love. So what I want to do is just start and give you a brief overview of our organization and then I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Seymour to talk about some of our educational issues with coaching. The CIF is a voluntary membership organization for grades nine through twelve.

We have over 1600 Member schools, 1609 high schools, or Members to be exact. 1200 of those are public institutions, 400 private institutions. We have over 1.88 million students in our high schools, of which 760,000 plus play high school sports. So about 40% of our students are involved. To give you an idea of comparison, the NCAA across the entire country in Division One, Two and Three have 1100 Member institutions and 450,000 student athletes.

So the size and scope of California is why we're organized the way it is and I'm going to talk a little bit about that later. We also have over 70,000 coaches in our state. What's concerning to us today is that over 70% of those coaches are now off campus. Great people who give time and effort on behalf of our student athletes.

But I know when I was in high school, I played a long time ago, played for coaches that also were my teachers that I had access to during the day as mentors. And so that's one thing that we talk to our schools about is how are they bringing their coaches who are off campus on board and talking about the culture of high school sports.

Because it is a very different culture than what we see in maybe other youth sports organizations, and we want to maintain that. In your packet, I just want to call your attention to it, and you can feel free to peruse it later. We gave a map of the state of California and our geographic regions for each of our ten sections.

Our state office is located here in Sacramento and we have ten geographic sections that range from the north all the way up to the Oregon border, to our San Diego section down to the Mexican border. We have our authority in Education code. Education Code 3353 describes us as a voluntary organization with responsibility for administering interscalastic athletic activities in secondary schools.

And we always tread a little lightly there, because while we have that authority, we also work with our schools, our school districts, and the CDE who we're organized under. And so, we want to make sure, no matter what we do with all of our rules and regulations that are passed by our members, we want to make sure we also respect the layers of authority and that our schools and our school districts and our superintendents have authority over issues like student discipline, et cetera.

And so it's a fine line that we weigh, and we're very lucky that we have a lot of supportive groups that work with us to help us achieve that. But we don't have authority in some areas that the same as our school districts have, especially related to athlete behavior and coaches who are the employees of the schools or school districts and not the CIF. The same code is why we're here today.

The same code requires us to file a report every seven years with the state Legislature and these committees, and then to report it, as we're doing today. Our governing structure, I think, is unique in that we're a grassroots approach. Our rules come from our 1609 Member schools.

They are the ones that to give you a good example, we just recently sanctioned the sport of girls flag football in the state of California that started with one person in one league in one of our sections, and is now a state bylaw state sanctioned support. And that's the way we love our organization to work.

It's always better when our membership suggests the rules that they want to abide by and vote on them as a membership versus a top down, where we're being forced to impose what we think is right on our membership. It really has to be something that they vote on. As I said before, we're made up of school communities and school districts.

We have over 200, about, I think, exactly 226 leagues, ranging from four to five schools in a league, up to 16 schools in a league throughout the state of California. We have, as I said, ten section offices, each with their own board, and we have the tents and the section excuse me, the state CIF office with our own boards, our Executive committee, and our Federated Council, which are our governing bodies. We communicate regularly and often with our membership.

Obviously, our phones are open anytime to the members of the public, parents, school communities, during business hours. We also communicate via our website all the various resources that we have available on our website. We provide presentations excuse me. We also have various social media channels that we put out information. We love putting out the information, don't always love the information we receive. In return from comments, we make presentations for the following partners. We work closely with the association of California School Administrators, or AXA.

The California School Boards Association, CSBA, the California State Athletic Directors Association and the California Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance. We have eleven allied Members, including these groups, that are also Members of what are called allied Members at our State Federated Council, each with a vote. At our State Federated Council, we put out a CIF newsletter several times per year. And then we also put out newsletters directed specifically to parents, coaches, principals, and athletic directors.

As far as economic viability and how the CIF is funded, we strive as much as possible to keep our membership dues Low. We currently charge our schools 88 cents per student. If you compare that with what one parent pays for one child to play club sports in California, which can range anywhere from $3000 to $10,000 per season, I think it's a very fair rate that we charge, and we've done so over the years. We've been able to keep those dues very Low.

Back in the 2000, 2001 school year, it was 63 cents a student. It's now eighty-eight cents. And the increase of $0.25 accounted for just increases we've seen in our own legal costs and liability insurance. So, our membership dues have not of student, have not been raised in well over 20 years. The $0.66 is what they pay for legal and liability insurance. Our primary sources of income are our championship events that we run.

Each of these represents a little more or less than a third of our income. So our championship events that we run, our corporate partnerships and our membership dues, as I just described, I'm going to turn it over now. I wasn't sure questions, I'm sure at the end of the entire panel. Perfect.

Great. Good afternoon. I'd like to talk to you a little bit about our coaching education program and some health and safety and sportsmanship items in this next segment. Because our organization believes strongly in the value of education, also wants to value the education for our coaches. And as Dr. Nichetti said earlier, we have 72% of our coaches statewide that are coming from a different line of work prior to 03:00 on our campuses.

So it's invaluable that every coach, whether they're paid and or volunteered across the state of California, goes through a coaches course that teaches them a little bit about philosophies of education in athletics, sport pedagogy, how students learn, psychology of coaching, and how to become a transformational coach rather than a transactional coach.

We also work with the coaches on their physiology, the principles of training and fitness and nutrition for our student athletes, and then also in management, understanding the risks and the liabilities that are out there that a coach assumes responsibility for when dealing with their student athletes. In regards to health and safety. One of the biggest pieces that you'll hear a little later on today, but just in the short term, there's certificates required for all coaches across the state. Again, whether they're paid and or volunteered.

Every single coach has CPR, first aid and AED training every two years. In addition to that, they also have sudden cardiac arrest, heat acclimation training, and of course, concussion training. So all of our coaches, again, regardless of whether or not they're a paid coach or a volunteer coach, all have to go through those standards in order to be on the field, on the pool deck, or on the court with all of our student athletes throughout the state of California.

Sportsmanship, is a big piece of what we do at the state CIF in our ten member sections. One of the resources that we have worked on this year in putting it out is we've developed an entire website designed exclusively, or web pages designed exclusively to be the change that's our tag for this particular year we have seen, as well as you probably have seen just in society, some things that are concerning.

And so, we've made it a point with our member schools to look at those issues and to really dive into those and make sure that our student athletes and our coaches are treating one another with respect and character. Throughout all of our athletic venues, one of the things that we are pursuing, one of our mantras, is pursuing victory with honor and where we promote sportsmanship and good character. And six of those traits are trustworthiness and respect, good citizenship, caring, responsibility, and fairness.

Those are foundational words that we have lived by for quite some time with the CIF, some of the resources that we're going to see a little bit later on today.

But one of the one I want to point out to you is in addition to some of the PSAs that we've put out, expressing the need for our student athletes, our coaches, our administrators, and more importantly, our spectators to treat one another with respect, we have a new training series for our coaches and officials, administrators and spectators. It's preventing and interrupting discriminatory behaviors. Very simple training system that can go through.

Takes them about 15 to 20 minutes to do this and also provides our schools with a number of resources that they can implement on their own campus to combat some of the issues that we're seeing.

Me okay, well, thank you, gentlemen. Any questions from the committee for our first panel? Yes, there's a chair. Quirk - Silva.

Thank you. Great presentation. I wanted to find out more about this. 70% of off campus, in essence, employees. As you mentioned, it used to be staff member would then be the football coach. And now we have what looks to be like the vast majority of coaches now not on campus. Is that an independent contractor situation, or why have you seen this trend increase so much?

Well, I think it's first of all, the coaches are contract with each of our school districts. They're employees of the school district. So that would be dependent upon the school district employer relationship. But I think the trend started years ago. This isn't something new. It's been slowly creeping towards that number. And there's a lot of time we used to have where you would coach a typical high school teacher would coach two or three teams during the year because once football the season was over.

Football season was over. Once basketball season was over, it was over. Now they leave their high school basketball team, and they go play a club basketball for another six months. And so a lot of these coaches feel compelled possibly to also coach the same. So to do that, in addition to teaching full time, I know firsthand the challenges. My daughter is a third year high school biology teacher and coaches. The varsity volleyball team is assistant swim coach and assistant athletic Director.

She hasn't learned to say no yet. As a new teacher, she'll learn, but just the time that I see her go through. But she also comes from a family of teachers. Her mom was a collegiate athlete and a coach, and so she's told her, hey, you grew up in a play pen with a net draped over it so you didn't get hit by volleyballs, so that her mom could keep coaching.

And so she said that's what you're expected to do as well, especially for our female coaches, because we need our female student athletes to see that that can be me. And I want to go into a career where I can have that impact on young people. But I think a lot of it comes down to the schools and who they choose to hire.

There's a lot of pressure on high school principals today on test scores, and they're trying to get teachers who can do that, where before you went into the classroom and you also were learning, but you also contributed as a coach as well.

