Assembly Standing Committee on Education

Oh, okay, here we go. All right. Good morning, everyone. Like to call the meeting informational hearing of the Assembly Education Committee to order. Like to welcome Ms. Bonta. And I just ran into Mr. Alvarez, who I know is on his way and would like to welcome the rest of the Committee to join us for this great hearing that we have such a nice lineup of education policy experts that we have lined up.

Thank you very much to the education Committee staff for all your hard work to put this hearing together. We are here gathered today to learn about the State of education in California as our students and schools continue to wrestle with the ongoing impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic.

We will hear testimony from current the current State of students academic performance, their attendance at school, ongoing challenges with chronic absenteeism, ongoing challenges with issues involving mental health and overall well being, and last but not least, issues related to student access to technology and our ongoing efforts to close the digital divide. We will also hear recommendations from policy experts and practitioners on promising solutions going forward.

We're grateful to all of our panelists for taking the time to share their research, their perspectives, and their recommendations here today. At the end of the hearing, we will be taking public comment in person. Comments may also be submitted through our Assembly Education Committee website. So with that, actually, let me invite Ms. Bonta. Do you have any opening remarks? Okay with that? We would like to jump right into it. Our first panel is focusing on the academic progress of California students.

We have with us Dr. Heather Hough, the Executive Director of policy analysis for California Education, which is an independent, nonpartisan research center led by faculty directors at Stanford University, University of Southern California, University of California, Davis, University of California, Los Angeles and the University of California, Berkeley. And to be followed with Dr. Bruce Fuller, Professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. I want to welcome Mr. Alvarez. Mr. Alvarez, do you have any opening remarks? Okay, thank you very much.

So we'll jump right into it. Our first witness here to testify is Dr. Hough. Welcome.

Can you hear me? Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me here today to talk about student learning at this point in pandemic recovery. I'm Heather Hough, the Executive Director of PACE as introduced. PACE is a nonpartisan research center that is headquartered at Stanford, and I come today to share knowledge derived from research and from our partnership with school districts. We currently work with dozens of districts serving millions of students representing the full diversity of region, urbanicity, size, and student populations statewide.

Can I get. there we go. At this point, it is well known that as a result of the pandemic and extended school disruptions, student learning is significantly behind pre pandemic cohorts. Overall, from 2019 to 2022, scores dropped four percentage points in English language arts and 6.4 percentage points in math. The results of the 2023 test scores are extremely troubling because they make clear that while the decline from 2019 to 2022 was dramatic, the recovery will not be similarly dramatic.

Between 2022 and 2023, scores in English language arts continued to decline and in math, scores increased only slightly. In 2023, students remained significantly behind pre pandemic cohorts in both subjects. Most concerning about these scores is that they reveal so starkly the large and growing opportunity gaps between student groups. I show math scores here between 2019. Okay, sorry, I think these are the old slides, so let's see here.

Overall, from 2019 to 2022, scores dropped four percentage points in English language arts and 6.4 percentage points in mathematics. The results of the 2023 test scores are extremely troubling because. I'm sorry, hold on, give me just 1 second. Okay. So what I want you to see from these slides is that I'm just going to skip that. Apologies. So prior to the pandemic, we had strong achievement gaps between students and these achievement gaps continued to widen post pandemic.

So what you'll see here is an analysis that was first conducted by Andrew Ho of Harvard, which shows that gaps by racial ethnic group have actually widened in the period from before the pandemic to now. We show here how far behind students in different groups are compared to pre pandemic cohorts in months of learning by grade and in math. This figure shows that black African American and Hispanic Latino students have fallen further behind their white peers.

For example, for students in grade three, black African American students are 5.8 months of learning behind pre pandemic cohorts, and Hispanic Latino students are 5.5 months behind, compared to only 2.4 months behind for white students. These gaps are unacceptable and if left unaddressed, will lead to inequitable outcomes in graduation rates, college access, future wages, and even life expectancy. Compounding this, rates of chronic absenteeism, or the percentage of students who are absent 10% or more of the time have skyrocketed.

Post pandemic before the pandemic, only 12% of students were chronically absent. The rate now is more than double that at 25%. And the chronic absenteeism problem is worse in schools serving Low income students who are precisely the students most in need of extended learning time to catch up. What you'll see here on this figure is that for schools serving over 75% of economically disadvantaged students, that's the bar on the right.

60% of those schools have an extreme chronic absence rate, meaning that over 30% of the students are chronically absent. To put this into perspective, if you're a teacher in one of these schools, on any given day, at least one student will be absent. A teacher will never be teaching to a full class. What this means is that every day a teacher is playing catch up with students who weren't there before she can continue on to new material.

Our current schooling system is dependent on students being physically present in class. And so with this situation, it's very difficult for teachers to move content forward if each day must be caught up. These problems are happening all over the country, as I'm sure you know. But our situation is among the worst. For example, on chronic absenteeism, our rates are very high relative to most other states. And as you see here, this is a comparison of multiple states that was conducted by teams at Stanford and Harvard.

We started low, meaning our test scores were low prior to the pandemic. We had a big decline as a result of the pandemic, and we've had a slow recovery. So our students overall remain almost a year behind the US average. So what do we do next? You will hear about tutoring and summer school and after school learning opportunities. And these are all extremely important.

But the research shows that these activities are most effective when they build upon and are aligned with a highly engaging, rigorous program of study during the school day. Sadly, many schools are not places where students want to be or where they feel engaged and empowered in their learning. At the elementary level, schools need to be reorganized so that teachers work together to ensure that every student meets the expected learning goals and to provide intervention when they don't.

There's a very promising CCEE pilot, that's the California collaborative for Educational excellence that's being implemented now along these lines. And at the high school level, students need flexible learning options aligned with their interests to keep them engaged in working toward their personal goals for college and career. Thank you again for having me, and I look forward to discussing further.

Thank you, Dr. Hough. And we're going to hold off on questions for the whole panel. And so I'd like to invite Dr. Fuller. Welcome.

Thank you, chair. Thanks for the invitation to share our early research findings. Four decades ago, I went to work for a young, rather feisty Assembly Member named John Vasconcellos. So it's a great pleasure to sit with this Committee once again many years later. Our team has been visiting schools across the state since the spring of 2021, learning how district leaders and frontline educators have emerged from an unprecedented era, along with how they sustain a variety of innovations to buoy students and staff.

Slide one simply emphasizes our basic research questions that we're looking at in this study, mainly focusing on how districts are making budget decisions with Federal and State Dollars and the kinds of innovations that they've sustained through the pandemic and now into later years. That is, are they trying some new activities and programs with state dollars that are yielding promising results?

Our work is funded by the US Department of Education and thanks to our partners at the Public Policy Institute of California, CDE here in town, and UC San Diego. As you know, the Federal Government and the state provided substantial dollars at the outset of the pandemic, and the State Dollars continue. This figure might be a little hard to look at, but these bubbles show the size of various dollops of dollars coming into California schools. The so called Esser $3 are the biggest dollop, about $15 billion.

As you know, expanded learning Opportunity grant CLOG provides another five to $6 billion. Free meals, transitional kindergarten. These are all major programs which you all have legislated in recent years. And I want to come back to the question of what seems to be working in addressing the enormous learning gaps that Heather just described. First, we ask how districts have been allocating stimulus dollars, often blended with LCFF local control funding dollars. And this slide shows the most common strategies.

Based upon our analysis of elog plans from 726 districts, Newgow and her team at PPIC spent many, many days going through these plans, and these most popular strategies are somewhat instructive. Among the most popular districts have engaged in increasing instructional time, lengthening the school day, in part through legislation that you all have supported over the years. In recent years, that is, as well as creating all sorts of tutoring opportunities, from intensive tutoring to one off tutoring, not so effective tutoring.

But tutoring, of course, is a very popular use of state dollars, offering free summer school, which may be waning a little bit. We're hearing from our superintendents as federal dollars run out and, of course, expanding after school programs. We also know that levels of new dollars per pupil vary markedly among districts. Both Esser funds from Washington and legislative priorities have weighted those dollars towards more challenged schools serving large concentrations of disadvantaged kids.

But so far we haven't found this variation of per pupil revenue is very associated or correlated with stronger recovery and student achievement. That is, the amount of money you all sent to schools is not predicting any bounce back thus far, and it may be too early for that, but that's something we'd like to track over time. We do know, for example, that when schools return to in person teaching, that is correlated with stronger bounce back and student achievement.

And of course, the most forceful set of factors has to do with the demographics of kids served. As Heather just detailed, in the most disadvantaged schools, we see the weakest bounce back return to prior achievement levels relative to kids in more affluent communities. Beyond studying these dynamics across all districts, we've repeatedly visited nine particular districts representing the diversity of the state, representing geographic diversity. On the right hand side of this slide, if you can make it out, are the location of our nine districts.

They're quite varied, from Del Norte in the far north to Sweetwater High School District on the Mexican border. And from these districts, we are looking at common patterns of decision making that we've observed across these districts. And you can see from this list that it includes similar and also varying contexts in which these districts have to respond in terms of enrollment declines, absentee rates, et cetera. But commonly across these districts, we see severe labor shortages.

And this is a significant problem you all may want to address in the coming months. The categorical aid programs that you've legislated, though well intentioned, require a lot of new classified staff, transitional kindergarten, after school programs, tutoring programs, and as you know, the state is suffering from a vast labor shortages. At a macroeconomic level, this leads to very, very great difficulty for districts in finding instructional aides and people that can help kids day to day. So the shared experience with labor shortages is quite severe. And.

The other thing we wanted to mention is that our superintendents in the field study across the nine districts, our superintendents worry about a return to categorical aid. First of all, they call--what they call the Plandemic, that is, each categorical aid program has a separate plan. They already spend a lot of staff, resources, and time in their LCAP planning process, and now Sacramento requires them to submit a separate plan for each of these new programs, and that's draining central resources as reported by the nine superintendents. Second, new programs like Extended Day require hiring difficult to find instructional aids, as I mentioned.

The nine districts also seek to balance academic learning with more holistic approaches with regard to the social and emotional well-being of students and staff. These efforts range from calling an 800 number if you have a problem to sort of a surface level remedy to pairing college students with individual kids through supportive relationships, through tutoring, classroom assistance, and a one-on-one social tie. We know that students are bouncing back at varying rates.

If you look at this slide on the right-hand side, if you can make out these bars, the downward sloping bars are the amount of learning loss across our nine field study districts. So the learning loss that Heather described is severe, but it's also quite variable during the pandemic. The bars on the right-hand side show the bounce back as schools have come back in person in most recent round of testing.

Notably, kids in Compton Unified and Del Norte Unified, which are two of our nine field study districts, have recovered impressively, and we're trying to learn more about why they've had such success. Budget and program strategies do likely drive differing rates of learning recovery, and a portion of these districts are focusing heavily on the social and emotional well-being of students. Importantly, Del Norte District, for example, is taking advantage of new Medi-Cal reimbursement policies to bolster their counseling staff.

That's proving to be quite a popular strategy among some of these districts. The other point about what's maybe working is that Compton Unified avoids the temptation of tacking on new programs at the edge of core classroom teaching. Instead, they push in more adults into classrooms as tutors, as individuals who connect and develop personal relationships with kids to buoy low performing students.

Compton has a very interesting program where they team up with Cal State Dominguez Hills to bring in college students who are really kind of a direct mentor one-on-one between the college student and a low performing child in the Compton schools, and that builds social relationships, social ties, and a commitment to schooling. District leaders argue that local budget discretion allows them to arrive at their own budget priorities in consultation with local stakeholders, rather than reacting to regulated categoricals.

Several districts carefully assess which new innovations are paying off in terms of stronger student engagement and which reforms remain affordable as federal dollars wane. And in conclusion, just to say, stay tuned. Our detailed report should be out this spring, and we're happy to come back up and talk more about the detailed findings. The Legislature, of course, plays a pivotal role in sustaining funding that lifts students and teachers.

In the wake of these huge spending infusions, we are just beginning to learn about what's actually worked to regain lost learning and to enrich this local spirit of renewal. Fiscal flexibility, again, for local school boards remains key as districts confront widely varying contexts and experiment to address student learning and broader well-being.

Equity elements of LCFF and new categorical aid remain essential if the state aims to narrow the achievement gaps that Heather's just detailed with greater rigor and hopefully more evidence about what's working on the ground inside districts. Thank you.

Thank you very much. So before I open it up for questions, I wanted to just recap some of what I heard were the main takeaways. First of all, Dr. Hough, I mean, you present some pretty stark data that indicates that--I think not only in California but across the country, we saw significant learning loss from the pandemic and especially from the school closures. Is that correct?

Yes, that's correct.

And the impacts were continued, the patterns that existed before the pandemic, in terms of the learning losses being greatest in disadvantaged communities, communities of color, economically disadvantaged communities, English language learner communities.

Yes, that's correct.

And that the recovery, despite the infusions of federal and state dollars, that the recoveries in general have been uneven, with the smallest recoveries being in the same disadvantaged communities.

That's right.

And so, Dr. Fuller, you're looking at, what is it? How many? Nine districts, ten districts? And while you're still studying the data, you're seeing some promising results from districts like Compton Unified and Del Norte Unified. And you highlight in your presentation some of the strategies focusing on increasing instructional time, on increasing instructional aids, staff training, digital tech assistance, as well as the overall holistic support, focusing on what we've been calling the Whole Child Approach, addressing not just the academic supports, but also the social emotional supports.

Yes. And we keep coming back to this word, 'coherence,' district leaders that try to get adults in classrooms one-on-one with kids and not getting distracted from other bells and whistles.

Okay. Let me see if any of my colleagues on the panel wanted to start off.

Thank you so much for the presentation. I think what most resonated for me as a concern is this essential issue of not having a high correlation between multiple sets of strategies and the kind of rigorous bounce back that we need for our children right now; balanced with the fact that many school districts don't want to be told what to do with the funding that the state provides them.

So can you speak a little bit to that, which feels to me a bit like an oxymoron, right, in that it would be helpful to, at this stage in the point in time, not have kind of this highly experimental, let's see what works, throw spaghetti on the wall kind of scenario. Sorry to kind of belittle the work that so many have done but--and the fact that we have dwindling now, resources that need to be very targeted from the state.

Yeah, a good question. And the spaghetti metaphor is probably quite apt. I think in the nine districts where we're working and repeatedly visiting, the superintendents and district staff are very appreciative of the new funding. So I want to make that point at the outset. And I would say in general, they agree with the legislative intent. I mean, they're very enthusiastic about transitional kindergarten. They see the utility of extended-day programs. They certainly are appreciative of arts and education, arts and music education.

So there's great appreciation for the funding. I think where they're not so happy is having to do a plan for each of these programs. And they feel--in a way it's going back to the good old days when I worked in this building where we were just--we were up to about 68 categorical aid programs. And then Governor Schwarzenegger and Governor Brown both reduced the number of categorical aid through local control funding, gave districts more flexibility.

So I think the districts, perhaps predictably, would like to go back to that level of flexibility. I think, as you're pointing out, it's a double-edged sword because we do want to know what's working out in the districts. We would like to get clear evidence and information back from the districts as to what working--what's working. We don't just want to let them throw spaghetti against the wall. In a sense, we want to know what spaghetti sticks to the wall and is effective.

So I think it is somewhat of a dilemma because the superintendents and district leaders are very appreciative of the funding, they're compadre with the legislative intent of these programs, but they don't want their hands tied in terms of how they move their resources around.

I'd like to add that I think in a time like this, we need some clarity on what is effective and what good practice looks like and the flexibility around how individual districts meet those goals. A lot of the barriers that districts are encountering in implementing these policies are things like local staffing challenges and labor management relations, local politics, and so in some ways, there's not a lot of attention on these broader issues that are producing barriers for them in implementing some of these policies.

And I think some collective problem solving throughout the system, from the school and district level up through counties and the state and the Legislature, would help to improve implementation.

Just my final question. Thank you. One of the data points that was really quite troubling is that in California, Hispanic and Latino students are disproportionately represented among chronically absent students compared to other student populations. This group made up 65 percent of the chronically absent students in 22-23 and 56 percent of the student population overall. So over half of the student population and far overrepresented in chronic absenteeism.

And to the point that you made, Dr. Fuller, if you're not in school, it's hard to even be able to get any kind of support. I did also notice on one of your slides you had commentary around holistic supports and kind of school climate environment being absolutely critical to ensuring that students were coming back and feeling like they belonged, and what they were experiencing was rigorous and connected and relevant to them.

So is there anything either in Compton or Inland Empire where we've kind of seen these pops of success, where there's evidence of specific programs related to either chronic absenteeism or sense of belonging?

I think what's impressive about Compton Unified is this notion that every child should have an adult, maybe a college student, but an adult that that student can turn to. So in a sense, it's not that complicated, although it takes a lot of discipline as a district leader to focus resources on those immediate social ties. And with Dominguez Hills and other supports around the Compton area, they've mobilized the number of adults that get in the classroom, sit with and read with students, meet with them after school.

If they don't show up for school, they're on the phone to the parent. So I think what's impressive about Compton is despite the budget constraints and the barriers we've been talking about, the district leadership there is focused on these one-on-one relationships for kids.

I'd like to add that when we think about chronic absenteeism, there's two solutions. One is: how do we get kids back in school, and the other is: how do we catch kids up and keep them learning if they're absent? And I think that both of those are important because there are some broader social things that are happening right now that are leading to chronic absenteeism.

I think just in general, social norms are changing around when we go into physical spaces, if we stay home, if we're not feeling well, if we need a break, parents are working from home more, which means they may not be in transition to take their kids to school, and so I think this is where some of those ideas around school reorganization are really important, too.

The CCEE pilot that I mentioned earlier, one of, I think, its major benefits is that because it's student-centered and every day evaluating: did kids learn what they needed to learn yesterday in order to move forward today, and what are we going to do if they didn't, and has a team of adults working together to provide that intervention support. If a student is absent yesterday, when they come to school today, there's an automatic structure for doing that evaluation and providing that support.

And that's not typically how our schools are organized. Typically, there is an expectation that you're moving forward on instructional content every day, and we don't have those multiple adults ready to help. So I think that attending to both of those things is really important because it's unclear at this point will we ever get to pre-pandemic attendance levels. I'm not sure that we know.

Mr. Alvarez.

Thank you to the panelists. Thank you, Mr. Chair, for organizing today's hearing. I want to start with a couple of questions based on the reports that you've presented for us. The California test scores show little improvement after pandemic. Ms. Hough, on the- There's a particular slide that just caught my interest and curious as to if you have any further research. It's the slide with the different grade levels and what's happened with the scores and almost all of them, obviously, they're all lower than 2019.

Some are showing a little bit of a rebound. And I'm just curious if there's anything that stands out. For example, it's actually the two ends of the grades, grade three, which is the first grade we do the testing, and grade 11, which is the final year that this testing occurs. Was there anything in the research that indicated maybe something related in the case of the younger kids, everybody was impacted, so this is going to sound contradictory to that, but the younger kids perhaps weren't as impacted because they were still relatively young and have been able to make up some of that.

And then on the other end, were the kids sort of old enough to be able to figure out how to, and then really the folks, the kids in the middle grades are the ones that haven't really seen any kind of a bounce back, it looks like. Is there any other research related to those two, grade 3 and 11, that you can share?

I'm not familiar with specific research on this. Perhaps you are, Bruce, but I think that your hypotheses are valid. Students at different ages were very differently impacted by the pandemic. So if you were in fifth grade when the pandemic hit, and I had a daughter who was that age, so I know, they were more able to navigate online learning than if you had a kindergartner at that time, which I also had. So those kids were really impacted. They couldn't do anything online without parental support.

The older kids got, the more they were able to engage. But we also know that they were more impacted, perhaps by the lack of socialization. So I think that there are a lot of things going on there. The 11th grade SBAC scores, just as a note, are always taken with a bit of caution because we know that as students get older, they don't take these tests as seriously. They're not connected with real stakes for them.

There could be something going on there as well with those measures.

Yeah, but it looks like almost across the board, every grade level saw the same level of decline from '19 to '22. The first time we did testing again, and then the second year, '23, grade 11 and third grade had that very slight bounce, but it was very small and the others continued to decline. Actually, let me ask you about just, I'm trying to get a sense of, again, the impacts, and this is now on absenteeism. Your report on absenteeism here.

Elementary, obviously we have more elementary schools, and I'm referring to figure four in this report. Obviously it's a larger number. I'm just wondering, I don't know, percentage wise, how does that compare to middle school and high school in terms of absenteeism? Are we seeing more at the lower grades or more at the upper grades?

We see a bit of a U shape in the grades. So we see huge absenteeism in kindergarten. And then in the later elementary it dips down. And then as students get older, it go through the grades, it increases. So we see a similar kind of relationship at the school level. I think the reason for that is very different. So at the kindergarten level, for example, students are very young. Kindergarten is not mandatory in California, so we see a much higher rate as kids get older.

Parents are less in the driver's seat on getting a kid to school. So for a kindergartner, it's the parent's job to put the shoes on and get them in the car. As students get older, they have a lot more agency in terms of whether or not they choose to go to school. So we see a higher percentage rate in high school than we do in the lower grades.

Got it. As someone who represents a lot of higher need schools, the figure three was quite shocking. Essentially 86% of schools who are in this have these students as a population have extreme or high chronic absenteeism. And that's really concerning. Have you had a chance to do any research on any of the strategies that are being implemented by school districts? And is there any research forthcoming on strategies that are being effective? Because that's something that clearly is hugely disproportionate here.

Yeah, there is a great deal of research, actually, on what kinds of strategies are effective. We work closely with Attendance Works. They're a national organization that does research on attendance and getting kids back into school. The way to think about it is in terms of tier one, tier two, and tier three interventions. So what are the things we do for all kids to make school more welcoming, more engaging? And that is akin to some of those strategies that Professor Fuller laid out.

As we then move up out of that baseline system, we're thinking, how do we provide targeted supports to students to get them into school. And so as we're looking at kids with really high rates, it's attendance coordinators, it's social workers, it's folks within the school who are calling the families and saying, what is happening that's preventing you from getting to school? And what can we do to support you?

And along those lines, there are schools who are providing really targeted supports, who are thinking about coordinating transportation, who are in Fresno, they're putting laundry into schools so that students can do their laundry at school because not having clean clothes was an impediment for students coming to school.

So as we think about interventions, a lot of it is how do we make schools in general places where students want to be and where students feel supported and where students feel empowered for their learning and then being able to provide those targeted supports as needed?

Okay. Now moving on to the other presentation, which is much more focused on sort of the fiscal matters related to these programs. I wanted to ask about the labor shortage issue. We've funded, as you've pointed out also in your presentation, we funded a lot of programs to try and ensure that education was accessible and available and support systems existed, and we don't recapture the fund balances that exist.

Now, you talked about a labor shortage, and I'm just curious, did you do any analysis on what that meant in terms of unused dollars by districts that they got to actually keep because we didn't ask them to give that money back as a result of labor shortages in all these programs?

That's a great question. Heather and I were talking before the hearing started. I mean, one reason the districts may not spend out their federal dollars by the end of September is they have so many open positions, they just can't find people.

Right.

And obviously, we have this macroeconomic condition in California. I mean, it's a good news, bad news story. We have very low unemployment, but then we have difficulties in finding instructional assistance for TK, for tutoring programs. So districts are having to struggle with this macroeconomic constraint while facing this federal deadline and trying to spend their dollars. And it's a tough situation for a lot of districts.

Meanwhile, the private sector, of course, you can go to work for In and Out Burger and make more money, as you've heard, than you can be an instructional aide at an elementary school. So the private sector's increase in wages is great, and the minimum wage increase is a huge benefit, but it does disadvantage districts who are trying to keep up.

And you talked quite a bit about districts. Their feedback has been, understanding, we saw that they want the flexibility that LCFF provides and not returning to categorical. I'm curious, though, if you had a chance to look at in particularly the schools, the districts that you really were focused on, on what their LCAP process was like and how specific their goals were in the LCAP, specifically to underachieving schools and student subgroups.

Because, as you probably know, last year Dr. Weber in the Assembly led an effort on what is called the equity multiplier, which is to focus dollars in higher needs schools. Because, and I'll just sort of say on the side note, there is some reports that I've read, research that I've read that said that focus dollars to higher needs schools have had an impact, a positive impact. I kind of heard the opposite in this presentation, so we can talk more about that.

But one of the things is the LCAPs really lead to what strategies get used, as you referred to. Did you analyze those LCAPs? Are they focused on those student subgroups? Because flexibility is great, but if it's not being utilized to students that need the support systems, then that's where we in the Legislature need to review that.

Yeah, well, it's a great question. I think maybe two layers. One is the extent to which LCFF is progressively structured. The equity multiplier is a small step towards making it more progressive in terms of getting dollars to highly challenged schools. And you're right, our colleagues at PPIC have shown that districts that benefit from concentration dollars, their student gains historically have been better going back to 2013, notwithstanding the pandemic shock.

So LCFF has been a success story in terms of, at least in districts that are receiving some of the progressively targeted dollars. What we're finding is if you look at the stimulus dollars, the amount of federal and state stimulus dollars received is so far, and we're still early in this recovery, I think, but so far, the revenue per child from the stimulus dollars doesn't predict any stronger bounce back. I mean, hopefully it will long term, but thus far it hasn't.