Thank you. And then one more quick separate question in relationship. You mentioned the stats of how widespread our student athletes are across California, not only participating on campus, but you also said that it's free. I just wanted to kind of comment on that, because we do have many underserved students that whether it's the physical exam they have to have from a medical profession, whether it's the uniform, whether sometimes there's travel involved, there are costs.

And I know that some students actually don't go out for sports because of the affordability. And I know that it's much cheaper than the if you want to say the club sports. And I get it. I came from a large family and many years ago was an athlete myself. But it is a struggle still for many families to kind of support those athletes, especially if there's more than one athlete in a family.

Absolutely true. And we would love to hear from students who are being charged, for example, for school uniforms, because that shouldn't take place. It's an educationally related activity, and it should be free. Now, we all know that that doesn't always happen in practice, but we would absolutely share that information with our schools and school districts. Just to quickly follow up on that before I turn over to Chair Newman. So if any of our families have a complaint, who should they go to?

Should they go to their school site administrator or to the CIF or both? So we always kind of deal with the principle of subsidiarity deal at the level where it's most appropriate. So that could be if you're a member of the freshman baseball team, talk to your freshman coach first. Now, if the complaint is about the freshman coach, then obviously you may want to go directly to your Athletic Director, but it always is the school site.

And then each school district has a universal complaint form so that parents have access to that as well at the school district level. All right. Chair Newman.

Thank you, Chair. And thank you to you both for being here today. First. A question maybe for Mr. Seymour. Maybe Dr. Nassetti. You know, there's been a lot of coverage in the news recently of athletic related injuries, in some cases deaths. And there's been an effort across the last couple of years in California to establish a separate licensing procedure for certified athletic trainers, right? And so clearly the merits, they're fairly obvious, but licensing in California is complicated. What are your thoughts on that?

My understanding is that you don't rely on certified athletic trainers. You rely on the coaches to perform that function. Is that correct?

It is up to and you're going to hear about this a little later from Dr. Chang. In fact, there's also a current Bill that is going to be that has been forwarded again to talk about the licensure of athletic trainers. I believe we are the only state in the United States that doesn't license athletic trainers, and they are a vital resource for our membership.

I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, Mr. Moore, I think 20%, roughly 20% of our schools have access to a full time athletic trainer, and less than half have access to any athletic trainer services. We just had our Sports Medicine Advisory Committee where a group that oversees athletic trainers and gets them into their schools is almost to the point where they're going to have to remove their mandate because they can't find the athletic trainers, because they aren't coming to California because they're not licensed.

So the more we can do to support that, the CIF 100% supports that. Because I think it's something where we have all these what you're going to hear from Dr. Chang regarding all our health and safety issues would be best served on campus with the appropriate person there to help them. Yet it does sometimes fall to our coaches because they're going to do whatever they can to keep their students as healthy and safe as possible.

But they definitely don't have the same training as an athletic trainer would.

I appreciate it. So I guess we'll hear some more about that. So thank you. I want to drill down quickly a little bit on the economics of kind of your model and Dr. Nichetta. You mentioned that the cost is 88 cents per student, but can you give us a better sense of the totals and not just around membership, but around corporate partnerships and the contribution of championship events? What's your total budget?

Our total budget is upwards of almost 6.8 - 6.9 million dollars. And about a third of that budget comes from each of those categories. So, our dues, for example, they're not quite we have 1.88 million students. That changes every year. So at student, let's just say it was a dollar a student, a little less than $2 million comes from our dues. Two point four, two point five million dollars comes from our corporate partnerships, which we share with all ten of our sections.

And then about $3.4 million of that money comes from our championship event structures.

The event structure. What's the model there? How does that break down to generate such a large amount?

So it depends on the event. We have roughly 13 championship events for boys, 13 championship events for girls throughout the school year. Certain events like golf and tennis. There is no admissions fee. We lose money, but we're going to still provide the events where we have, for example, our Wrestling Invitational, which is this weekend down in Bakersfield. It's a hugely popular event in the city of Bakersfield, and we probably bring in several 100,000 dollars.

Contrary to popular belief, our football championships this year, I think we're going to probably lose $90,000 to run our state football championships. So football isn't the driving factor like everyone maybe always thinks it is. Now, the school site may be different, but our championship is not. So that's driven by ticket revenue. We do our best to keep our ticket prices down, but we also have to charge enough because a lot of the money from our event goes back to paying for travel for the teams involved.

It costs us probably, I want to say, upwards of $20,000 to $25,000 to travel an entire football team to a championship. So those are the expenses involved. We usually subsidize ticket prices, for example, at our state football championships, if we charge the ticket price that we needed to to break even at that event, guarantee we're going to break even. We'd have to charge $23 a ticket, and we charge roughly $16 a ticket for adults.

And lastly, let's talk about the corporate sponsorship piece. So how does that model work? What's a typical agreement look like, and what are the kind of obligations on both sides?

So the primary obligations, one thing we don't do is we don't share any data of our schools, so we don't sell email lists. That's what they all want, but we just aren't going to sell private information. They can go look at that on our website. So primarily entails, they get to either provide, have a space there at the event where, for example, the US. Marines are at our championships and students can visit their booth.

We have some that it's signage on the sidelines of a volleyball match or in the signage in the end zone of a football game. But it's usually those are the types of marketing assets they get for their sponsorship dollars.

And how are those sponsorships sold? Are they done at the school level, at the CIF level?

So we control it, and we work with a third party marketing agency similar to a lot of colleges work with someone like Alirfield Sports. Those are the experts. And so we work with a third party agency that does all of our sales, but we have the right of refusal. So we tell them, you are not allowed to sell, obviously, tobacco sponsorships. We're not going to allow you to bring energy drinks into the high school space. So there are certain categories that they are completely off limits.

And even if something is really within the limits but we don't like it, we have final say in what they can and can't sell.

Lastly, lastly, to what extent does the school have right of first refusal or veto power over particular sponsorship?

The school sites are completely up to them. We only sell our sponsorship agreements for our postseason championship events. So that does not infringe upon a school or school district's right to sell their own sponsorships and it doesn't force upon them. Our sponsors appreciate that.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you. Any other questions from committee Members, Mr. Cardio, along the lines of Senator Newman's question on the memberships, are the memberships of the school district total population or just the students that participate in the sports total population? Because they're all eligible to participate. Okay. And on the coaching and education, I believe I heard that you said that it takes 15 minutes to 20 minutes to do preventing and interrupting discriminatory behaviors.

Yes, that's correct. It's about a 20 minutes training video.

And do you find that to be effective in that amount of time to prevent?

Yes, we found it to be a very good starting point when you take it. It then makes the user ask some questions about their own perceived biases and how they can be better at their own site.

Okay. And lastly, just a comment. I'm a firm believer that getting students to be physically active with arts and sports really improves their ability to learn more, to be more successful in their years in education. Are you guys doing any efforts to keep us increasing the number of athletes in the school systems so that they can continue to perform better in their academics?

Yes, that's a great question. And every year in the spring, our schools do a participation survey where we track how many student athletes we have that are participating in all sports across the board, both from male and female. And we also track a number of other things, similar to how many schools have access to a certified athletic trainer, how many schools have access to additional facilities or on campus coaches, and things of that nature.

So adding new sports and taking surveys of their current student population to find out what they would like to do is the method that we use to bring on new opportunities for our student athletes.

And lastly, one more comment. With the increasing popularity of soccer, are you getting more participation from US. Soccer federation to increase the number of.

We have a good relationship with a lot of our national governing bodies. Similar to US soccer, our mission is about all of our students and not just the elite level student that would move on to an Olympic level deal. As you well know, soccer is booming in the state of California, and its popularity is seen across our schools. And so it's one of those sports that's continuing to move up in a number of participation across the board.

Could I add one comment also is, I think, with encouraging student athletes to play sports, I do think the one thing that we, as an organization, as a membership, need to do a better job is increasing participation opportunities for our girls. We still have 100,000 less girls that are playing sports in the state of California, and everyone wants to point to the sport of football and say, well, that's why there's 90,000 student athletes that play football.

We also have over 500 girls that play football, but that's not the reason to not continue. So two years ago, we added the sport of girls beach volleyball. Just recently, our last meeting, we added girls flag football. Our goal is, I hope before I leave this office, that we can say that we have the same amount of girls playing sports as boys. So I don't want to make it seem like there's not work to do. We definitely need to do a better job in that area.

And then with what Mr. Seymour has said about soccer, is correct. The only thing we wish is that they would also reciprocate sometimes with the partnership and not tell their student athletes that they have to make a choice whether they play for their club team or whether they play for their high school team. If a student athlete elects to play for their club team and their high school team, we're going to wish them the best and say, congratulations, that's a choice that you're making.

But let them make it, because when someone does that, the way we look at that is they're opening up a spot at that school for a student athlete that would love to be on that team that maybe didn't make it the year before. But we just want that to be the choice of the student athlete and their family, not because they feel pressured by an outside organization. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Avalino, then Mr. Lackey and Senator Cortesi.

Thank you.

Mr.

Chair. In one of the previous slides, you shared that about 40% of the student body participates in high school sports. Would you say that high school sports is the most used extracurricular activity in high school?