And then secondly, to your question about LCAP. I mean, LCAPs are, if you can't fall asleep at night, read an LCAP, right? And I think there is a debate over whether the LCAP process leads to more effective strategies for disadvantaged youngsters. I mean, there's a lot of positive rhetoric about moving dollars to those kids. We come back to our earlier conversation. We need to know more about what's working for those students. And just having high sounding progressive rhetoric in an LCAP doesn't mean you're investing in an effective strategy.

I would say the same thing to the districts. Just saying and having the rhetoric that you're focusing the dollars in the ways that are we need the flexibility because we're going to focus the dollars where we need them. Well, that's great, but are you showing student progress? And that's where flexibility meets the importance of oversight and accountability on how those dollars are being spent.

Because I am concerned that in providing flexibility, and there was a lot of, not just with LCFF on an annual allocation basis by the state, certainly the federal dollars, but all the other state dollars that weren't really stimulus dollars, but they were dollars given throughout the last several years. Many of those came without any real specific metrics of success.

And so I get again to anybody who's listening from the districts, and we'll definitely talk about this in the budget sub three, but flexibility is good only to the extent that you're using it and putting your dollars to use to meet the outcomes that we desire. Otherwise, flexibility just to make people's budgeting life easier is not really my vision of what that's intended to do.

Yeah. Two quick points. One is a lot of mid sized and small districts don't have the staff to actually determine what's working. I mean, this is a real constraint. I mean, big urban districts might have analytic staff and they contract with people like PACE to figure out empirically what's working. But a lot of districts don't have that capacity.

So maybe the state should play a role in that. If we're providing dollars for a specific outcome, then maybe we need to make sure that we're measuring that those outcomes are being delivered.

Yeah, and to CDE's credit, they are investing in our work to try to figure out what is working. So there's a little bit of activity there at the state level. But I agree the state might be better positioned to develop the analytic capacity than a thousand local schools.

Let me just ask this final question, Mr. Chair. On your slide on Compton, it really caught my interest. In the case of Compton, I think the way I'm reading your math, they essentially lost 5% of proficiency, but then they gained it. So they're back to where they were, or actually a little bit above it looks like where they were. Am I reading that correct?

You're a good reader of graphics. Precisely.

Visual learner. So then, you mentioned specifically, and this will be the last one, I promise, because I've heard from a lot of superintendents about the social emotional issue. And in this case you mentioned that Compton was really focused on that, I'd love to hear more about that as you develop more research, but that is one of the federal funding programs that I know is coming to an end in terms of mental health support systems for our schools. That is very concerning to superintendents.

So I'm just curious how Compton has been doing this work till now and how they hope to continue to do that work, given that, it seems that that might have been a really effective tool for their bounce back.

Yeah, they've invested heavily in classified staff, instructional aides, and then again, the Superintendent, I think, has been very skilled in teaming up with Cal State Dominguez Hills and other NGO partners to bring more adults onto campuses to develop these relationships with kids.

I would mention quickly, Del Norte county- They say Del Norte up there, but Del Norte county has really skillfully tapped into the Medi-Cal reimbursement, and that's been a huge positive and a big achievement legislatively, I think, here in the Capitol because they can now get reimbursed for a lot of the counseling services to deal with attendance and follow up that Heather mentioned. Otherwise, they would not have a stable source for that kind of social emotional support.

Great. Thank you for sharing that.

Can I note, too, that research from several years ago through PACE showed that California has one of the lowest reimbursement rates for Medicare in schools. So this continues to be money that's still on the table.

Right. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you. Ms. Bonta.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I am going to have to step out for a moment, so partially directed to this panel, but also I'm going to be very sad to see some of my former friends and current friends and former colleagues not hearing what they present. So I think one of the issues that you all raised that's really critical is whether or not we have advanced post-Covid in our schools, in the way that we have in our work.

Many of our people are still engaged in a life of telecommuting, of hybrid work schedules, of doing things in a different way. I sat on the school board when Covid hit, and a lot of the ESSER dollars and funding was literally just spent to make sure that we had HVAC units and computers and tablets in classrooms, to be able to just support the basic functioning of classrooms. But what also happened is that students got used to learning in an adaptive way, for better or for worse.

And so I think part of the challenge that we have right now is ensuring that we're actually keeping the good part of what came from that learning experience for students over several years. Not everything happened in their learning environments inside four walls in a classroom. Educators had to adapt, unfortunately, and also, thankfully, to ensuring that students had the ability to pace themselves in their learning progress over the course of a year.

And so part of what I hope we get from this hearing and overall in our work in the Education Committee is that we're really thoughtfully looking at the ways that we need to adapt the entirety of our learning process to be able to support learners where they are, both developmentally but also situationally.

And I think any dollars, and I say this with great respect for the Budget Sub-Chair under Education and hope that we actually have an opportunity to ensure that the dollars that we can spend right now, either directed or flexibly, have the ability to really capture the best of what we learned during COVID which is that whenever you meet a child where they are, they have a better opportunity to be able to learn.

And so I'm looking forward to that being a strand of the conversation as we move forward in this hearing. And we'll also say that one of the greatest challenges that that aspiration leads to is the way in which we continue to have technology and broadband access widely and certainly available for every child. I see some of my colleagues from Oakland in the room and in the space who have held down the fort largely around the idea of broadband being equitably and certainly available to every individual.

And I think we have a challenge there in matching our aspirations educationally to the actuality of having everyone be technologically enabled during this time of bounce back. I know we do it. I know that we can do it, but I know it's going to be challenging. So thank you, Chair, for the opportunity.

Thank you. Ms. Bontai, we know that you have important matters to attend to, but I just want to remind you that we have our third panel on closing the digital divide, and if you can come back. Thank you. I'd like to follow up on our colleagues. I just want to note that we have San Diego, Oakland and the Los Angeles area represented up here. And so we are covering at least the largest school districts in the state in addressing these issues.

I wanted to follow up on this healthy debate between Ms. Bonta and Ms. Alvarez in terms of the balancing act between giving districts more flexibility to be able to address their particular local needs versus the state wanting to make sure that we are holding districts accountable and spending the dollars, especially from our perspective, the state dollars, most effectively.

That's a constant balancing act, constant debate that we have here in the state capitol to what extent do we respect the local control of school districts versus wanting to ensure that districts are being held accountable and being effectively spending the dollars, Federal and State Dollars that are being appropriated? I just wanted to give an opportunity to either or both of you. If you have any comments on any advice for us in terms of how to, in general, strike that balancing act.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's something I'm thinking about a lot right now as well. I think the challenge is that we're asking school districts and educators to do something that has never been done before. So when you look at the way we closed achievement gaps and grew student learning, it was very slow over very many years, and then we had this huge drop. We don't know how to do the huge gain.

And we have to recognize that when we think about accountability, because it's not, you need to do something, you know how to do it. Are you doing it? It's none of us really know how to do this. How are we going to collect data? How are we going to monitor? How are we going to build capacity? How are we together going to think about how we remove the barriers that people are encountering to do the work?

And I think that that's part of the challenge, is that we don't have that infrastructure that we've built statewide to say, what are people doing? Is it working? How do we share those practices? If you're not able to do some of these things that we are seeing are effective, how do we build that capacity for you to do it locally? And as Professor Fuller noted, we really don't have an infrastructure for collecting data.

We didn't build that into most of the legislation or the funding for these various programs. So at this point, we have very little information about what's happening at scale and what kinds of practices are working for which students, under what conditions. Building that infrastructure is the first step to then being able to all come together and say, how do we support the places that aren't moving the dial, that don't seem to have the capacity to do the work and why?

Yeah, I would just add, I think about this at two levels. One is how are we doing in terms of school finance overall? And Mr. Alvarez, I think, was onto a good line of reasoning that the way we've structured LCFF does seem to be yielding some benefits in terms of narrowing achievement gaps, notwithstanding the pandemic catastrophe. So we have to keep analyzing how are we doing with supplemental grants, concentration, the equity multiplier.

But then at a second level, when we legislate these programs, I think we've got to give CDE more resources and better capacity to evaluate them. I mean, I've been part of a conversation to try to get an evaluation going of Transitional kindergarten, and the Department of Finance, year after year, just doesn't want to fund an evaluation. And it's really pennywise and pound foolish, I think, to spend billions of dollars in each of these programs.

But then the Administration or legislative leadership feels that careful evaluation is not worth the money. It keeps us in the dark empirically.

Well, I think we're all for having the data to make data driven policy decisions, but we're also confronted with the often heard demands that dollars should be spent most in the classroom rather than on administrators. That is the challenge that we face. But we hear loud and clear if we want to identify the most effective data driven strategies that we need to invest in that infrastructure. Dr. Hough, you were just talking about how we don't really know what is going to be the most effective strategies in terms of ramping up that learning recovery, especially for communities that suffer the most impacts.

And yet your slideshow, your slides, I have so many slides in front of me, but your- This is not numbered. Your last slide in your first deck. It shows the relative academic performance scores as well as the recoveries before and after the pandemic among states. And yeah, again, these are sobering. It's a sobering graph that I often see.

First of all, this is the graph that shows Massachusetts, as often as the case, seems to be the top state in the country in terms of academic performance, and California being well below the United States average. What do you attribute that to?

Well, I think the biggest piece of it is a long history of underfunding. Heading into the pandemic, we had amongst the lowest per pupil funding, when adjusted for cost of living. We were 39th in the country in education spending, adjusted for cost of living, 40th in education spending as a percentage of the total economy. And because of that, we were 48th nationally in teacher to student ratios, 48th in guidance counselors, and last in librarians.

And there's a lot of infrastructure in these states that are at the top around building state level structures and supports to build capacity locally. PACE over the years has done a lot of research looking at different topic areas and trying to see what are these other states doing that are better or that maybe have a stronger foundation. They've had longitudinal data systems for 20 years. They have a statewide infrastructure for tracking what works and under what conditions.

They have a lot clearer expectation of what good instruction looks like and alignment in those goals from policy through teacher education, through funding, through accountability and support. So I think it's not just what are they doing post pandemic. Are they instituting certain kinds of policies that we know are effective, like tutoring, et cetera? It's bigger than that. It's that going into the pandemic, they had a stronger foundation. And this staffing issue is one that we just have to really look at that.

I think about it in terms of drought, because we're in California, if you have drought parched soil, when it rains, it's hard for it to absorb it. And we had a drought parched education system. And so when we poured all this money into it, we weren't able to absorb and make use of that money in the same way that some of these other systems that had that stronger capacity, that had more adults in school buildings were able to do.

So I think as we think about our recovery, we really have to be thinking about these long term system improvements. We also know that in California, from the day districts got this additional money, they knew it was going away. People were talking about the fiscal cliff the first day they got new money. So they knew that they weren't able to create new workforces, new pipelines, because they were looking at a very short term fix.

And so as we think about our long term recovery, which it's pretty clear we have to be thinking about long term recovery. We have to be thinking about how do we build that foundation so that our schools are places where we're able to build that capacity long term.

Dr. Fuller, do you have any comments?

No.

Okay. So, Dr. Hough, so you're saying that despite the fact that in our general, California's general fund budget, that we spend more on K-12 than on any other program area compared to the rest of the country, historically, we have been way far behind in terms of the per people spending and-

We've had improvements over the last few years, absolutely. But the cost of living in California continues to be very challenging, that even as our per pupil spending goes up, when you adjust that for cost of living, it's still very low compared to other states because the buying power of a dollar is different here than in other places, which makes it difficult to hire staff.

It means that, and I think this is a lot of what we saw in the teacher strikes during the pandemic is this demand for higher wages, higher salary, to be able to afford to live in the places where people work or even near the places where people work. And so we continue to have very few adults in our buildings, even as we've increased the funding for.

Okay. Dr. Fuller, your presentation highlights some of the most common strategies, most common budget and program strategies among the 726 districts that you studied. And yet I heard you saying, please correct me if I'm wrong, that you agreed with Ms. Bonta's analogy of throwing spaghetti against the wall. We'd like to think that we know better than, and we're making these budget and policy decisions with more than just throwing spaghetti against the wall. Don't we have a better sense of...

I know that we're all going to be anxiously awaiting your Spring Report. But, for example, there seems to be a common theme, not only in terms of your presentation, but I remember last year we heard from Los Angeles Unified about how they were kind of bragging about how they've been having exceptional results with learning recovery, with their summer school programs, with their after school programs.

There seems to be a common theme of focusing more attention, getting more instructional aids, getting more tutors, getting more literacy coaches, getting more Cal State Dominguez Hills kids working with kids, that kind of more individualized attention for the kids with the greatest needs, as well as the overall investments in expanding instructional time. Whether it's summer schools or whether it's providing more after school programs. At least, should we be focusing on those general strategies?

Well, I think you do have some successes already, like transitional kindergarten. I mean, beyond Heather's shop and our shop, we have research colleagues all over the country, and I think starting early with Pre K and TK, we know that's likely to pay off. We'd like to know whether the California program has sufficient quality to replicate these results. But point number one is you have some successes already in terms of where you're targeting dollars.

I think ELOG is extending the school day, and we know that if we can extend instructional time at a fairly high level of quality for kids, that's going to pay off. So I think the good news is evidence is mounting on some of these basic strategies that seem like pretty solid bets.

Secondly, our Spring Report, I think, will add some precision to this because we'll take all those strategies we've recorded and coded from the 720 plans, and we'll statistically see whether those strategies estimate a stronger bounce back for California kids. So we're going to try to add precision to what we know about what works.

But I think around the country, and given the research capacity in California, we do know starting early, longer instructional time, intensive tutoring, nurturing these one on one support relationships with more adults, we do know already that those have really promising effects. So I think you're making some really rational decisions thus far. Now we need greater precision, I think, as to which of these district strategies are paying off.

Okay. Dr. Hough?

Yeah. I just want to underline quality in all of this. Because research on all of these programs shows that it's not just adding the extra time or putting kids into summer school. It's making sure that that is taught by people who have the right knowledge, that it's aligned with their school day program. And it's really hard to collect measures of quality. But without that, we don't really know anything about whether we should expect it to be effective.

Okay. Thank you. This is going to be important as we are going to be facing a lot of difficult budget discussions this year. Last for myself, and I'll ask Mr. Alvarez if he has any further questions. But Dr. Hough, you talked about how... Well, first, would you agree that one of the most effective strategies in attempting to close the achievement gap is by focusing our efforts on early childhood education?

Yes. A lot of research has shown that early education and having students start with more even footing is very important for long term success in school.

Okay. And Mr. Alvarez's earlier questions focused on how the chronic absenteeism is particularly pronounced in kindergarten. While that's not pre-k, of course, that is the earliest in the k-12 scheme as we continue our efforts to bring in universal transitional kindergarten. But how do you feel about making kindergarten mandatory?

Well, I think in terms of attendance, we know that having high rates of absenteeism in kindergarten sets habits that continue into the required grades. We also know that having mandatory education in grades one through 12 isn't necessarily making it so that we don't have an attendance problem. So I think that what making kindergarten mandatory might do is to communicate to parents this is expected, this is a requirement. I think that there are many ways, in addition to that, that that can be communicated.

In a work group that we pulled together at the end of last year, we did talk with folks about the importance of an attendance campaign, a reminder to parents that going to school is important every day and why. So I think that any way that we can remind parents or reinforce that expectation is important. I don't think that it would probably solve the problem in and of itself.

Dr. Fuller.

Basically agree with that. The other point, I think, is one we're sort of facing a curious problem around the buildup of TK has been slower than expected. LA Times covered this last month. And it may be linked to some of the issues that Heather's already put on the table for four year olds. That parents are worried about health conditions. Parents are not understanding TK relative to other existing pre K programs.

So there's a bunch of external factors out there I think that Heather's referring to that are super important, that are affecting parents' decision making about whether to get up and get the child to school.

Okay. Well, that sounds like a good segue to our next panel. Mr. Alvarez, do you have any? Okay.

Just very briefly. It's really caught my attention. You already heard me sort of talk about the issue of ensuring that programs are working, and the fact that we've proudly talk about TK being universal in California yet aren't measuring what outcomes we are going to be seeing from that is certainly something worthy of discussion as we look to expand that and spend significantly more dollars every single year, not just in human capital but in infrastructure as well in order to accomplish that. And really focusing, what I've learned is that the way we've structured is based on what we've seen be successful in other models.

But there's one thing in modeling after successful programs and it's another in implementation. And so I think that's just one takeaway for me, specifically as it relates to one program that's relatively new but a significant long term investment in California's education system. But similarly, the same analysis should be done on is it working? Or Dr. Hough mentioned something about are we accomplishing what we're hoping to accomplish? And I think we got to ask that about every program. And we have to analyze through data collection, and we have to figure out how to do that. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you. And thank you very much to our panelists for our first panel. Thank you.

Thank you.

All right. Moving on then to our next panel focusing on the overall well being of California students. We are very pleased to have former Assembly Member Ted Lempert, President of Children Now, and Tara Kini, Chief of Policy and Programs from the Learning Policy Institute. Welcome. Mr. Lampard, would you like to start?

Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's an honor to be back before this Committee, and I really want to thank you for taking this whole child approach. We know that students who are healthy and given the unique set of supports that they need are certainly going to fare better in school. And I know I'm speaking to the choir, but I just really want to emphasize the need to double down on your leadership and actually make kids the top priority.

So everyone, top priority kids for a lot of reasons. One, we have fewer kids right now, demographic changes, and so it's essential that every single kid has a unique set of supports, building off Assembly Member Bonta's comments about unique support for each kid so they can reach their full potential. If we're going to have the economy, the society, and be able to support all of us. And then also, as goes California, goes to the rest of the country.

And really appreciated the previous conversation on comparing with other states. We lead on a number of areas in this state. We don't lead on kids' well being. Annie E. Casey Foundation every year puts out a measure of kids well being. California ranks 33rd. Now the good news, thanks to your's and other's leadership, is we've moved up. We were 42nd a decade ago, so we are making progress. But that 33rd is unacceptable.

And that leads me to the Children Now Report Card, which I know you and the other Members have a hard copy of. Folks who are listening, please go to our website at childrennow.org to look through. I'm just going to highlight for the sake of time and to be able to answer questions just a few of the measures. Do want to highlight that this was not a report card I would have liked any of my daughters to bring home. It's a C minus average.

We are actually seeing some slight improvement but have a long ways to go. So I want to refer you first to page seven, Environmental Health and Justice, where we look at the rate of asthma. A major theme of all the health sections is the lack of progress that the state has made in addressing racial disparities in health outcomes. Asthma is one of the many health conditions that impact kids over well being and success in school.

And these racial disparities are caused by systemic bias and access to safe housing, clean air, adequate health care. And you'll see in our report that 19% of Latinos and 15% of black kids missed more than three days of school due to asthma. Second, and I'm just flipping through, there's a lot to go over here, so I'm just highlighting a few of the highlights, or low lights, as the case might be.

And the next is on page 20, Substance Abuse, which actually got one of our lowest grades, a D minus. The good news, drug use among youth in California has gone down. However, it's become more deadly with the introduction of fentanyl. And you'll see one of the charts in our report card is showing that in 2021 there were 794 overdose deaths among California youth due to fentanyl. The important thing I would urge you to remember is that kids are using drugs because they're in pain.

The question for us as adults is how do we help them heal so that drugs and alcohol aren't the support that they turn to? Next on page 28, we go through childcare. And I want to thank you and your colleagues for really tremendous leadership last year in prioritizing childcare, both in terms of rate reform and family fees. The grade did go up. I know C minus isn't a great grade, but it went up from the D range in the previous report card.

But as you'll see from these stats here, we have a long ways to go in childcare, including the growing economic loss to the state as a whole, and that for a single income family, 48% of their funds right now are going to childcare. And I did want to note, I know there's a lot of back and forth on TK already. I just wanted to add one extra point.

I know there's a lot of debate in the building about how TK hurt childcare and that the economic model for childcare relies so heavily on four year olds. I think all of us have Children Now, and I know, speaking for so many others across the state, is that the answer is not to delay, stall, interrupt TK expansion, but to invest more in childcare. And that the TK has been a multi-decade goal of folks in California to have that universal access.

It's critical that we continue on that path. The next stats I'd like to highlight on page 36, English Learners. As you know, California has the largest English learner student population in the country, over 2 million students. These students are a huge asset for the state, but we need to make sure we're providing adequate support. You can see on page 37 with the stats, we're short of our goal of 150,000 high school graduates entering the State Seal of Biliteracy.

And then in terms of our English learners, you'll see on the bottom of that page that 16% of all California 6th grade English learners are still not English proficient by 6th grade. So so far, some fairly bad news. I want to highlight one of our higher grades, and that's on page 40 and 41, Expanded Learning Programs. I really salute the Administration and Legislature on your expansion in number of expanded learning programs.

I would note that as we progress to implement the Expanded Learning Opportunity Program, ELOP, that we have to set minimum program quality standards and staffing qualifications. I think just building off the last conversation, in so many of these programs, having those minimum standards and quality standards is essential. And then also partnerships with community based organizations.

I think we learned through Covid and even before, that there's such a need, in addition to the staffing we'll get into in a minute, really making sure we're leveraging support for community based organizations in community who can certainly help with these expanded learning programs and others. So then to page 46. I appreciated Heather's comments previously where she highlighted the staffing ratios. There's long standing debate in this building about where do we rank in education funding. I've heard from second to 49th.

I think Children Now would say we're hovering around the national average, 21st now, but after this year's budget might drop below national average. What's not in debate is the staffing ratios that Heather highlighted, and we highlight those in our report card on page 47, where we're near the very bottom of the country in total staff. So that's teachers, that's principals and assistant principals, that's guidance counselors, that's student support staff, and that's nurses.

And when you look at other states, and the question was asked why are they doing better, they have higher ratios. And I would also urge, if we look at some of the more expensive private schools in this state, I think I would argue that what's the difference? It's not teacher quality. There's a whole lot of adults on those campuses for a lot less kids.

So this is one of the many critical things. And I do just want to add, since we were highlighting Massachusetts and other states, we do focus a lot on Prop 98 and the minimum guarantee. I think one helpful way of looking at things is we're grouped in all those higher performing states as a high tax state. We rank in the top 10 in state and local taxes. So why don't we rank in the top 10 in education funding?

I think that's a better approach than what's the Prop 98 guarantee year after year. And then finally, and I'm sorry, a little out of order here, I do want to take you back. I think everything I've just mentioned could be appropriately termed from a youth or students point of view of a crisis. The last point I want to make, I think it's not an over exaggeration to say an emergency. That's student mental health.

So appreciate your Mr. Chair and the Legislature and Governor's efforts here and increased investments in youth mental health. And it is making a difference. But just need to highlight the stats we're looking at. Mental health issues are the number one reason California kids are hospitalized. There were over 15,000 self harm emergency department visits by female students. This is page 19. And over 469 suicides by young males in 2021.

And I think the issues we just talked about in staffing and funding and others highlight the mental health issue. And I'll just close, not to be the bearer of bad news, but I hear lots of top priorities bounced around. I don't hear kids, kids, kids, year after year, year after year, top priority, and it just gets back to where we rank nationally.

And the Report Card highlights 43rd in percent of GDP spent on schools, 49th for kids with tooth decay or cavities, 50th in percentage of kids receiving their checkup, 50th in percent of kids with a timely visit to an eye doctor. And I know you know, Mr. Chair, that early childhood, oral health, vision health, mental health, physical health are all critical to every kid, making sure they receive a great education. And to end on a positive note, we are making progress. It might not sound like it, but we are. But it's small progress, and we need to make much more dramatic progress to make sure we're a leader in child well being. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for the opportunity to address you today. I want to start by just echoing the challenges we just heard from Mr. Lempert and from the prior panelists. Despite California being the fifth largest economy in the world, nearly two-thirds of our students come from low-income families. And that's a number that's growing. 3% of California's students are experiencing homelessness, and nearly 40% come from homes where the first language spoken is not English.

So, on the one hand, we're an enormously diverse and wealthy state, and on the other hand, our system of public schools serves up student population with significant needs who are facing a great deal of poverty in a state with an extremely high cost of living. So you've heard today about the significant challenges we're facing as we work to recover from the pandemic, both in terms of academic outcomes and in terms of student well being.

I want to focus my remarks today on California's efforts to address these challenges and to support the whole child. So what do I mean by whole child supports? I mean supports that recognize the interrelationships amongst all areas of children's development, their physical, psychological, cognitive, social, and emotional development. These include access to nutritious food, healthcare, and social supports secure relationships, educative and restorative disciplinary practices and learning opportunities that are really designed to challenge and engage students while supporting their motivation, their self confidence to persevere and succeed.

So California has taken this kind of a whole child approach, responding to the challenges of the pandemic with a robust and a coherent set of policies that together create a web of supports for students and their families, both in and out of school. This includes providing universal school meals, which was first enabled by the Federal Government during the pandemic. But California was the first state to make that a promise by committing ongoing state funds. We're just one of eight states to have done so.

MediCal now covers more than half of California children, and California has invested $4.6 billion in the Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative. This initiative is working to break down the silos separating the state's child-serving systems and linking the efforts of the health, education, and other sectors to give California's children broader access to mental health and substance abuse supports. We've also invested $4 billion annually in providing expanded learning through the Expanded Learning Opportunities program before school, after school, during summer, and intercession.

That's hands-on and engaging, and that really helps to meet students academic, social, emotional, and physical needs and meet their interests. These are not your remedial summer school programs, and in 2021, the state approved the plan to provide universal pre-K to all four-year-olds and income-eligible three-year-olds. We've heard a lot about that today with those pre-K investments.