I don't know of one that's more now in this particular school. It certainly could be, but overall, I believe it is the largest cocurricular activity, extracurricular activity in a school, yes.

Awesome. And when it comes to the funding, is it proportionate to the number of students that use and engage in after school sports?

That would be up to each school or school district on how they Fund their sports program within their school or school district.

Do you have a sense, though, in.

Terms of I don't, because I think they're all fairly different. I know that each school has a budget for each. Some districts will Fund their coaching stipends, some leave that to the schools. Some will Fund their transportation. Some the schools have to fundraise to do that. So each one is different. But I can say that I think the schools I know the school superintendents do as good a job as they can to being fair and equitable across the board for their sport.

So then the engagement in an extracurricular activity by high school students, this would be the most that we see.

Yeah, I believe so. Overall, yes.

Thank you.

Thank you. Mr. Valencia. Mr. Lackey.

Yeah. Thank you. I apologize I wasn't able to be here earlier for your presentation, but one of my questions has to do with the fact that I represent a rural district, and some of the schools that I represent are very small. In fact, I represent the high school that I attended and very, very small Enrollment number. But yet when it comes to playoffs, they are put and placed against teams that are ten times their size in Enrollment.

And I was just wondering why enrollment is not taken into account when making the determination on who plays who?

It's a great question, but what we've seen over the years is that enrollment is not necessarily an indicator of how good your team is. So we could have a team that competes at the highest level with an enrollment under 100 and then therefore has earned the right to compete against other schools of Likability, regardless of what the size of those schools are.

We do have multiple divisions in all of our championships that provide opportunities from a competitive standpoint to compete with, like, competitive schools in order to establish the best overall bracket or championship opportunity as possible with the teams that have qualified in a given year for that particular sport.

Yeah.

I can just tell you though, that I don't think that a lot of those schools considered a right to play a school that has substantially and sometimes I'm talking well, the school I'm talking about in particular has enrollment just over 200 and they're facing teams that are twelve to 1500 at least. Sometimes even more than that. So yeah, I'm just trying to understand it.

I understand there's a little bit of competitive consideration, but I think that the advantage is pretty obvious when you have an enrollment of 1500 that you're much more likely to have bigger athletes, bigger players, and bigger doesn't always mean better, but it sure means it has an advantage. And I just wish that the CIF would take that into consideration a little more than they do.

That's all I got. Thank you, Senator Cortese.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I guess the first part of my question is just whether or not this is the right panel to direct the question to. And if not, I feel like my question is a health and safety question per se, but also gets caught up in the competition issue. I feel fortunate being here in the Legislature the last two years to see an increase in attention to mental health issues in schools. Certainly this committee has taken it up.

The entire Legislature has tried to move forward legislation and budget provisions that really focus on that area at home. And I'm a Senator from San Jose and the West Valley cities. West of San Jose? Currently. We hear from constituents a lack of concern. Of course, that would be the CCS section down there. I can't validate this. I've never been to a section meeting. I've certainly seen correspondence go back and forth.

But it's sort of a lack of concern about issues that either are behavioral health issues or relate to behavioral health issues or exacerbate behavioral health issues where a student needs to move from one school to another but gets hung up in a set of competitive rules that throw up barriers to that.

Again, it's very difficult, challenging for a legislator here in Sacramento or even at home in the district in the limited time we have week to week to investigate or have your staff investigate those kinds of issues. We've certainly weighed in and encouraged great attention to those issues. And I would suspect that none of these sections gloss over them. But again, first question is, are you the right folks to direct that question to?

The question at the end of the statement is how do we know that the very mental health issues and bullying issues and behavioral issues that we are trying to put an end to disrupt mitigate here in the Legislature aren't going to be glossed over for the sake of competitive advantage from one district or one school to another? And again, we've seen those allegations.

I don't know how many others up here have seen those allegations and how well founded they are, but they certainly seem to be well founded at times. And I just like to hear your response.

Absolutely. And this is a conversation I think I could speak to the rules side of this for sure, and then if you had additional conversations, when Dr. Chang comes up, you can absolutely ask her. But I want to make sure, number one, we say that we will never gloss over anything that comes from this body. Our bylaws, especially many of our health and safety bylaws mirror what was codified as state law. So we're committed to doing that.

We do have a hardship circumstance for safety issues and a specific safety incident of a student and whether it's related to mental health or bullying or hazing that if there is a specific documented incident that created a safety issue for the student at that school that they can and that's been documented with the school or with outside law enforcement, for example, that they can move without penalty from school A to school B. We're dealing with many different constituencies when things come forward.

Another example I can give you that hit home with us was McKinney vento and homeless students. And we have sped up our timeline to make sure that if we have a homeless or foster youth that comes through our transfer system, we speed up our timeline to make them eligible as soon as humanly possible.

However, we also saw this year I don't want to say for the first time, but a pretty public case this year where a student moved to California, claimed homelessness, even though both parents had a residence in the state they were coming from. And it turned out that they primarily were here to gain access to NIL. And so we had another student transfer.

And our bylaws say if you make a full family move that you can transfer without penalty, they moved to another state during COVID and because they didn't move with both mom and dad, mom and dad got a divorce so their son could play high school football. So those are the extremes, but it's hard to write a rule for every circumstance.

But we are engaging in the discussion about what would be an appropriate rule with respect to mental health of student athletes, not simply a one or two sentence letter from a psychologist said they need to change from school A to school B. How do we document to make sure that people aren't take advantage of a rule that's in place?

Let me follow up to the chair. I appreciate that. And I was pretty familiar with most of those rules. Again, just from constituent services. The constituent services aspect of our job or my job, I would encourage there's 15,000 McKinney Vento students a year in our high school, seniors in our high school. That's just the seniors. There's over 200,000 McKinney Ventil kids in the schools. Probably many of them would like to play sports.

How many folks, homeless or not, unhoused or not, are moving because of cost of living issues, lack of housing, affordability from one place to another? It's just a huge impact, I think, as we all know, on a student's mental health, not even getting to the point that we just came through a pandemic. So I don't think a one size fits all approach is going to work. And I don't think focusing on the fraud as the common denominator is going to work.

We have that problem across agency issues here in Sacramento, as I think everybody knows, if you spend all your time setting your rules at the lowest common denominator at fraud, there's just going to be a whole bunch of folks who have legitimate concerns that are going to get squeezed out. So maybe just sharing, and it's an informational hearing, sharing the kind of things that are percolating into state Senate offices and legislative offices through the constituent services aspect of what we do.

And it's probably good for you to know that we're hearing these things and have concerns.

Absolutely. And I always encourage anyone to reach out to our office. And we want to know those things and when they occur, we know with all of our rules that while hopefully it weeds out the people that are trying to break the rules, we are going to catch a lot of people that aren't trying to break the rules. Absolutely. Thank you. We have Mr fong, then Mr. Lackey, then Ms.. Daly. Thank you so much, Mr. McCarthy, then, Ms.. Daly. Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman.

And thank you, CIF, for that presentation. As you mentioned, CIF recently voted to officially sanction girls flag football. Whether efforts are being done by CIF to move closer to gender equity in high school athletics. So again, girls flag football, girls beach volleyball. We also want to have conversations with our schools about the sports they currently offer.

There are some sports where there are two freshman teams and for maybe a boys basketball team and a girls basketball team, but yet we see 40 or 50 girls that are cut from their freshman volleyball team. Why is there not a second freshman volleyball team? And we do realize that when we're talking about this, every school is different, facilities are different, access to coaches are different. But we just ask that they continue to look at ways to do it.

We provide them with resources on all the different strategies they could use, especially with one way they're supposed to be using. The survey they're supposed to be using to satisfy Title Nine requirements is asking the students, what are you interested in? And are we meeting those needs of that student survey that we give to show we're complying with Title Nine. So I think that's a huge strategy for our schools to employ. Thank you so much. Thank you.

I want to remind the panel our next panel is going to be on gender equity and inclusivity, including Title IX, and then we're also going to have the following panel on health and safety issues. Mr. McCarty, then Ms.. Dolly. Yeah.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

And I apologize, my questions are on the later panels, but I have to go to a budget hearing on homelessness, another important topic in California. So if I could just ask a couple questions here.

Mr.

Chair, first of all, thank you to CIF for doing an amazing job. And I think the bottom line is all the research shows that kids who participate in sports, they may or may not make professional a team may or may not play in the Olympics, but research shows they're better in their student academics and better off in life. So that's more importantly the issue. So thank you for doing that. And I know that during the pandemic was really hard.

We reached we got to you and worked with you on rescheduling games during those early days. So thank you for that. I wanted to ask about football, specifically tackle high school football and what's happening across the nation. So numbers have been declining in large part because of the risk of injury. And I know that's part of your later discussions. You said California is roughly 90,000 tackle.

Football, a little less than 90,000 players. What was it at its peak at 104,000.

Okay, I know, like, maybe it's different here, but across the nation, I think it went down by way more than that. Maybe California.