UPK investments leas have been able to steadily roll out UPK across the state, with four-fifths of districts offering T-K at all of their elementary sites. Over four-fifths offering full-day T-K. Over one-third of LEAs offered early enrollment TK in 2022-23 and plan to continue that offering this school year. So they're expanding the rollout of transitional kindergarten ahead of the legislative schedule, and more than 80% of LEAs are combining multiple funding streams and programs.

ELOP, for example, ACES CSPP Head Start, and more to offer full day and extended day for transitional kindergartners and even for three-year-olds. Finally, the state has invested more than $4 billion to create and sustain community schools, which is a key strategy, really for organizing the resources of the school and community around student success. It offers a framework for really integrating many of the supports we've talked about today in a way that attends to the whole child needs of students and their families.

These various whole child programs and many others are critical investments intended to provide that web of supports that wrap around children and their families to enable healthy development and respond to student needs and address students learning barriers. The foundation that they rest on, of course, is the core work of teaching and learning. So the state's ongoing and substantial investments in the Local Control Funding Formula are critical to enabling this core work.

We're now a decade into this more equitable approach to distributing funds based on student needs and then allowing local districts to make decisions about how to spend that funding through our accountability system. That's looking not just at student test scores, but at other measures of student and school success really adopting that whole child approach in our accountability system.

Recently released research on LCFF from UC Berkeley Professor Rucker Johnson finds that LCFF funding induced funding increases improved academic achievement for every grade and subject assessed in both math and reading, with students in concentration grant districts having the largest achievement boost, and I've provided a brief that summarizes those findings I think in your packet. The other foundational investment that the state has made is in the recruitment, preparation and retention of a well prepared educator workforce.

We've heard a lot today about the impact that staffing shortages is having on the ability to implement many of the new programs with quality, so I think it's important to mention that foundational investment. So I want to close by sharing a few examples of districts that are leveraging these various investments that California has made to support the whole child in ways that are making a difference for students academic outcomes as well as their overall well being.

So Lost Hills, for example, is a small, rural elementary district in Kern County serving a student population that's more than half English learners and more than 80% students from low-income families. This district has fully launched a community schools strategy. They first leveraged a federal full-service community schools grant and are now using California's Community School Partnership program grant funding. They're part of the West Kern Consortium for full-service community schools.

So that's enabling schools in that consortium to all have a community school coordinator, a social worker, and an AmeriCorps mentor who are working together to support students and families in those schools. They're offering after-school programming, shared nursing services, and preschool, and the consortium has been able to pilot MediCal-sponsored mental health services directly on campuses one day a week.

On the academic front, they've identified math education as a focus area, and so they're providing math coaching for teachers and for instructional aides who are providing small group instruction in math. And these efforts are paying off academically. They saw double-digit gains in ELA and math since the pandemic, and I've included a summary of the work that's going on there. Modesto City Elementary services student population who are one third English learners and 85% of whom come from low-income families.

They're leveraging ELOP funding and T-K funding to provide expanded learning district-wide, and they're doing that both through after-school programs at all of their T-K eight sites. That includes academic intervention classes as part of the after-school programming that are taught by classroom teachers, enrichment classes, intramural sports, and community partnerships with the boys and girls clubs and city park and Rec.

So the district's data on that program show that of the nearly 1200 K-6 students who participated in academic intervention for ELA there, more than 90% met their growth targets 15% or more from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, and chronic absenteeism in that district, which is a major challenge both for that district, as we heard from Heather from so many others, declined by 17 percentage points last year compared to the state's statewide decline of six percentage points.

Oakland Unified is another district that's been able to leverage both community schools funding as well as some of these other programs to implement a community schools approach district wide and is seeing success with that strategy. So the whole child investments that California has made as well as our ongoing investments in LCFF are enabling educators in these and other districts to attend to the many aspects of children's well being that create the foundation for learning.

As you heard from Dr. Fuller, we're still really early on in implementing many of these investments. There's much to be learned about how implementation is going and how it can be improved. LPI is engaged in research on some of these initiatives, on UPK, on community schools, on the educator workforce investment. So look forward to sharing that research with you when it comes out. But I think there are many folks in this room who want to learn what's happening with these programs and stand ready to support you as you do so.

All right, well, thank you very much. This is great. Assemblymember Lempert, you first presented a very critical picture of California's investments in overall child well being, especially in terms of our budgets. And while everyone has been acknowledging that we have made tremendous strides in recent years, I'm curious.

As a former state Legislator, Ms. Kini correctly paints the picture or provides the data that shows that overall, I mean, California, we are not only the wealthiest state in the country, but we also probably have among the biggest, most high needs population. Is that fair to say?

Yes, absolutely.

A lot of the challenges that you highlight in your Children Now report card is in part a reflection of how we have nearly two thirds of our students coming from Low income families, that we have the highest percentage. We are number one in the country in terms of the percentage of English learner students that we are high wealth, but we are high need.

I mean, that's kind of like a bottom line takeaway given that we are the fifth or fourth, depending on who you're talking to, with the largest economy in the world. And yet, according to report card, we're doing so much worse than most other states in the country. Are we just spending a smaller percentage of our overall budget?

I mean, I know as part of this whole child approach that we can't just talk about our Prop 98 funding, but all of this spending, child care, health care services, mental health services overall. Is it your opinion, Assembly Member, that we are behind or are we below the US average in terms of the overall investment and the well being of our children?

Yes. So big question. Just a few brief mean if you put all these programs together, certainly we're around national average and education, which is the largest, and then MediCal, the next largest expenditure for kids. And we talked about those reimbursements aren't as high for kids, and then third largest is child support. So yes, in general, we are certainly below where we are in terms of taxes.

And I'm not saying we don't need more revenue, but what I'm saying is if we're top 10 in state and local, we don't think about that often enough. If our revenue is top 10, why aren't all these expenditures top 10? When we are, we tend to be below average. And the other piece, I think data was mentioned, one of the grades that went up in this report card that launch pseudo data system for K-12 to higher ed.

We need to make that a whole child system so we can see what's working. I mentioned prioritization because as you know, it's so critical in driving decisions. And I almost feel we have a complacency when it comes to kids like, oh yeah, kids, zero yeah, they're not doing bad. As opposed to that's the top issue. And then if there's another top issue that's getting a lot of attention, well how's that affecting kids?

So if the top issue this year is not kids but homelessness, then let's look at childhood homelessness where the focus hasn't been. Right. And so if you look at our report card, which port, great. We show that the number of homelessness where most of the funding right now for homelessness is not directed. So I do think that we too often accept where we are with kids about saying what's the top issue of the state this year? Kids well being every year until we turn around.

And the good news is this takes a while. Health insurance. It wasn't that long ago when more than 10% of our kids don't have health insurance. Now it's very few. And that's not just Obamacare as you know, that's this state's effort to cover undocumented and all kids. Universal preschool, another example where for years we talked about it and got it done. So I think you feel that this seems overwhelming, but it doesn't need to be. Let's focus on each of these areas.

Where are we trying to get and stay focused and then on the education funding. Since you referenced my past service, remembering the early days of Prop 98, and I know you've heard this many times, it was a floor, not a ceiling. And I don't think anyone in their wildest imagination thought that Prop 98 would ever be waived for a few years. What it was that would ever actually be the four.

And so that's why I made my comment earlier where I feel all of us, not just the policymakers but outside advocates as well, we tend to just take Prop 98 as that's where we start with education funding as opposed to let's start the debate looking at research like you've heard today, where do we rank with other states and what is the appropriate level of funding to make sure that every kid has the appropriate support?

So again, in terms of the high level takeaways, we're top 10% in the country in terms of revenues, and yet we are well below average in terms of the overall investments in the overall well being of our children.

Yes, and I just have to make one other point. Since the comment about in and out and the staffing shortages, what correlates to that as well is, and we highlight this in the report card, let's just focus on the public sector. Let's not focus on if you work with kids, you make less, even if you need a bachelor's degree plus. And so the State of California in General, unlike both private sector and nonprofit, we're not really providing an education premium when we look at our workforce.

So just focusing on our workforce, we're sending the wrong message with how we allocate funding by saying, if you work with kids and whether that's in health, well, obviously in education, everyone would work with kids. But compared to other public sector employment, and certainly childcare is literally just hanging in there at minimum wage, you work with kids, you're making less. And let's just focus on the public sector, where you all have the ability to make those shifts.

So it's a good bridge to my question to Ms. Kini. I mean, Mr. Lempert's comments reminded me of a question that I intended to ask the first panel, but I'll ask it to you now. There was earlier discussion about how districts are not spending the federal and state dollars that they've received because they can't fill the positions. Is there evidence indicating that districts are using some of those unspent dollars to pay higher salaries to try to make sure that instructional aides are making more than in and out burger employees?

I think the staffing shortages issues that have been a theme throughout today are real. I mean, when districts can't hire qualified staff, they will turn to people, for example, amongst teachers who haven't completed teacher preparation, don't yet have a teaching credential, or they'll increase class size. They may cancel classes if they're elective or they just leave those vacancies unfilled if they're aid positions, et cetera. I think raising salaries, we've seen that be a really successful strategy, especially for getting substitutes to cover classes.

So a number of districts have substantially increased their daily sub rate and have eliminated their substitute shortages in that way, raising salaries for teachers and other staff. There's a robust research base showing how that is related to your ability to fill your staffing position.

So specifically with instructional aids. Are you familiar with any?

I haven't seen the research on instructional aids in particular. I think it would be a good thing to dig into.

Okay. But I know I have a Bill to try to increase salaries for the overall education workforce in order to try to solve this chronic workforce shortage challenge. But you believe that data shows that, especially with substitute teachers, that it has clearly helped resolve the substitute teacher shortage.

Yeah. In California and as in other states, teachers make about $0.80 on the dollar of other college educated professionals. And that's after you take into account the Shorter work year. So to the point about competing with the private sector, it is very hard to do with salaries as they are.

Okay, another question I have for both of you know, I had an opportunity to travel this past fall to Boston and New Jersey to look at how Massachusetts and New Jersey has been trying to expand universal pre-K while at the same time supporting the care industry infrastructure. And one of the takeaways from my trip then was the importance of investing in both priorities, universal pre-K and childcare, while at the same time not lowering standards in terms of the workforce.

But it would seem to me, and in fact we heard a lot about how having high standards for the workforce creates the challenge in terms of the workforce shortage. Any thoughts on that challenge specifically for California?

Yeah, well, you're touching on know really critical and important issue and I think gets especially tricky in a budget year like this where it's so important like for T-K, that we're focused on quality and the appropriate ratios for that age group and at the same time recognizing we need to keep progress going. So I think it's critical to keep the focus on quality and if there's any brief exemption from that, we agree to go right back to it.

And then your comment about the just a broader point then very specifically, this is not to let folks off the hook, but I think one of the struggles we face with early childhood, unlike some of these other issues, is if only we knew during the new deal or great society what we know today. This is the most important investment. This is where we should be putting the most dollars in those earliest years.

And of course, historically this is not just California, but the United States has been way behind. The international comparisons are frightening. We're about $500 per capita childcare. Most other countries are over 15, 20, 25 thousand. So we've got a long ways to go. But I think the way to look at that is to recognize that, that we're late to the game here. But that's why any available dollar kids early years, last place you cut.

So we look back in the last, not going to use the word recession now, but you look back during the Great Recession, what did we cut first childcare? That sent us way backwards. So now during this budget shortfall, we're on a better path, but we need to ensure that we don't ever look at cuts for kids and have to go elsewhere.

Then to your specific point about the workforce, the goal and Bill back better had this about we're really looking at early childhood educators matching K-12 educators in terms of salary and then looking at even that being too low. But that's the goal we need to strive for. So as we get closer to that goal, then those education quality requirements become very, very doable. And I think we just need to be thoughtful how we phase that in.

But it shouldn't be a wild eyed goal to say that that early childhood educator shouldn't be on par. And anecdotes are sometimes helpful. I know we were fortunate enough to have our kids in quality childcare and I know talking to the teacher of my three year old was just as complicated as my teacher conference the next day with my second grader. Right. And actually more so.

We need to recognize that the early childhood workforce, mostly women, mostly women of color and throughout history, not given the support. And so where do we want to get? Let's set that as a goal and move there as quickly as possible and adjust the educational and workforce standards as we move that along.

Ms. Kini, do you have any?

Yeah. I think I would just point to as well the state's role here because with districts, cities, counties, they can't solve these staffing challenges on their own when there's an overall shortage across the state. Right. The neighboring district or city or county can pay more and woo those educators away.

So I think the statewide investments, the states put 100 million into the UPK planning and implementation grants, the 100 million that was set aside for staffing there in pre-K, T-K and kindergarten is a really important investment.

The statewide investments in things like the golden state grants, service scholarships for teachers, including in T-K and childcare, teacher and school counselor residency programs, those integrated teacher preparation programs in undergrad, including with our new P3 credentialing programs are all critically important to building up that statewide supply of qualified educators.

Okay, last, as we begin our discussions on a very difficult budget year coming up, and with difficult budget years going forward, I know it's always easier to say we need to invest more in children, and it's harder to answer where is that money going to come from if we're not talking about new revenues, which of course is always an option. But do you have any general thoughts, especially looking at other states? If other states are spending, are other states?

I guess this might tie into my earlier question, but are other states spending a bigger portion of their budgets on supporting the overall well being of kids? And if not, do you have any thoughts in terms of the advice for us in terms of how to prioritize children's overall well being and where that money should be coming from? What other programs should we be taking money from in order to support more of these programs supporting children.

In general? We are behind money is most of them. Not the only point. I think some comments were made earlier about just whether it's accountability or really evaluating programs that work and sticking with that plan has been important. On the money side, I would just repeat, let's not make, I think, errors we made in the recent past. So when there is a budget shortfall and this gets to prioritization, how about we say that if there's any available dollars, it goes to kids.

And I see in the budget right now, albeit small, but there are some small areas where there's proposed increases not for kids. That has to be for kids. And the second is last place you cut. And this goes across education, early child welfare. You're aware of the very serious proposed cuts for youth and foster care. The last place you cut is kids.

And if you take that as the principle, that's going to help keep us more in line with other states rather than dropping below other states. And then in terms of new revenue, past efforts have been which Children Now have supported. Don't want to, don't get me wrong, but they haven't been focused on kids, even going back to Prop 30 and the Prop 15 that narrowly failed. Those are general government supports.

And so I know folks aren't completely focused on it right now, but as we look to a future revenue measure, you look at this report card, let's focus it on kids health, education, early childhood through higher ed, and youth in foster care. And so both prioritizing it within the current pie, which we don't do enough. And if we talk about new revenue, not general. Government needs to be focused on kids. Not that there aren't other important points, but this is where we're furthest behind.

This is what puts us at greatest risk as a state.

All right, Ms. Kini, any thoughts?

That's a tough question, and I'm glad I don't have your job. But I guess I want to say I mentioned the foundational investments in LCFF. I think we are seeing that that policy has been good for students in California. So I would just name that as a building block for us as a state. And in terms of many of the investments I've talked about and others have talked about, just we are still very early in implementation.

It takes a lot for district leaders and others to stand up those programs, to get them going, to learn from their successes and failures and tweak and refine them around the edges or reboot completely to get it working correctly. I worry about people having stood them up and then watch them go away. I think that's part of how we lose educators from the system.

And so I think learning from what's working there, elevating those successes and doubling down where we're seeing those successes is something we should be keeping in mind.

Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much. Really appreciate you sharing your wisdom. Thank you. Okay. Last but not least, we have our third panel, Technology Access for California students addressing the digital divide. We have three panelists want to welcome Niu Gao, senior fellow with the Public Policy Institute of California, Agustin Urgiles School to Home Executive Manager, California Emerging Technology Fund, and Terry Loftus, the Assistant Superintendent and Chief Information Officer for the San Diego County Office of Education. Welcome, everyone. Why don't we start with Ms. Gao?

Thank you for the opportunity to testify this morning. PPIC is an independent, nonpartisan research institution and does not take positions on legislation. My comments are based on recent PPIC research on the digital divide in California and efforts to achieve digital equity for year students.

The Covid-19 pandemic made digital access an educational necessity and highlighted the state's longstanding digital divide, defined as disparities in reliable access to Internet and devices. In spring 2020, when schools shifted to distance learning, only 68% of households with school age children have reliable access to devices. As a result of federal, state, and local efforts, 82% of households had reliable device access by the fall of 2020, with the greatest gains among low income households, households without any college graduates, and black and Latino households.

However, Internet access improved more modestly. The share of households with reliable Internet access rose from 71% to 75% between the spring and fall of 2020. Gains were strongest among low income households and households without a bachelor's degree. Moreover, progress on both device and Internet access stalled in the spring of 2021. 41% of low income households still do not have full digital access for distanced learning. Neither do 37% of Latino households and 29% of black households.

The lack of photo progress could be contributed to a few factors. First, most schools had reopened for in person instruction by the spring of 2021. Second, many low income communities and also rural areas do not have broadband infrastructure, which may take many years to develop. Key barriers to universal digital access include availability, affordability, and adoption. Federal and state governments have enacted a lot of major policy initiatives to lower those barriers to access during the pandemic.

In the interest of time, I will just highlight three key investments. The first is the FCC's Emergency Connectivity Fund, or ECF. Created in 2021, the ECF provides 7.2 billion to help schools and libraries provide Internet or devices to students and school staff. It covers eligible devices, WiFi, houseboats, routers, and connectivity purchases for off campus use. Educational organizations such as school districts in California have requested nearly $1.4 billion in ECF funding. The funding has provided about 1.6 million connected devices to California schools.

The second major investment is the FCC's Emergency Broadband Benefit Program, or EBB. Created in February 2021, EBB provides about 3.2 billion to help eligible households connect to the Internet. The program was replaced later that year by the $14 billion Affordable Connectivity Program, or ACP. Eligible households receive $30 per month towards broadband services. Right now, about 5.8 million California households are eligible for the ACP program, and half of those households are currently enrolled to take advantage of the monthly subsidies.

There is considerable variation across counties in Imperial County, for example, 100% of the eligible households are participating, whereas only 5% of eligible households in Mono county have enrolled. The good news is that counties with higher poverty rates tend to have higher participation rate. It is also worth noting that as of February 8th, Congress has taken no action to renew funding for the ACP program.

As a result, the ACP program is no longer accepting new enrollments, and enrolled households will continue to receive the monthly benefit until the program exhausts money, which is projected in April 2024. And thirdly, California State Senate Bill, or SB 156, allocated $6 billion to increase equitable and affordable access to high speed Internet, and the time is passing. In 2021, SB 156 was the largest public broadband investment in the country.

In our research, we've seen school districts, cities and counties leveraging those new investments to bolster their efforts to close the digital divide. Two decades ago, the Imperial Valley Telecommunications Authority, which is a collaborative of 35 agencies, including school districts, city governments, the County Office of Education, Imperial Community College, and San Diego State University, established a fiber optic network to provide Internet services to over 120 educational agencies throughout the county.

And recent one-time dollars helped the county replace equipment for security purposes, expand network capacity, and also increase the number of antennas. Fresno Unified School District leverages fiber optic backhaul and school buildings as a platform to deploy a private LTE service covering about 20 sq. mi and supporting more than 6500 concurrent student connections. And finally, Lindsay Unified School District, a small rural district in the Central Valley, built a community WiFi network in 2016 to deliver high speed Internet to students at home.

State and federal funding allow the district to maintain its network during the pandemic. In conclusion, the pandemic has shined the spotlight on the importance of digital connectivity. Federal, state, and local efforts have led to considerable improvements in digital access for students, with especially strong progress in access to computing devices.

However, three in 10 households with school age children still do not have access to either reliable Internet or a device, and disparities among racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines persist, given the increased frequency and intensity of flooding, wildfires, earthquakes, and extreme weather events. Universal broadband access is key to building resilience into the education system so learning can continue when school buildings are closed and all students have access to high quality education.

All right, thank you very much. Next, I'd like to welcome Mr. Urgiles.

Thank you.

Let me put up the slide.

See, we're trying to get them connected. Okay, there we go.

Thank you very much on behalf of the California Emerging Technology Fund, we really appreciate being able to be part of this important discussion. I'm Augustine Urgiles.

I'm in charge of school to home, a strategic initiative of CETF to close both the digital divide and the achievement gap helping title one middle schools use technology effectively the urgency of this hearing is underscored by the recent 2023 statewide digital equity survey conducted by CETF, the California Department of Technology, and USC researchers, which found the following points I'm going to share these points, but I also want to say that there will be a briefing on this survey for legislative staff on the 29 February.

So just FYI. The first highlight of note, broadband connectivity for families with children in school drop from a peak of 97% in 2021 during the pandemic to 93% in 2023, in part due to the ending of school based connectivity programs. There has also been a significant decrease in the share of K-12 households reporting their children have a computer that they don't have to share at home for school use, declining from 95% in 2021 to about 70% in 2023, and this mainly impacts low income students.

Additional data from a random sample of families who attended one of the 75 in person ACP enrollment events the CETF conducted across California last year. We learned that 75% of those signing up earn less than $40,000 per year, 65% of the families with children's in school did not own a computing device, 37% said that their children's school did not provide a digital device for each student, and 47% said their children's school did not allow for devices to go home. Unfortunately, ACP faces uncertain funding.

As you have heard, this will reinstate affordability as an issue that will significantly contribute to the digital divide. CETF will continue working towards making sure that this issue is addressed by supporting the development of a backup plan to ACP in the form of two bills that are currently up for consideration, Assembly Bill 1588 and Senate Bill 1179, which will require ISP vendors to the State of California to provide affordable offers for qualifying families.

But we also need to keep in mind that the digital divide alone, or solving the digital divide alone, will not solve the challenges confronting our schools serving low income students. They need a comprehensive program, a framework of support like what we have seen in school to home, to help them adopt and use technology effective and maximize the impact of these resources. These are some recommendations from our experience working in this area.

We need to make sure that students have access to these devices at home to computing devices. And we need to declare that digital device for student is essential to learning today as essential to learning today as textbooks, and require that devices purchased with public funding can be taken home by students following guidelines established by CDE.

To make sure that we're taking care of these devices next recommend that all middle schools serving high need students provide digital devices to their students to use at school and home, and offer training to parents on how to use technology to support their children's education and receive information on affordable Internet service offers that are available. Next, request state Board of Education to provide districts with information on what's working on guidance for integrating technology best practices into their local control accountability plans.

Furthermore, we can ask the California Collaborative for educational excellence to convene learning communities among interested high need districts to implement programs and resources and promising practices like what's been done in school to home, and then report the findings to inform lcaps of districts with high knee students. And then we can also urge the Legislature, state Superintendent, Governor to recruit philanthropic foundations and technology companies to Fund these convenings.

Finally, we can look at updating the California Community Schools program to require grantees to incorporate strategies and best practices that optimize technology use and help families sign up for low cost offers because a lot of the services and supports can be delivered online. Again, thank you for this opportunity. We're committed to closing this persistent gap.

We really need to make sure that all of the millions that were spent during the pandemic on technology, hardware, connectivity, software, even trainings is fully maximized, and we build on that to address a lot of the gaps that are still impacting our highest need students.

Thank you. Thank you.

Good morning, Chairman, Mayor Suchi, staff and guests, I have the honor of serving at the San Diego County Office of Education, where our work is centered on supporting more than 550,000 k-12 students and staff across the County of San Diego. We've just heard some great statewide and regional metrics, and I appreciate the opportunity to provide some insights at a local level. So we serve over 470,000 students in 43 school districts and 129 charter schools.

Our schools serve a beautifully diverse set of learners with the county itself being geographically and culturally diverse. What we see here are some of the overarching demographics for San Diego County. And in putting together today's comments, I feel it's important that we share that the technology needs of California students, and indeed the students of San Diego County, are directly affected by economics and socioeconomic status.

As we've heard from other panelists earlier today and taking a look at the numbers on the screen, we know that our families continue to struggle with 51% of our students and their families currently enrolled in the free and Reduced Meals program. And researchers from the nonprofit San Diego foundation have found that San Diego's County's total poverty metrics are greater than those of 93% of other counties in the United States, which is not something you would commonly think when you think about San Diego County.

While these challenges are not unique to San Diego, I know that these statistics, as they are really key to the underlying cause of the digital divide we're talking about today. So when the pandemic began in 2019, we found that one in five students in San Diego lacked access to reliable, affordable broadband connectivity. It's still staggering to think that we had 100,000 students lacking proper connectivity at the beginning of the pandemic.

Looking at the connectivity portion of the digital divide a bit closer, we have learned that there are areas with limited or no connectivity options in San Diego County, and yet we also have areas where connectivity is available, but it's too slow or unreliable, and it means that the connectivity will simply not support digital learning, curriculum platforms, or engaging online.

Most students and families make up this number, in fact 65,000, approximately from San Diego's southern region, where school districts and charter schools have a much higher percentage of free and reduced meal recipients, English learners, migrant and homeless students. We have a district in South County with 25% of the students are homeless. My office, as with other county offices of education across the state, faced a range of technology needs at the start of the pandemic, with some of those remaining to this very day.

In the notes provided to the Committee, I've outlined a few ways we initially ramped up efforts to close the digital divide San Diego County, from coordinating a wide array of donations to direct technical assistance, such as ensuring the many thousands of Wi Fi hotspots that were being given out to students and families were safe, to legislative advocacy, to procurement assistance during a time, you might remember where supply chains were radically disrupted at the beginning of the pandemic.