Yeah, it varies depending on the state you're in. The state of Texas, it actually tends to go up. In California. It's gone. We lost about 10% for several years, and now we've lost about three or 4% the last few years nationwide. I don't know the specific number, but I can certainly find that out and send it to the committee staff Members.

But the real question I have for you on this issue is with some of the major lawsuits on CTE and concussions, there's a major lawsuit, the NFL and some other lawsuits and class action lawsuits on the high school level, is there a risk that the high school teams and the districts won't be able to get insurance for participation in those sports? I know there was a hypothetical about that a couple of years ago before the pandemic and just wanted to know, has that.

Come up at all in California.

We have not heard that specifically from our membership that they're unable to get insurance. I would suspect that the insurance rates may be going up for that, but that would be a question I'd have to put out, maybe survey our superintendents advisory group that we have to ask that question. Thank you. Any questions you have that I'm unable to answer today, please submit to me and we'll provide a written response. Thank you, Ms.. Dolly.

Thank you. And thank you for being here today. So I have a question, a follow up question on the participation surveys that you do. Do you ask about barriers in your surveys? Like, is there a reason that you haven't participated in sports yet? If you're a sophomore in high school, why didn't you get into sports as a freshman specifically? We're talking about, like, financial barriers. Do you ask that question in your surveys?

Not at the state level when we accumulate that data, but that's one that comes out at the local level, because the principal of that particular school or the superintendent of that district will want to know the answers to those questions so that they could maybe figure out a solution to some of those problems that are directly related to the site itself.

Is that something you've considered at the state level to try to compile that information?

Well, it's certainly something that we could look at doing it's just wondering if we would be better served at the local level, because then we'll get a truer reflection in different parts of the state where we've notified we can see we have an issue. We have to figure out a way to solve those issues in certain areas.

And also to follow up on the hardship. So there have been a lot of wildfires in my districts throughout the years, and children have to move because they may lose their school altogether. Is that part of the hardship appeal process as well?

Yes. So what we'll issue is an immediate resolution that our schools, we let the transfer issues then happen at the local level. So all they have to do is submit the piece of paper to us saying that here is a list of students, potentially not even just one for each, that have experienced a hardship. We had one up in our northern section two years ago where an entire community was destroyed, and we're not going to make each of those families go through our hardship process.

So we did a blanket waiver of our transfer rules in that case, similar to what we just did with students being displaced from Ukraine, that they can immediately participate. The principal signs off and designates that this is valid. We trust our administrators there.

Thank you.

That's very helpful. Also. So my son was a wrestler. I'm sad I'm not going to be in Bakersfield this weekend, but I do know he came from a school of 50 students and went to state, but he wrestles against kids from all we have a very large state, so Reagan very proud. He took fifth at state.

But has there ever been a consideration because wrestling is what you weigh, and that's where you wrestle to maybe have divisions in our state, considering you're wrestling against kids from LA and you're from absolutely.

Absolutely. It's one of the unique aspects of not only our swim and dive, our track and field, and our wrestling. It's one race, one event, one weight class. Everybody's involved. Our wrestling advisory committee and our Member schools have had this debate specifically about wrestling. This is year 13 for me in the office, and it precedes my time.

But as Dr. Nocetti mentioned earlier in our governance process and how things come, that's up to our member schools to bring forward a concept or an idea, and then it's brought to the membership. And so when it gets to that point previously, it's very difficult, as you well know, for your son to get even onto the podium at that particular event. And that's the way it has remained.

Other states do have different divisions, correct?

Yes, there are other states that do have different divisions, different formats. It's a myriad of different types of things across the nation.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you. Any other questions from the committee? I have one, which is I've heard from a family friend the concern that their high school I think it was basketball, basketball coach, not only coached at the high school, was the coach for the varsity boys basketball team, but also had their travel club. And speaking to the issue of financial barriers, they couldn't afford to participate in the travel club.

And there was a perception I don't know what the reality was, but the perception was that you had to be on the travel club in order to be actually, yeah, he didn't make it on the varsity team because the perception was only the kids in the travel club will make it onto the varsity team. Are there any conflict of interest regulations like that related to? Yeah. No.

We used to have one section that had a rule that a coach couldn't be associated with more than, I think, three Members of their team at any one time. And then there was lawsuits threatened about limiting what income they could make because they don't make a lot of money as a coach. And so they wanted to be able to coach both. What you're bringing up is a perception, and in some cases, I'm sure it's probably warranted it happens.

And that's where when we hear these things, we go right to the school principal, school athletic Director, school district, and inform them, this is what's being said. This is something you probably want to look into and make sure that you're doing a fair and complete tryout that's objective. And that's part of what we talked about earlier. With having 70% of our coaches now being off campus coaches, that is one of the issues that we're going to continue to see. Okay, thank you very much.

Seeing no further questions. Thank you. Dr. Nocetti, you're going to be staying at the table. No. Okay. Is it Mr. Seymour? Dr. Nocetti. Okay. All right. Next I'd like to oh, let me turn it over to chair. No, man.

Thank you. Not that it matters a great deal. So. Thank you, Dr. Nichetti. I know we'll see you again for that first panel. Very thorough and very useful for us. We'll now move to the second panel in today's hearing. This is the panel discussion on gender equity and inclusivity. Mr. Seymour, I understand you'll continue participating. And welcome to Diane. Marshall Freeman, who works CIF's General counsel. Welcome, Ms.. Marshall Freeman. You may begin when you're ready.

Well, good afternoon. I am. I'm Diane Marshall Freeman. I'm a partner with the law firm of Fagan, Freeman, and Full Frost, and I've had the honor for serving as General counsel for this organization for close to 20 years now. So I think I'm the longest tenured staff Member here. My contribution today is going to be on Title Nine, and then I will be speaking afterwards in regards to transgender student athletes.

I'm going to begin with Title Nine, and I think we all know that as of 2022 serves as the 50th year of Title Nine since it was enacted. And I believe I'm uniquely suited to give this presentation because I'm a baby of Title Nine. I started my intercollegiate my inner scholastic and my intercollegiate career at the birth of Title IX when it was passed.

In short, and I know I'm preaching to the choir, but I'm just going to share that Title Nine provides that we cannot discriminate based on sex for recipients of federal funds for our purposes in high school athletics, for our public schools, our Member schools. I could read the statute to you, but I think you already have the background in regards to Title Nine. But it does say I'm going to hit it specifically a little bit.

It says that we can't exclude individuals from participating, deny them any benefits of nor can we give them differential treatment based on gender, based on sex. So since Title Nine was enacted in 2000 and I'm sorry, in 1972, we've come a long way back in 1972, in the entire country, there were approximately 300,000 women and girls participating at the high school and collegiate level to date.

Well, as of 2022 or as of to date, there are over 300,000 students alone, female students, participating in the state of California. So we have come an awful long way in the United States or in California. We can talk about what states our female athletes are participating in. And there is I'm going to kind of go from top to bottom here.

We have girls participating, track and field, volleyball soccer, basketball, fast pitch, softball, cross country tennis, swimming, diving, cheer, and competitive cheer, or stunt cheer, lacrosse and lacrosse. Those are the top ten. But as Mr. Nichetti took a little bit of the wind out of my sails here with talking about how we need to improve. But I will also state this in regards to the number of female participants that we have in California, we probably going back and forth with Texas, give or take.

Ten students or so are number one, if not number two, depending on the day in the country, on the number of female participants in high school athletics. But while we have that number, while we have that 325,000 students participating in the state of California and high school athletics, there is still a differential, there's a deficit of about 100,000 female students less participating in athletics. And the question is, how do we correct that? How do we move forward?

And Dr. Nocetti was talking about that in what steps we do take. I will say back in 2010, we added girls wrestling. And that's one of those sports. And some of you may remember Field of Dreams, where they said if you build it, they will come. And they came. Girls wrestling is huge in the state of California. Back in 2016, we added girls stunt.

We added beach volleyball a year, two years ago, 2021, which I think is a little bit of a misnomer because you don't really need a beach, all you need is sand for purposes of girls volleyball. But we've now added and you may have seen you heard from Ron, certainly 2022, three, we have sanctioned girls flag football. This is, again, one of those sports where if we build it, they will come.

It is sweeping across the country, so we expect exponential growth in terms of the number of our female athletes, particularly with the birth of flag football here in California. But Title IX alone doesn't only talk about educational opportunities. It talks about equal benefits and treatment for our student athletes. So there is what we call the Title IX laundry list. You may be familiar with that, particularly in the collegiate realm where you've heard, well, are there benefits equal in terms of locker rooms, transportation funding?

It goes down a whole list of what we call the 13 items or the twelve items on the laundry risk that our schools have to look at to make a determination as whether they're providing equal access or equal treatment for purposes of benefit and treatment of their female students, student athletes and their male student athletes. With that, what we have done at the CIF is provide a number of resources for our schools. We've done some training for our schools.

Certainly we have our websites that provide training modules on them, but we also have resources online. And what we do have, for example, I won't go through the whole list, but there's a guide here on our website that's accessible not only to our school Members, but the public that speaks to guide to equity plain fair Title Nine and gender equity in K Twelve athletics. Fair play. Title nine playbook. And it goes on.