There's some additional notes provided, but I want to move on to taking a look at the fact that while strides have been made, there is still a number of opportunities ahead as funding runs out and we are facing challenging financial times ahead. The significant strides made during the pandemic are evident, with now over 90% of San Diego County students having access to mobile computing devices and the number of students and families not having broadband dropping by approximately 50%.

While we could delve more deeply into the discussion of student needs, technology and otherwise, I'd like to conclude today's comments with a very brief look at the road ahead. So, as we look forward, K-12 students, staff and families face a wide array of opportunities and obstacles in our schools. We commonly utilize an assets based approach with our students, focusing on strengths and opportunities.

So as an educator, I'm going to take that tack this morning and start with the positives and the assets for the adults in the room and talking about the broadband for all initiative, which is a transformative initiative for our state and mostly for our students. It really will empower K-12 students and families up and down the state.

I have the honor of also serving on the board of directors for Scenic, which is the third party administrator tasked with the design, construction, and acquisition of the Middle Mile network infrastructure that's critical to reaching particularly the rural, unserved areas of our state, such as our tribal communities. This work is still in progress, but has the biggest potential to erase connectivity inequities. That would be a profound change in our state. The second item is more specific to K-12.

The leaders of our state have long held that education must be a budget priority and an area of constant analysis and improvement. Legislators, committees like this one, as well as state agencies and private partners, have all rallied around the important topic of K-12 education. So, speaking of recognizing the importance of the K-12 sector, even our federal partners are starting to take notice.

And in fact, as we work with them on cybersecurity issues and others, there's a great quote that I got from the Director easterly from CISA, the United States Cybersecurity Infrastructure Agency, where they had posted, there is no more important institution to the future prosperity and strength of the United States than our nation's K-12 education system. I think everybody in this room would probably agree with that quote. I will keep it the federal focus for just a moment.

As colleagues here, panelists mentioned about the affordable connectivity program, this is a really powerful program that is positively impacting students and their families nationally, across our state and in San Diego County. And so in San Diego, just to give you some more specifics, you heard some overarching numbers for the state and the nation, but just taking a look at the graphic there, we have 227,000 families that are eligible for and have signed up for and are receiving reimbursement from the ACP.

Think about the negative impact of pulling ACP funding from these families and how it will expand the digital divide. Again, understanding that this is a federal program, but the repercussions for us here in California are going to be very real. Unfortunately, the last topic I believe the community Members will be seeing and hearing more about when we're thinking about technology, student inequity and access is cybersecurity and digital privacy issues, as well as AI and Quantum computing.

On the cybersecurity front, very briefly, these threats are increasing and evolving at an alarming rate and are impacting leas with the least resources. The most. Those that have the least find it most difficult to recover from attacks or to respond to them or to prevent them in the first place. K-12 is under-resourced for this challenge, lacking infrastructure, funding and expertise. And the last element, and not to be repeating what's been said multiple times today, but is the staffing element.

And teachers very much should be at the center of all of these conversations. But we know that the workforce across the state is incredibly diverse itself. In an individual school district, there's hundreds of different roles that are served on both certificated and classified fronts. And when it comes to technology, we have been well behind the game. So it was said earlier that if you serve kids, you make less.

That is abundantly clear if you are a technology worker in the State of California wanting to serve the students and families and communities around K-12. In fact, today Microsoft is saying, as we sit here, there are 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs unfilled globally. And so when you think about that long queue of who needs this expertise, these folks to help protect kids sensitive data and support their ongoing privacy, we are at the back of the queue. Thankfully, we've had some limited federal resources coming online.

We've got local organizations like here we have an organization called California it and education that really empowers it staff Members to work together to collaborate, training resources, so that we can do the best we can with the resources that we currently have as far as staffing in the state. But ultimately, there's a lot of work to do on many of these fronts.

And as we connect more students and their families, we want to make sure that we're also affording training, digital citizenship awareness and protections against evolving and escalating cybersecurity threats. So ultimately, my county is thankful for the resources and support of this Committee and all those working to serve K-12 students, staff, and K-12 communities here in California. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. Thank you very much to all three of our panelists. Since I have a monopoly on the mic in terms of questions at this point, I'm going to bounce around among our three panelists and would appreciate your insights. So, starting with Mr. Loftus, you talked about the broadband for all initiative as having the biggest potential to erase connectivity and equities. Could you expand on that?

Absolutely. So the money set aside by the Legislature or the Governor at the beginning of the pandemic really had an aim, of course, of connecting all citizens. And so, as the metrics have shown, both at a local level and also statewide, those most impacted by.

Nine pieces of history here, and they're all women focused. Sounds like we're having technical difficulties from the Bay Area. And then it loops through this. Nothing in there that's of relevance to this. Then it comes into our unity center through the back end of it.

Zero, it looks like we're back up with no indication of a Cybertech at this moment. All right.

I promise my comments were not foreshadowing.

Or that wasn't, that wasn't staged. Right. That wasn't part of your presentation?

It was not. But to return to your question, chair, are the broadband for all initiative.

And so we were right in the middle of Mr. Loftus from San Diego County talking about the broadband for all initiative and how this potentially may have the biggest impact to address connectivity inequities. Please proceed.

Thank you very much. Again, yes, the broadband for all, just simply put, is, I think, disproportionately beneficial in a good way to the students and families of California. So speaking on the specific benefit, I'll talk a little bit more about San Diego, is that at the beginning of the pandemic, it was an all hands on deck to get students and families connected. That was done, as you know, predominantly through mobile Wi Fi hotspots. We partnered with Viasat and Starlink to install satellite connectivity in some of our mountainous regions and desert areas, because we have areas throughout the county which in this day and age don't even have cellular coverage.

And so that's hard for a lot of folks to realize that live in places that do have good coverage. So the solutions in many cases bridged the gap, but they were very much that it was very much a temporary solution. And what we need is solid infrastructure, particularly fiber out to rural areas, to reach these underserved or unserved populations that just came to light during the pandemic, but existed well before the pandemic itself.

So it very much the broadband for all, as a result of the spotlight being shown on this broader set of inequities, the broadband for all, we're very, very hopeful that in some years ahead, we're going to be a much better place to provide broadband. So, again, broadband definition of something that's high speed, it's reliable, it's consistent, and it's affordable, which, of course, is a key element, as well.

So, for the public's benefit, could you talk about the basic parameters of the broadband for all initiative as it relates to. I mean, you mentioned Viasat and Starlink. It's not satellite. Right. It's laying.

Correct. You're spot on. Those were the temporary fixes, if you will. The long term fix is actual infrastructure. So fiber, at its kind of simplest description, being run trenched construction projects throughout the state. And there are multiple components.

I can speak most to what's known as the Middle Mile Broadband Initiative, because that is when you think about the connectivity of our citizens, of our students, we're really kind of dividing it up into three simple buckets. One is that origin, or first mile, the middle mile, and then what's known as the last mile. So the middle mile itself was our biggest area of opportunity in this state, which is, again, there are parts of the state that simply has no connectivity.

And it's not because we don't have vendors and companies that are interested in providing it. It just didn't make economic sense for them to do these large, costly projects to areas with small populations. And so the Middle Mile broadband initiative, specifically as a component of the broader broadband for all initiative, is really focused on that piece to provide not only connectivity, but also economic incentive to some of those private partners that might be able to come in and partner with the state.

But is it accurate to say that that would make the biggest difference for rural communities?

Yes, I think that's an apt statement. I think there's benefits to all. I think there's benefits. Again, there's many places where there are an offering of connectivity, let's say cellular, but maybe you only have one provider and there's no choice, and costs are very high. Broadband, even in areas that technically have some connectivity now, will also see benefits.

Okay, but when we're talking about the digital divide challenges in urban and suburban communities, we're talking primarily, I guess I would address this to any or all of the panelists, but we're talking primarily the affordability of reliable Internet access, the availability of the devices, and the digital literacy, not only of the students, but the parents, the families. Is that an accurate summary?

Yes. Definitely. And I think that highlights the importance of making sure that there's a game plan for when ACP ceases to exist. Right. So at this point, like I mentioned.

Could you pull your mic?

Yeah, sure. So making sure that we have a game plan for when ACP ceases to exist. That's why CETF has really been focused on these two bills, the AB 1588 and SB 1179, because there are affordable offers available from ISPs, but we just need to make sure that ISPs make them available and let the public know that this is an option.

So that's sort of a second, next best scenario for our highest need families, and then the device, at least for families that have the children that are in school, making it so that it's easier or more likely that those devices would go home with some kind of training. And digital literacy is important.

And I think what we've seen is that the big carrot for parents to participate when parents, it's sometimes as challenging for parents to come to the school, participate in training, but when they know that they're going to learn how to support their children, when they know that they're going to learn how to monitor grades, that they can communicate with parents, that they can use any of the programs that we're spending so much money on, great adaptive learning programs, that makes it more likely that they're going to participate and become more familiar on how to use the device or how to monitor their kids using these devices. So it's a combination of some of those strategies.

And so on that last point about, could you give examples of what are the most important lessons or knowledge that needs to be passed on to families to support the overall digital literacy in order to close the digital divide.

Sure. I think it just needs to be communicated that by schools. And I know that there's been a lot of work on setting up that welcoming environment of being more parent friendly. And sort of a specific draw for parents is the opportunity to have this access, but to really do it in a way that underscores what they're going to be able to do, because sometimes they may not know what they don't know. So if they make it clear that they will be able to make better use of these portals, a lot of the portals that we see are not fully subscribed. Right.

And there's lots of great information in these portals and software that, again, could have higher rates of use. It'll vary school by school. Sometimes you don't really have as many students that really need to access these programs. So the more parents understand that they're going to learn how to use that, and then if they do, their children are going to do better. It just comes down to the communication and kind of setting up the environment that invites parents to be part of that process.

Okay, so, for example, I know as a parent, when I'm looking at my daughter's records, we use Aries in our school district. I don't know if that's a common platform, but it's things like accessing grades, accessing classroom schedules, communicating with school staff. Those are the kind of practical things that you want to make sure that all families.

Sure. I do want to say as a parent of two daughters in middle and high school, I am regularly learning of the new functionalities that you can go deeper in terms of resources and things like that. So it's always helpful to get as much of that on the front end.

Okay.

I would just simply add that K-12 is uniquely positioned to help families and connect with them as far as sharing information on available digital curriculum, because it's all of those things, the grades, being able to interact with your school, interact, parent teacher interactions, email and otherwise. But it's a wide array of other awareness, digital citizenship, that students working online are properly citing work. There's a whole broad brush when we think about digital curriculum. And so K-12 schools are uniquely positioned.

And we found when we looked at those ACP numbers being so high for San Diego County, one of the highest in the state, was because it was K-12 bringing that message home to families, backpacking home, a flyer saying, hey, there's this new program, the ACP, that might be available to you, working with our partners, community based organizations, faith based organizations.

But having a trusted source like K-12 is very powerful on a lot of fronts, and particularly in this initiative to raise awareness about broadband connectivity.

But I received a note saying that we should wrap up to make sure that we have enough time for public comments. But I have so many questions. I'm going to push back a little bit and ask. And so it seems like there's a lot of emphasis on the ACP program, but the ACP program, am I correct in understanding that that basically provides financial assistance in order to access the private, for profit Internet service providers services?

It's a subsidy for the service. $30 a month.

Okay.

And 70 for our tribal communities.

Yeah. And I remember when I was working with my colleagues on a public broadband infrastructure bond that there was a lot of discussion about the pros and cons of a public broadband infrastructure versus the private. But the bottom line, are we still so far away from being able to build a public broadband infrastructure that we need to continue to rely on providing subsidies so that we can provide more customers for these for profit Internet service providers?

Well, I think the short answer would be is that.

Could you speak into the?

That ACP is going away now. Right. So this is sort of the most immediate and really motivating ISPs to have a really affordable offer. As much as the state can, will really help for now, while there might be other opportunities.

Okay. All right.

Can I just add one more thing? I think in the state we talked about the broadband for all initiative we're actually seeing, a lot of counties are actually starting to build a public community owned Wi Fi network. So counties like Santa Clara and also Napa Valley are also considering some kind of public infrastructure. To get to your point about affordability in the US, average broadband costs about $68.

So the ACP helps, but in a lot of coastal areas, it's just really a drop in the bucket, which was one of the reasons why the ACP tickup rate has not been as high as we've hoped. So I think right now, with the federal and also the state investments, we have a really great opportunity to leverage. And we're actually seeing a lot of very innovative public private partnerships going on across the state as well.

And you highlighted Ms. Gao, for example, Imperial County. So they have a joint power authority to establish a fiber optic network serving over 120 LEAs throughout the county that not only provides the Internet access at the school sites, but does it also provide Internet access in the vicinity of school sites for students and families?