There must be eight or nine resources that we do have available in the area of Title IX. And that's where we are in title nine with title nine in California. We're moving forward. We're going to keep moving forward. Our schools are required every year to conduct their participation. Surveys provide that information not only to the CIF, but also to the California Department of Education.

All right, thank you very much. Questions from the committee chair, Newman. Oh, I'm sorry.

Thank you, Ms. Marshall Freeman so, as the father of a six-year-old girl, I'm very grateful for Title IX, especially because she has no obvious athletic ability. So, title nine is her best shot. A couple of questions, and I know, Dr. Nocetti, you touched little bit earlier on outreach as part of the requirements of Title Nine. Could you tell us across the state what you're seeing by way of best practices for the kind of survey outreach that is informing your Title Nine efforts?

Well, I was going to say Dr. Seymour, but Brian Seymour here will also add to this response, because our schools are required annually to provide that information to the Cde, fill out that survey, submit the survey also to the CIF, and they're supposed to be posting it on their websites. But with that, the survey will include a number of questions. For example, what sports would you like to participate in? Are you interested in anything else?

We've had states that we have some sports that are listed that are not sanctioned. For example, maybe surfing, or we do have rodeo that are provided as club sports, different levels of sports that are provided, and any other outreach that they do have on the survey itself.

Yeah. I think the most important thing that we provide at the state office for our Member schools is the workshops in regards to title and when Dr. Nocetti and myself get a chance to speak to other organizations bringing up what they can do, how to improve the opportunities for female students on their campus, how to include them in more of what they already offer is something that's very beneficial for our schools to hear.

And I would add this. As I was presenting at a high school, I was asked to speak for a group of young girls at a high school, and Title IX has empowered them to have their voices heard. They asked the question, how do we get this? How can we do that? Are our facilities equal to that of the boys? Do we have transportation available to us? So the question is out there. I believe that the information is out there.

We've empowered our own girls to now start asking the questions themselves.

Let me shift to another dimension of inclusivity students with disabilities. Is that a different presentation, Mr. Seymour?

That'll come up here shortly?

Okay, so we're doing this in parts. Okay, so we're going to talk about Title Nine for now. Well, let's move on to other Members of the panel. Any other Members of the panel questions? Assembly Member Quick Silva I have a.

Comment and a question. I am a product of Title IX as we can do the math. I'm 60 years old, so I was nine years old when Title I was. But I also know that access for women particularly, makes the difference of girls going into sports and high school. So an example of that is in the city of Fullerton. They opened up Olympic size pool in 1976 when I was going into junior high.

So I actually swam there, not very well, not very fast, but I actually swam. So then when I went to high school, I then indeed not only swam four years, but guess what? I played on the boys water polo team. Why? Because there wasn't a women's water polo team. But that being said, I graduated in 1981. And those years I also played something that we don't call it anymore, Bobby Socks, which again, this is part of the age.

So, there has been involvement, but it really goes to the fact that from the K-8, that when we can increase that enthusiasm for sports or anything, whether it's music, whether it's dance, whether it's theater. We know that's how they move up into the high school. So, one of my questions is there any conversations from junior high? Because we know some junior highs have sports, some don't have sports. So, it's all about that access. But I think that's something that's really important.

And then one question is, is dance considered sports and what is stunt?

Those are good questions. Yes, I'll tackle the we're of similar age, and I remember my middle school years with a robust, full athletic program. That is not the case statewide, as it was back in the early late 1970s, early 80s. So many of our junior high programs that do offer sports actually reach out to us to see if we could use our rules for sports as a model that they can follow. So I think that's one of the issues there.

As you mentioned, if you have access at an early age, you're more inclined to be involved later on in high school. One of the other things that we ask our member schools to do is to do exactly that ask. Sometimes it just needs someone to go out there and say, I think you'd be really good at this. Would you try? And that needs to happen more often in our schools to get students to take that step and then get involved.

And it doesn't make a difference whether it's athletics or if it's in the band or drama or mock trial or student government. It's just that opportunity to be asked to do so, to see about someone saw something in me, and I encouraged me to do that. The idea of trying to increase those types of participation levels that you mentioned is something that we deal with on a regular basis, on an annual basis, to try to figure out how we can improve on those.

And could you ask your final question again, was stunt? Stunt. Stunt is a competitive it's not competitive cheer. Competitive cheer is a little bit different. Competitive cheer is one team on a mat doing a two and a half minute choreographed routine as the judges panel. Stunt is a series of not only competitive gymnastic, lifts and cheer, but it's done simultaneously with another team on the mat.

So no different than a volleyball match between Team A and Team B. They're all doing the same routine, and they're being judged on how well which team does that routine. It's broken up into four quarters similar to a game, and there is typically a normal traditional schedule of playing a match against School B on Tuesday night and then playing a match against School C on Thursday night with tournaments and things of that nature.

So in the state of California, traditional competitive cheer, we conduct that in the winter as a season sport, and stunt is done in the spring. So that's just now. Beginning right now, dance normally falls under the guidance of our physical education departments at our Member schools, and they have actually a different type of program that they follow. We do not oversee the sport or the dance itself.

It doesn't fall into the traditional competitive cheer model at this point in time, but again, that's something that may evolve into that in the future.

Senator, may I add just 1.0 for you in regards to your point, which was excellent in terms of access. I grew up south. Central LA. There were no black volleyball players, no African American volleyball players when I was growing up. So in terms of providing access at an early age, community access, I think, is key to some of the areas that you're talking about, whether it is tennis or golf in certain communities to be able to increase their participation at the high school level.

And my last comment will be that that's where we're starting to see a huge difference in equity, because many cities are cutting their parks and rec programs, and school districts are cutting their parks and rec, not parks and rec their athletics, or it varies school to school.

So, again, unless you have a family who's moving you up through these out of school experiences, you may very well have just say, a 12 - 14-year-old girl who starts high school and thinks, I'm never going to try out for a team because I don't have any experience in it. So they're just not even going to make that step.

Thank you. Ms. Quick-Sila, any other questions from any other Members of the committee? Mr. Chair?

Thank you. Question does the CIF track or are you aware of data on how many uniform complaints regarding Title IX have been made over the years? Like, is there a trend for purposes.

Of the uniform complaint under TitleX that school districts are required to comply with? Those forms are not provided to the CIF. They're held internally within the school district. Unless there is an appeal directly to either the Department of Education or the other appeal process would be through the governing board of that specific school district.

Right now, there is no requirement for school districts to report Title IX complaints to anyone?

No, it does not exist at this point in time as a requirement to provide it. Now, we may get information or questions that arise, but in terms of the submission of the forms themselves, no, sir.

All right, thank you.

Any other questions from any other committee Members? Okay, part two on gender equity and inclusivity, the inclusivity portion. So, Mr. Seymour, I believe you have.

I'm going to just jump right in, please. Transgender student athletes. It'll be, I think, an important but rather brief presentation because the CIF believes in inclusivity and providing participation opportunities for all of our students, despite any protected, certainly including students within protected classifications. But thanks to this California Legislature, the CIA Legislature, we have not had to debate, we have not had to exclude students based on any legally protected classification, whether it's the race, gender, and that includes our transgender students.

The CIF again, likes to we want to provide opportunities for all our students to participate in athletics. We welcome that participation. The CIF complies with the nondiscrimination laws of the state of California and the federal nondiscrimination laws. So I'm going to just kind of go through briefly for you what the law provides.

And, as you all may be, I'm assuming, are aware that California law under the Education Code section 212.5 F provides that a pupil shall not be permitted or shall be permitted excuse me, strike that. Shall be permitted to participate in sex segregated school programs and activities, including athletic teams and competitions and use facilities consistent with his or her gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on the pupil's records. So that's state law. That's what we provide.

That's the information we share with our schools when we provide our training, when the question comes up, we also provide that information. We take a look at the federal law, the federal law, which also provides under Title IX, that there shall not be discrimination based on gender or sex, which would include transgender, of allowing the participation in and not an exclusion from programs that are provided federal funding.

What we do do is, for example, back in 2016, the Department of Federal Department of Education provided, issued a guidance protecting transgender students, answering that Title IX bans discrimination based on the student's gender identity. And recently, fairly recently, in 2021, you had Executive Order 13 98 from President Biden, which again cites to the protection of our LBGTQ students and seeing that they should have the same receive equal treatment and benefits under the law, no matter gender identity or sexual orientation.

We at the CIF developed a bylaw back in 20 13 13 bylaw 300 D, which mimics California law. Essentially, it says that students are going to be allowed to participate. They shall not be discriminated against. They shall not be excluded from participation in athletics based on their gender identity.

And with that, what we provide at the CIF for our Member schools is on our website, we have a resource, our Gender Diversity Youth inclusive toolkit, which we provide for all of our Member schools and for the public to be able to access, which allows them the opportunity to receive some additional information and resources. It talks about everything from the federal and state laws, gives them the background and history, gives them definitions. It talks about specific terminology that's used.

It talks about optimizing inclusion and provides question and answers. If there's a specific question a school may have, they can take a look at the website. The answer may already be there, and it provides a number of additional resources. So with that, that is the presentation on transgender students.

Any questions from the Committee on Transgender Students? One quick question. So it's obviously a hot button issue in lots of places, hopefully not as much in California. Any recent sort of developments around issues at the district or school level around the participation of transgender students that you're aware of?

What I have seen, and this is not so much at the CIF level, but the school districts that we do represents the question that we represent. In my law firm, the issues will come up from schools. How do we assist? How do we help? Do you have any information? And I think for purposes of the CIF level and Brian would be able to speak to this better than I am is to having that toolkit. There has been a response. Thank you.

Thank you for providing us information, helping us to figure out some of the issues that are involved there.

Yeah, it's a resource. Anything new? There's change involved in that. Sometimes people are hesitant. So having the resource and providing it to our schools, we've heard directly back from them that, thank you. This is a great starting point and helps us navigate what we need to do to make it an inclusive environment in our campus.

Okay, let us then move on to the third bullet here of inclusive sports.

Absolutely. In 2015, many of you know that the CIF and the California Department of Education kind of ventured into a great partnership with Special Olympics Northern California and Special Olympics Southern California to bring unified sports programming to our CIF schools. And it's been a big success. The participation opportunities for student athletes with disabilities were not there until unified programming was brought on board.

And what we found from that is that our school cultures, the culture of our schools, has changed dramatically for the better because it brings more inclusivity to our total student population. Giving an example, the power of sport that can occur on our campus, this is directly from a superintendent that brought on unified programming into their campus. There was a student that they had disciplinary issues with, traditional student that had disciplinary issues, was not involved in anything.

Once they brought unified programming on, the very first event that the teams were going on the bus to head to another school. This discipline student shows up, and the actual superintendent was there with the principal and was like, okay, where are you going? You're not getting on her. And the student lifted up their shirt and saw that he was wearing the Unified Team logo and team uniform number.

So it took that one bit for that student to find a connection to no longer be the discipline issue anymore. Now he's a Member of that team. And that's the power of the unified programming that we've seen on our school campuses. And that's just one story that we've heard from numerous different people throughout the state nowadays. Right now, our schools are participating in Unified Soccer, unified Bowling, unified Bocce Ball, unified Basketball.

And at the state level, they're participating in unified track and field, where we have unified schools that are competing through their league and section and then on and competing at our State Championships that are held at the end of May in Clovis. So it's been an exciting change there. And continuing on with the theme of inclusive culture, the CIF has also sponsored with the Challenge Athletes Foundation, where we work closely to provide opportunities in track and field for athletes with physical disabilities.

Challenge Athlete Foundation has provided CIF with grants for training of coaches, equipment for our student athletes that need special racing wheelchairs and throwing chairs for track and field, and also have been there to provide competitive expenses, maybe for transportation for some of our schools. When they have a Paralympic athlete that's competing on their high school track and field team, the Paralympic student athletes compete side by side with their fellow classmates and advance through, again, section and State Championships events in track and field and in swimming.

And finally, just want to throw out a piece about our student services for scholar athlete awards, spirit and Sport and community service this school year 22-23. Our state office is proud that we're going to be presenting roughly $135,000 in scholarship money for our seniors who are selected to win our spirit of sport, our scholar athlete, which those of you in the Assembly and the Senate on an annual basis receive those two students in the chambers in a resolution in the end of May.

And so we're pretty proud of that dollar amount moving forward. Thank you.

And thank you. I have one question. Look to the committee Members for other questions. As it relates to providing opportunities to students with disabilities, that's obviously not simple, and I think in many cases, it's expensive. So do you see instances where that creates cost pressures, either at the district level, school level, and is there anything that you would recommend that the state should do to offset some of those costs?

Well, I think the Members of the Senate and the Assembly have identified the need for Special Olympics, northern California and Southern California, because in the last two budgets, you've provided substantial resources for those organizations. And you're absolutely right. There is an additional cost for some athletes, depending upon what their disability is, to get them to be transported to and from. It's not like you can simply pull up and put somebody who is in a specially designed wheelchair into the back of a car and transport them.

Those things take some forethought and some planning to do so. But as our schools take that first step to get involved with unified programming on their campus, they find ways to the value of watching those student athletes get to participate and represent their high school far exceeds some of the hurdles that those administrators have to tackle in order to make it work.

And you mentioned that some of those costs are offset by some of the partnerships that you referenced. To what extent do they offset?

It depends. They're on case by case because schools can go ahead and reach out through, for instance, our Challenge Athletes Foundation that we work with, and they can earn some sort of grant or any type of funding that would help them with those specific deals. Primarily, it's equipment, getting the proper equipment so the athlete can go ahead and compete at the highest level.

Thank you. Questions from the committee? No? Okay, terrific. Thank you for that panel. Let me now turn the gavel over to Assembly Member Kirk Silva for the next panel.

Thank you again for the presentations and very informative. And as we've already said, we note that when students participate in sports, they do well in many areas, not just better, in some cases academically, but as you move towards the future. As I've stated and others who are athletes up here have said, in many cases, sports has been the foundation for our future success.

Big believer in John Wooden's pyramid of success and believe that in many ways, I wouldn't be sitting on this dais without being a former athlete. As I said, not a very good athlete that didn't win almost any swim races, but still, I stuck to it. So with that, we are excited to hear about this next panel. We know that there's headlines that appear, of course, when there are, whether it's heat exposure, whether it's concussions, things that are related to health for our athletes.

So we want to welcome Dr. Cindy Chang, who is the chair of the CIF sports Medicine advisory committee. Welcome.

You can hear me? Okay, great. So thank you for the introduction. Everything that each one of you said resonated with me. I'm 60. My kids went to a public school and played sports in Berkeley. I moved here in 1995. I was a Member of the Ohio State High School Athletic Association on their sports medicine advisory committee. Very small compared to what I entered into when I came to California, and I joined the Smack in around 1999.

So if you have a slide in front of you, I have been participating in many different sports medicine organizations over my 30 year career, with Paralympics with Olympians. I'm now the CMO of the NWSL. But we have many other committee Members that are part of the Sports Medicine Advisor Committee who have diverse experiences in sports. And if you talk to, for example, one of my colleagues is a CMO of Major League Baseball, so we all bring in very different experiences.

I was also the head team position at Cal for many years. But what brings us the most joy is really making sure that we're making youth sports safe for all of our high school athletes as well as down to middle schools, because we do know about the trickle down effect that goes from the elite level all the way down to our youth levels. So that is our goal is to make things safe for our student athletes.

I also would like to reiterate that the Licensure Bill coming forward for athletic trainers ron, I'm sorry, Dr. Nocetti, I've never called him that. Dr. Nocetti was very correct in his statistics. And the thing is that what we're going to be talking about, which are preventable tragedies that could happen to our athletes, they are benefited if you have that school that offers an interathletic program, if they have a certified athletic trainer there to help with some of these regulations.

So we'll talk about these and then if you have questions, I'm certainly welcome them. So we talked a little bit about Sports Medicine Advice committee made up of physicians as well as athletic administrators, principals, athletic trainers. We all take part in really advising the CIF in terms of sports medicine health and safety issues.

We are a volunteer committee, so none of the $0.88 on a dollar goes to pay us, except for our travel expenses and we have a really nice lunch when we do have our meetings. We do have, as you know, the emergency action plan. There was a law, it was passed in 2019 that every school should have an Emergency Action Plan and should have an automated external defibrillator. Again, it was in the law.

It says that it's strongly encouraged that it be accessible to the intercollegiate correction, sorry, I'm at all different levels of sport to the high school athletes, accessible to the coaches, the athletic trainers or school administrators. We as a committee really emphasize to all of our member schools that it needs to be accessible within 3 minutes of a medical emergency. And so that means on a really large campus, you need to have more than one AED per school, which is what the law says.

But we hopefully encourage our member schools to abide by what the American Heart Association and other institutions say, okay? Because that's how it's going to be most beneficial to saving a life if it's within 3 minutes of a medical emergency. In terms of heat, illness, we also encourage all of our schools, we do have to purchase wet bulb globe thermometers. Now, you guys may not be familiar with that. You know what a thermometer is? It just measures the temperature.

But the WBGT is a special thermometer, which actually measures things more specific in the climate. So besides the temperature, it measures humidity, it measures cloud cover. So if it's a sunny day or if it's a cloudy day, it measures the angle of the sunlight.

So if you're practicing, for example, at noon, where the sun is directly overhead versus later in the afternoon at an angle, it also measures there's a fifth thing, and I have to say I'm more nervous talking to you guys than I am talking to 2000 of my colleagues at a medical conference. But you're making it easier. And I think wind speed, that's the last one. Okay, so those five components all take part in this measurement.