Yes. Correct. It also provides Internet access for students at home. So when the pandemic happened, the county was actually in a really good position to pivot into distance learning. And the GPA was established many years ago, even before the pandemic. So there has been some very innovative local practices out there, and it offers a lot of good lessons and also some practices, good practice, best practices for us to scale those up across the state.

If I might just add the one word of caution to that, though. The reality is the vast majority of our LEAs receive what's known as E-Rate funds. And so that does not allow for providing Internet access anywhere outside of the school grounds. And so, yes, innovative projects are happening, but we're having to be clever at the school level and district level and county level as to how we're dividing those up.

Because if I'm a school district and I have 80% of my Internet connectivity costs subsidized by the federal E-Rate program, I do not want to lose that as a result of providing connectivity outside the bounds of E-Rate. And so the FCC and Chairwoman Rosenworcel is working on how are we relaxing those or expanding those in the years ahead? I think that's a much broader solution to some of these.

But right now, just for the Committee to be aware, there are some constraints that LEAs are working with that they don't want to harm themselves from the services that they're providing by trying to expand it. And, in fact, we had some issues with E-Rate when it came to the distribution of hotspots not being covered by the federal E-Rate reimbursement plan. So I would add that as just a current reality.

Yes, thank you for that reality check. How does Imperial County deal with that? Do you know?

So my understanding is the county actually is drawing money from multiple sources. So E-Rate is a challenge for a lot of the districts. But as my colleague mentioned, FCC is looking into a possible solution. And then the other challenges that a lot of the school districts, for example, during the pandemic, many school districts actually have to step up and act as a role of ISP provider, which has not been the traditional role that many school districts have taken.

So I've seen some districts are starting to wonder, is that a role really for school districts to play? And what are some of the implications, from many perspectives about having a school district serving as an Internet service provider?

Okay, what I'm hearing you saying, Ms. Gao, bottom line is that there are ways to get around the current E-Rate restrictions in order to provide public, affordable, reliable Internet access, not only at the school sites, but at homes.

Yes, it takes a lot of creative solutions and also efforts.

Okay. I don't want to get too much in the weeds in terms of the technology, but bottom line, you're saying that with the Imperial County public broadband infrastructure, that somehow can extend access to public reliable Internet access all the way to homes throughout Imperial County.

I think that the model of public owned broadband has been tried and also in some places succeeded in other parts of the US. And I think in California, when we look at SB 156 implementation, we've heard from a lot of communities looking into those kind of public owned broadband network. But I think there are some legislative challenges or legal challenges, and there are also political challenges.

For example, it takes a lot of political connection and a political willingness, especially at the local level, to really establish those partnerships. For example, the GPA in the Imperial County, and we've run into a few counties where they had those conversations going. But then given the political turnover, the GPA just didn't work out.

And so I think there are in some other places in the US, those kind of publicly owned network has provided very promising model and a potential for a lot of local communities for California to learn and also adopt. But it takes a lot more than just money and also politics and also legal challenges to really make this work.

But the Imperial County, the Imperial COE fiber optic network, isn't that a publicly owned broadband network?

Yes, it is.

Okay. All right. And how do they pay for that broadband network?

There are some fees than the network charges, and I think that pays for most of the maintenance cost.

Were there any bond funds used to establish that county?

As far as my understanding goes, I'm not aware of any bond funding that goes into it.

But are you aware of any school districts that have used bond funds to create, like, a broadband infrastructure.

I'm not aware of that. So I think there has been some debate about given the, for example, using bond money to pay for devices or Internet access, given the lifecycle of those devices.

Actually, my question is for the broadband, for the fiber network.

I'm not aware of any districts or planning to do that.

Okay. And Imperial County Office of Education did not use bond funds.

Not to my understanding.

Okay. All right. Well, I can go on and on, but I think to give everyone else an opportunity to participate and be heard. Want to thank you very much. And I suspect I'll be following up with questions for each and every one of you. So thank you very much for coming out for today's hearing. Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, so with that, I'd like to open up for public comments, and given the restrictions on our time, I ask each speaker to limit their remarks to 1 minute each. Please proceed.

Marc Epstein, California Environmental Technology Education Network. And over the years, I've also served as on different iterations of the Sacramento Area Digital Task Force. From the discussion on this panel, one aspect as far as on digital divide that has not come up and not discussed is that the use of digital tools in instruction. The reality is in California, of what digital tools and applications are used has not changed in 25 years.

And these tools would enhance and engage as far as instruction, particularly with data science becoming more important. And the problem we have in California is the vast majority of our teachers do not know that these things exist. This is turning into a workforce competitiveness issue. I've also, the last 15 years, have had this discussion with folks over the Department of Education, and I've had, very honestly, a hostile response where we do not want to have the responsibility to make the schools aware. And because of that, the Legislature needs to start taking a look action to look at this aspect of the digital divide in California K 12.

Thank you.

Hi there. Rachel Bhagwat with ACLU California Action. Thanks for having me. I'm here. I just wanted to quickly share that student well being is impacted by the school to prison pipeline in California, school policing, suspension, and expulsion do have an adverse effect on student wellness. And this actually goes really hand in hand with the staffing issues around student support professionals that was discussed much earlier in this hearing.

California has one of the most expansive school policing systems in our country, and paired with our lack of student support staff data has shown that 30% of our students attend a school where there's a police officer but no nurse, social worker, or counselor. Our kids are struggling maybe more than they ever have. And we know that, right?

And when students act out or they show up to school under the influence in California, we send them to the cops or we suspend or expel them, not to a counselor because of resources. Law enforcement contact does not help our kids heal. Children need support, not trauma. And Ted from Children Now who may be here still highlighted this earlier, and countless research also shows that police don't make schools safer.

And so this year your Committee is going to hear several proposals that would roll back law enforcement and kicking students out of school as the default response for many behaviors. And these would keep struggling students in their safe school environments and help them thrive. So I urge you to consider, please, these approaches as an investment in student well being and success. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you Mr. Chair. Carlos Rojas, representing the Kern County Superintendent of School's Office as well as the 46 school districts in Kern. County. I appreciate the discussion and acknowledge the tension between increased flexibility on local school budgets to meet community needs and the Legislature's desire to be more prescriptive on how LEAs allocate state dollars. It's a delicate issue, but I don't think it's an either or.

I would state that the state already has an accountability system that helps provide state oversight, the LCAP, California school dashboard and the statewide system of support. As was stated earlier in Dr. Fuller's testimony, we have examples of categorical programs in which districts across the state have large sums of unspent funds for multiple reasons. Schools aren't looking for less accountability. What they are looking for and asking for is efficient and appropriate accountability that supports the work that they do.

We would encourage the state to stay true to the spirit of the LCFF and prioritize results based accountability through the existing structure and improve upon it where needed to ensure funds are being allocated towards strategies that lead to the lowest performing student groups showing appropriate growth. Thank you.

Good morning. Sasha Horwitz with Los Angeles Unified School District. Los Angeles Unified has been using a variety of strategies to address learning loss, including offering Summer school to over 116,000 unique student participants in July 2023. In 2023, we also gave 43,000 unique participants access to our winter academy. In the Fall of semester 23/24, over 108 unique students received small group and high dosage, virtual and in person tutoring to improve their English, language arts, and math outcomes.

Across the board, we're seeing improvements in reading and math as a result of our targeted interventions through our iAttend effort, a comprehensive, multi tiered approach to reducing chronic absenteeism the district engaged over 300,000 families in 2023 with phone calls, home visits, and attendance conferences to address chronic absenteeism and facilitate regular attendance.

We appreciate the governor's proposal to allow districts to recoup Ada through attendance recovery programs using ELO-P and other funds, and urge the Legislature to provide maximum flexibility as possible in one time and ongoing state funds that will enable school districts across the state to best meet the local needs of students. Speaking to technology access for California students, LUSD has taken steps to not just be the state's leader, but the nation's leader on digital equity.

We're going to ask you to wrap up.

Sure. According access to high speed and reliable Internet access has proven to be a necessary to reduce the homework gap during the height of the pandemic. With funding readily available, LAUSD worked hard to provide immediate solutions to student Internet connectivity, including making hotspots available to every student and providing universal broadband access to families of LAUSD students.

We'd also like to say that with federal ECF and ACF funds drying up this year, it's more important than ever that the state safeguard investments in the Middle-Mile Broadland Initiative so that our communities and municipalities can access the public access they need.

Thank you. That was two minutes.

Hi, my name is Dominique Donette with EdVoice. In short, the concerning early literacy rates in the State of California predate the pandemic and have only worsened because of it. Data from California's standardized tests show that three in 10 third grade students from low income communities are on grade level in English language arts, compared with six in 10 of their higher income peers.

Nearly 178,000 economically disadvantaged third graders in California are not meeting state standards for English language arts, and the majority of those falling behind are children who are disproportionately black and Latino students from low income communities, English learners, and students with disabilities. This is a crisis that can only be addressed with comprehensive early literacy reform. As policies are considered for how best to serve California's children, we must prioritize ensuring that students can read or these academic gaps will become lifelong opportunity gaps.

There's no greater issue concerning public education at this moment in time. Mr. Chair EdVoice is co sponsoring Assemblywoman Rubio's Bill AB 2222 to address the growing early literacy inequities in our state. We look forward to future discussions. Thank you.

Thank you.

Chairman Muratsuchi and others. Glad to be here. Lance Christensen, the Vice President of the California Policy Center and father of five who have all been in the public school system. I also live in a rural area. It really is not about technology. It's about actually curriculum and teaching basics, things like the science of reading. Poor states like Mississippi have increased dramatically their literacy rates by simply enacting policies that will not just teach kids the science of reading, but also the teachers.

We would also implore to think more about not growing the monopoly of the government system, but to allowing for more choice. Charters have been an incredible asset to the State of California, and freeing some of the restrictions on those will improve academic outcomes for children across the state. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Patrick Messick, title one educator and Director of Oakland Undivided. I appreciate how today's discussion highlighted digital literacy as a focal area. But to be clear, digital literacy is a privilege for those who already have home Internet access. In Oakland's highest poverty schools, 30% of students lack access to reliable, high speed home Internet, the basic tool of a 21st century education. How is this possible in Silicon Valley's backyard. The number one barrier to student access is discriminatory pricing.

Absent competition, monopolistic providers charge the highest rates for the worst quality service in high poverty black and brown communities. The CPUC's own findings confirm this. Ms. Brandy, a mother raising two school age children in public housing in West Oakland, would need to pay $150 to her monopolistic provider to receive speeds adequate to attend her son's virtual IEP meetings. We won't coupon our way out of this crisis with ACP, and don't buy the hype about monopolistic providers discount programs. Eligibility criteria are incredibly restrictive.

And as Miss Patricia, an elder in East Oakland public housing who relies on one of these programs, told me, you get what you pay for. Even for those fortunate enough to afford the exorbitant rates, the Internet quality for paying customers is untenable. Speed tests I conducted at Ms. Brandy's apartment show her provider delivering less than 10% of advertised speeds she's paying for each month. And Ms. Brandy is not an outlier.

Results of over 100,000 speed tests conducted from thousands of unique locations in Oakland's least connected communities show that one in every three paying for home Internet plans aren't provided speeds that qualify as broadband Internet.

May I ask you to wrap up?

So where do we go from here? The Legislature must channel courage to stand up to industry and alongside community to actualize the promise of broadband for all by ensuring California's historic broadband infrastructure investments serve the highest poverty, least connected urban, rural and tribal communities. Public dollars must serve public benefit. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hi. Cinthia, Oakland Undivided. I'm the Director of Community Impact. Oakland Undivided started at the onset of the pandemic with a mission to provide home digital access to Oakland's more than 50,000 public school students. We've done our best with the COVID era resources we've had available, such as the Emergency Connectivity Fund and the Affordable Connectivity program, and have tried to hotspot and subsidize our way out of the digital divide. But we cannot and we must not rely on band aid solutions any longer.

As you're thinking about ways to meet the tech needs of our students, I urge you to think about long term rather than short term solutions that leave our students at the mercy of temporary government products like programs like the ECF and ACP. As my colleague Patrick mentioned, time and time again, we hear from our students that cost and connectivity issues are the main barriers that keep them disconnected.

There is a reason why gains and Internet access have been modest. Without adequate infrastructures in areas like east and West Oakland, this will continue to be the case, and we will always end up where we were before the pandemic, with our least connected, highest poverty communities on the wrong side of the digital divide. But unlike March of 2020, we don't have to be reactive, and we can be proactive and develop and support solutions that aim to address the underlying issues of the digital divide.

This is a historical, once in a generation moment where California is looking to invest $8 billion to improve its broadband infrastructure. Please, please work with us to ensure that these public dollars serve a public benefit and that this money is invested in the urban, rural and tribal areas that Internet service providers have deemed unprofitable for decades. Thank you.

Thank you. Seeing no further public comments, thank you very much for everyone for coming out for today's hearing. This hearing is adjourned.