And this is a much more accurate measurement than just a temperature. It's a much more accurate measurement than heat index, which looks at humidity and temperature, but in the shade. So we encourage all of our Member schools to have one. The NFHS gave us a grant. We were able to distribute 400 of these to our schools, primarily in zones.

If you go through your slideshow, you'll see that there are three zones in the state of California, because we know that if you're in the central valley, you're going to be more acclimatized to practicing and playing in heat. Higher WBGTs than you're in the coast coastal areas. And so you can see that there are three zones one, two, and three. I'm from zone one, meaning I'm more coastal. Yet this fall, we had a high school athlete collapse at a cross country meet in San Francisco.

With heat stroke 105 degrees. She needed to be placed in a cooling ice, cooling tarp, and her life was saved and her life was saved by an athletic trainer, because had gina not been there, it's okay for me to use her name. Had not been there to cover that event, then the responsibility would have been on the coaches who aren't there. They're on some parts of the course. They're not always at the finish line, and those resources wouldn't have been there.

That emergency action plan for that venue wouldn't have been established. Or if it had been, it would have been great. Kudos but that's an extra burden on our coaches, and we already can't get coaches into our schools. Believe me, I am an avid recruiter of coaches. And the thing is that once the coaches are in the school, that's how they can recruit females to join the teams.

If your athletic Director is a Member of that school and an educator as well, they're the ones that say, hey, come on out. We have an open tryout. Hey, it's fun. That's how you get it. And I distinctly have seen it in the East Bay, because that's what happens when this transition happens, when coaches are the teachers, et cetera? That's another story. I wasn't asked to talk about that, but so many topics resonate with me. Okay? And it says us. Soccer on the slide.

Essentially, the NDBSL I'm, the CMO of that professional organization. Now, US. Soccer all use this heat categories map because if you look at the chart that was developed by the Georgia High School Association, depending on where you are in the state of California or in the country, then basically you base your practices and you limit your practices. You change your practice times based on the WBGT for your zone. Okay? I'll move on.

We've had wonderful communication between our sections and our leagues within the sections about when they're going to cancel or postpone a game because of the air quality. The typical one is 150. Everyone pretty much abides by that as it's unsafe to play your practice. And if you have a student athlete that has certain respiratory or cardiac conditions like asthma, et cetera, then their recommendation is to not participate with an air quality index even lower than that.

So we have guidelines on our website as well to help guide our Member institutions regarding the AQI, and we follow that and it's a very local issue as well. Let's see, COVID, we've been really heavily involved in COVID. I have been at every level of athlete with whom I work, and we have COVID guidelines as well for our Member schools on our website, health and safety guidelines, when to return to play after having had COVID, et cetera.

And all of those can be found on our website. And things are evolving. I just currently put out a 2023 guidelines for the NWSL and certainly we don't always all agree, but we all agree that the health and safety and well being of our student athletes are paramount and we have to first consider them as well as the homes and the communities in which they live and if they live with elder relatives. Everyone needs to be protected.

The last topic is the pre participation fiscal exam, and we do require annual pre participation physical exams for our student athletes. We provide the form, a form that is essentially I was part of the writing committee. Five national organizations, medical institutions which take care of student athletes, all participated in the writing of the monograph, and we provide that on our website. We don't require that our schools use that.

If they want to use a different one, they may, but they absolutely have to have the questions about heart conditions on there, because sudden cardiac arrest prevention is very important. So they absolutely have to have those questions on there. But our form is pretty thorough and most of our Member schools use that form. I think I'll stop there and see if you have any questions.

As the chair of the Arts, Entertainment and Sports Committee, we do have two bills that we believe are going to be coming to our committee. But one, you did mention the athletic trainers Bill AB seven, nine, six. Is that something that you think is necessary and then following up on that related to concussions, we believe we'll be having a Bill coming to our committee on concussions. Could you give us an indication of what sports you're seeing most concussions in?

Okay, so question number one thank you. Is absolutely essential to license athletic trainers in our state. Because we don't have Licensure, an athletic trainer who is licensed in another state can come into our state and apply for a position. And because schools need athletic trainers, there's no one, though, in the state of California that that school administrator can contact and say, we are interviewing this candidate.

Can you communicate with the schools that they've been at or the other states and see if there's any outstanding problems that this person had in their other state? So there is no governance. Meaning if I, as a physician, went back to my state home state of Ohio. Sorry. I know. There's my home home and my home home, so I have two homes.

But I've went back to Ohio where my mom wants me to go back to after 30 years, and she says and I did something in California. I don't know. Wrote a prescription. I'm just saying I've never done anything like that.

But just for an example, they would be able to talk, and I wouldn't be able to get my license in Ohio and treat patients because I had my license suspended here in the state of California, there's no way for us to find out if that athletic trainer coming in is a bad actor. And because of that, honestly, we are losing training programs in the state of California. Fresno State has stopped their have I just found out that San Jose State is stopping their programs?

That means that we don't have a pipeline. And while we can hire certified trainers through UCSF where I work, we can't get enough people to interview and apply because we don't have that pipeline coming in. And people from other states aren't coming in because they feel like the state of California doesn't respect this health profession. And this health profession educates and saves lives and supports our high school athlete and our coaches and our administrators.

And it's really sad to me, and I've been up here for 15 years, coming up intermittently to talk to people about Licensure, and it has yet to pass. And this is on my bucket list before I die. I was going to say before I retire, and it just kind of retired, but before I die, it's on my bucket list, but I really feel that this is so, so important. Okay, that was question one. I will answer question two shorter, but you have to remind me.

Oh, football concussions. Yes. I feel like concussions have gone down because rules have changed, contact practices have decreased. We know the recent state law, there's only two contact practices per week. Now. It used to be where coaches could practice as many times as they want. Coaches are better educated, coaches are younger, right? I mean, I've been in football for a long time, and the coaches now understand, they understand that their concussion that they had wasn't a badge of honor.

It certainly did affect them, and they want to make sure this doesn't happen to their student athletes as well. But we see concussions, obviously, in all sports, but even in swimming, backstroke, I've had it a couple of times in my athletes because they're not looking or they took down the flags, but certainly everyone is pretty aware about it. We need to be better about it. We have the state law that passed for all those youth sports.

Really, there's really not a lot of policing that goes on. But all the youth sports that we have, I believe there were 29 identified horseback riding. If you offered all that, you have to get educating concussion as well. So I think it's improved, for sure. We have to educate better so people don't panic after they've had one concussion. I see that happening. And then the kids aren't getting better because they're worried, right? And the parents are worried, and that anxiety and angst affects the recovery.

So it all goes together. But it's really, really important. And I do see concussions decreasing. To answer someone else's question, I think it was McCarthy in terms of there is a drop in high school athletes across the country playing football. There's an increase in girls, though, playing high school football across the country. So there's a drop. It just dipped below 1 million for the first time. But there is an increase of girls playing high school football as well.

And as we can make it safer, I think that we can continue to attract that as an avenue. As you guys all know, it's harder for larger, heavier high school kids to find a sport that they love. Football is often an avenue to come in, and then they recognize the importance of teamwork fitness, et cetera, et cetera, and then they go on to do other sports as well.

Sorry.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I forgot I was in charge of this.

You're doing such a good job. You're making it seem effortless.

That's why we're passing the gavel.

All right, any other questions?

Yes, ma'am. Thank you. Dr. Chang, thank you for being here. My concern is that with the growing realities of climate change that we're seeing and having to wanting to prepare for more days of extreme heat throughout the state, you indicated the heat stroke incident in San Francisco. You addressed the issue of the wet bulb thermometers and how they're distributed. It's my understanding that they're distributed to the hottest identified hottest areas of the state.

We reviewed applications, and, yes, they were distributed to those schools that were primarily in the hot zone, as well as those schools that had a certified athletic trainer that they could do something with and we've all heard the stories of if you have it but you don't use it, what good is it like the AEDs? You need to know where it is, it has to be accessible, et cetera. Same thing with the WBGTs. So we really focused on those schools that had a certified athletic trainer.

But certainly our next push now, and Dr. Nocetti and I have been talking about this has been about how do we now get the rest of our schools some financial support, grant money, et cetera, to be able to help them. It costs $500. And I understand I was on our middle school and our high school athletic fundraiser team. I was the President, so I understand what the issues are.

$500 doesn't seem like a lot, but it does seem like a lot for a lot of our schools. So we want to help support that. But again, we are putting so much burden onto our school administrators and our coaches. And I think that's a part of the reason why we're losing coaches as well is because they feel that they have to do so much now.

They can't just coach their sport, but they've got to make sure that the physicals, that the paperwork is coming in and it's all checked off, and they have to make sure that all these health and safety issues are in place. Do they have to come an hour early and make sure the ice buckets are full? Because that's what's needed for a heat stroke. A heat illness is to have available ice and water.

And we are really, as a national organization, all of the sports medicine physicians are really watching to see do we have to adjust the WBGT readings and adjust those readings as the country gets hotter so that we can then adjust that graph? Absolutely.

So speaking of those readings, does CIF have a specific policy? I see that you handed out this chart. Here is the CIF policy, the categories, and the activity guidelines.

So we do not have a specific policy regarding that. All of that information is on our website, and it's certainly a guideline. We do not have a specific policy in place for that. And I know that we as a committee have discussed that. Again, it's a big educational thing as well. What we find is that we want to make sure that there's a good understanding of the measurement.

What we don't want people to do is just look at a heat index graph because that will underestimate the heat stress on their athletes.

Okay. I think I remember seeing this past fall, or maybe it was the summer of incidents of students dying during football practices on extreme heat days. Is there a discussion in terms of a policy to give guidance to coaches in terms of limiting practices and games on these extreme heat days?

Yes, absolutely. And that's something that we just met last week with our sports medicine advisory committee. And that's one of the discussions we had, is guidelines versus policy. And the key is, if we do develop policy, we want to make sure that I know as a layperson, when I first read that chart and I saw these temperatures, I just regular temperatures, I'm like, what do you mean we can't play when it's 84 degrees?

I have Dr. Chang with me to walk me through and explain this, but not every coach, every athletic Director has that. An athletic trainer would have that knowledge. So I think there's so much more education before dictating policy. But I do think that our schools look at our guidelines, and I think they pay attention to them. This year, we had an excessive heat in all areas, as you mentioned. I grew up in San Francisco. When I was in grammar school, it was 70 degrees.

We were asking why we're in school versus friends that lived in hotter climates. But we're making sure that we put the resources out there for our schools, and that if it becomes policy that they're informed of the policy and everything that goes with that. We did have an incident in California, in Northern California, where we had someone that should have been practicing, and they were. What I want to say is that one is too many.

And as you heard Dr. Chang say, heat illness is one of the few things we can deal with that is 100% preventable. And so we worked with that one school community and their superintendent in their school district jumped right on that. But compared to ten years ago, our schools were moving games. They were canceling lower level contests. They were moving varsity football games, outdoor events to 08:00 p.m. At night and waiting until it was safe to play.

So I think our schools are doing a very good job. It's just we have to continue to get better about the resources we provide them.

All right, thank you.

Any other questions? Thank you for your presentations. I was so enthralled that I was relaxed. That's why I forgot my job.

Okay, we'd now like to turn to panel number four, which is, again, turning back to Dr. Nocetti on emerging issues with the CIF.

And there's a lot more in our packet that we provided in our report to the Legislature and many more resources. We're just highlighting a few of those here today, and this is kind of a closure. And then any final questions from you? We're welcome to entertain. We've been seeing an exorbitant amount of behavior issues, especially with fans, sadly, with parents, to the point where we actually had to revise some bylaws. And it was kind of sad that we had to put a bylaw in place.

That said, we have bylaws in place what happens if a student athlete is ejected from a game they can't play a certain amount of contests. We have that bylaw in place for coaches. We never really thought we'd have to put that bylaw in place for mom and dad, aunt and uncle, grandma and Grandpa, to the point where I'll tell you a quick story. My daughter became she plays water polo at UC Davis. Her coach encouraged her to be an official.

One of these things where she saw her coach officiating water polo and said, I can do that. And she did. In her third contest, in a JV girls water pole match, she had to remove a mom, a dad, and a grandmother from a contest. And she's like, what do I do? And I go, you know, you did the right thing. That's what has to happen. The game is about the student athletes.

So we put a bylaw in place that if a parent is asked to leave an athletic contest, they can't come back for a game. If it happens again, they're not coming back for the remainder of the season you know. And those are the things that we've started to have to do. And it does put more stress on our school administrators.

But we've also, at the same time, thanks to Mr. Seymour and the rest of my staff, we put out a sportsmanship toolkit to our schools that have an abundance of resources of how to handle these situations. We talk about how behavior changes simply by an administrator being present and being active and being there to supervise. The students will behave when the adult is there to supervise, unfortunately, not always the parent. And then you have to remove them from the contest.

We also put in our treatment of contest officials. We have a physical assault bylaw, and we had to add spectators to that because last spring we saw a baseball official accosted by a fan in the parking lot at the end of a contest and was assaulted. And so now we have a bylaw that says, if you're found to have physically assaulted a sports official, you are permanently banned from attending a high school athletic event in the state of California. There's code out there.

I'm waiting for the day that charges are pressed. And it's enforced because it says already in our statutes that if someone assaults a sports official at any level, professional, collegiate, high school youth, they could be fined. And correct me if I'm wrong here up to $2,000 and spend up to 365 days in jail. That's enforced one time, and I believe it solves a lot of our problem. So we'll see what happens if this continues our future leadership. We've talked a lot about age here somehow.

Don't let the gray hair fool you. I'm only 55, but I am getting close to that time where I want to know who is going to lead this organization, what we do and what we do for student athletes. Not because of me in this position, but more because of my staff and our school administrators and our coaches and the people that really care about high school sports and everything it provides. We need our future leaders.

So we've had our staff start what's called a CF Leadership Initiative, where we are attracting younger leaders to serve in this group. We're looking at demographics. We want to make sure it's diverse with respect to race, ethnicity, gender. And a few of those people have already become President elect or President of their local sections. And so that's what we're looking to do for the future to ensure this organization.

We've been around 109 years, and we're hoping that it's going to continue for at least another 109 and be ready for the next generation of student athletes. We've also looked at expanding. We have a bylaw proposal before our Federated Council that's coming for a vote. It seems to have support. We'll find out we have a nine Member Executive board, and that's who I answer to. And so they're charged with the finances of the organization. They're charged with governance of the CIF.

We do a good job, I think with that committee right now is five men and four women. I think we do an excellent job. It wasn't always that way, but depending on the year, it's not always the most diverse committee with respect to race and ethnicity. So we're looking to expand that committee from nine to 13 Members, and we get to nominate four Members that represent the demographics of the students of the state of California to be approved by our Executive committee.

We just had a first reading, and again, like I said, it seemed to have overwhelming support, and then it would expand starting this summer. And I'm excited about that because I think it's something that we need to have a committee that comes from a variety of backgrounds and experiences to help lead us to do the right thing for our student athletes. And then finally we started an advisory committee.

And I was pleasantly surprised at the participation because we've never had an advisory committee made up primarily of superintendents and district office personnel because they're just so busy to try and attend more meetings similar to, I'm sure, what you do on a daily basis. So we had our first meeting of 18 people from all areas of the state of California in October, and every single one of them was there.

In fact, they said, Next time, can we meet for an additional 30 to minutes to 60 minutes? Because we really enjoy this. And I think they'd like talking about something positive, to be very honest. So we've met twice now. It's a group that we can bring. We need support of our superintendents for everything we do. If superintendents tell our principals and our coaches and our athletic directors, you will implement the CI Sportsmanship toolkit, you will be trained in the preventing and interrupting discriminatory behaviors.

And as Mr. Seymour said, and I think it was a very good question, yes, it's 15 to 20 minutes. It is meant to simply introduce them to all that they can do and to dive deeper into the resources that are available there and the resources I'll close with this, the best example I can give you is a contest I went to. I went up to Fall River, California. I had not been able to go up there because I started the job.

And then that same year I got the job, COVID hit. So the first two years of my job as Executive Director, that's what I was primarily dealing with. Finally got the opportunity after COVID to go watch a girls volleyball match and then a football game the next day. And before each of those contests, they had a student athlete from each team come together and read a statement about what they expect from their parents and their families in the stands and that, this is our contest.

We want your support. We want you to be positive. And they did it at both games, and at both games, they got a standing ovation. If our public address announcer just simply did what I'm doing right now and read that, everyone's going to be there just watching their phone, not paying attention. When the students pay attention, when the students come to talk to them, people listen. So those we have to engage our students more in this. It is their event.

And so I think the more resources we can get out there and it goes back to we talk about developing future leaders. That's what we're doing by helping them help themselves to have better experiences in sports.

All right, thank you, sir. Any other comments? Senator Newman, I know that you have important business.

I do, unfortunately. So I want to say to all three panelists, thank you so much for being here today. A very useful conversation, one which we will continue about money, the issues we discussed today. So thank you. Thank you both chairs.

Thank you. We are going to have an opportunity for public comments, but Dr. Nocetti, before you leave, I just wanted to thank you for your entire presentation today as well as specifically on this last panel, the bylaw revisions on sportsmanship and fan behavior. I know I hear a lot from constituents, parents, families, that all of the divisiveness and hostility that we're seeing throughout society, we seem to see it magnified at sporting events.

And I know I've heard coaches saying that they didn't want to coach anymore because they're tired of dealing with the parents. I'm glad that CIF has I don't know if I'm glad or sad, you know, because, you know, you know, back in our day, it was it was expected to be respectful and courteous to each other and and now it seems like those values are not being taught or remembered by the parents. So seeing no other questions, thank you very much.

Much.

I'd like to open it up for public comment. Each Member of the public may speak for up to 1 minute during a public comment. Is there anyone interested in making any public comments? Seeing? Going once, going twice, seeing none. Thank you very much, everyone, for this hearing, and I'd like to adjourn the hearing. Thank you. Thank.