Assembly Budget Subcommittee No. 2 on Education Finance

Good afternoon. We will start this Subcommitee with a Subcommitee of the Subcommitee, but thanks for joining us here. Budget chair Ting. Today's hearing is K-12, TK through 12, section on learning recovery and chronic absenteeism, focusing on where we've been since the pandemic and where do we go from here. So we do know that this issue has had a big impact on student learning in schools throughout California and our 6 million school kids.

And we've allocated plenty of resources, over $30 billion in federal and state money through 2026-27 school year. But the challenge is there's no real silver bullet to these issues. In reality, California had a horrible achievement opportunity gap before the pandemic, and it's only gotten worse for these cohort of kids. And we need to refocus our efforts on the long haul to reverse some of these trends. And we'll hear about today.

Some policies from school districts also talk about the implications and impacts of absences and some potential remedies, and really focuses on what the state's role going forward to make sure we get our kids and our schools back on track and on track. So with that, we have panel number one. Issue number one is the State of learning recovery and student performance. And we have Linda Darling-Hammond with the California State Board of Education. And Iwansi ogo, I almost had it with PPIC. Please come on up.

Okay. Yes. And Linda Darling-Hammond, I know you are joining us remotely, so if you start speaking, we will see you on the screen.

My pleasure to appear today, and thank you for inviting me for this important conversation. This initial session, as you said, is intended to look at what our dashboard says about where we are as a state in this era, and my colleague from PPIC will speak to that directly. I'm going to frame a few key points about what the dashboard does not reveal to us about our progress that we need to know make progress at this critical moment.

We do know, of course, that the percentage of students meeting standards on the smarter balance tests in 2022 was about four percentage points lower in ELA and seven percentage points lower in math than the students who took the test in 2019 before the pandemic. This puts our student proficiency rates about where they were in 2015-16, 4 years before the pandemic, and the rates of game were lowest for our youngest learners and for our migrant and military students.

As you noted, stubborn achievement gaps remain between racial, ethnic, and language groups, but they did not grow larger in California as they did in many other states. The dashboard does not show the additional analysis you could find on the CDE website for the group of 740,000 students who took the Sparta balance test in both 2021 and 2022, which is about 25% of the students in our state. And I do want to show my screen quickly to share some information about that with you.

And if you'll give me 1 second to see if I can call these up. You should be seeing some slides now. Basically what they show is that you can see the drop in performance for the group of students who did take smarter balanced in 2021 from the pandemic. And then you see a small increase for 2022 when the test was given to all of the students in the state. Of course, there are differences in the composition of those samples.

So we looked at the students who took the test in both years, and I'm trying to make my screen move forward, but not doing so. So I might have to go out and share it again. I might have to stop sharing, go back in and share it to get it to move forward. Sometimes that happens. Give me 1 second. There we go. Let's see if it will now move forward.

So we also looked at the students who took the test at both moments of time, the very same students, so we could see what kind of gains were they making between 2021 and 2022. And what this shows you is that compared to the pre pandemic years, the students who during that sort of recovery, beginning recovery year, were gaining at a rate faster than what they would have done before the pandemic, their analog peers before the pandemic.

So we see some sense of learning recovery and learning acceleration happening there. That first slide is grade three to grade four. Here is grade six to grade seven. And you can see this steeper incline, which occurred in most grades. So we have some reason to believe that accelerated learning is beginning to happen. We also tested all of our English learners throughout the pandemic on the LPAC test.

And again, you can see the drop between 2020 and 2021, but you see a steeper than average increase in the year from 2021 to 2022. So why would this have happened in the midst of all the stress that we know is going on and all the pandemic events? We did, as you know, invest $27 billion in recovery investments. Nine out of 10 districts were offering summer school during this time. Of course, expanded learning time was being used after school with additional support.

We have tutoring and other supports and training for those tutors that are supporting acceleration. And then, of course, the mental health support, social emotional learning wraparound services that are being increasingly used in schools as they come out the door, teacher training and of course, connectivity and devices. So I'll stop sharing my screen, but I just wanted to give you that additional information that is not available on the dashboard but can be found on the analyses on the website.

Likely for the same reason California lost less ground than most other states on the national test, the national assessment of educational progress in both reading and math. In fact, as a state, we did not show any significant loss in reading between 2019 and 2022. Los Angeles, which is part of the urban sample of that test, showed us an increase in 4th and 8th grade reading during that time, even when other cities in the country were declining.

San Diego remained the top scoring urban district in the nation in 8th grade reading. Its scores were stable and in the top group of cities in fourth grade. And this is very surprising to all of us, including to analysts like Sean Reardon at Stanford, who looked at data for every district in the country, and he found drops especially tied to race and poverty in almost every state.

62% of California's public school students are from Low income families, 78% of students of color, and he identified California as the exception to the rule. The analysts who predicted that the length of school closures would predict state learning loss were also surprised to learn that this was not a significant factor. As the Director of the National Center for Education Statistics explained, I think for California it was the investments that this Legislature made that leveraged these outcomes.

Of course, we still have daunting needs for learning recovery, but this may suggest that we are on the right path in some respects, that we need to keep our foot on the accelerator to continue to realize these kinds of gains. The other issue I'd like to briefly address is student attendance, which of course is a prerequisite to learning recovery. There is a lot of concern about the high rates of chronic absenteeism that we're seeing.

The chronic absenteeism rate is the number of days missed by students, 10% or more of the days that students are expected to be in school missed for any reason. And this doubled from 2021 from about 14% to 30% in 2022. We saw that in other states, Florida had an increase to 32%, Michigan to 39%. These rates do show disparities by race and income, and because of the way our state and federal accountability system works.

This is a major reason for the fact that more than 600 LEAs are identified for, quote, differentiated assistance from their county offices, which is meant to focus on solutions to the problems we see on the dashboard. But it threatens to overwhelm our system of differentiated assistance. And this, of course, is a very important indicator. But one of the things that we know is that with pandemic conditions and weather conditions, we cannot sort out exactly what is going on, what problems it is identifying.

It does include excused and unexcused absences of all sorts, and it doesn't sort out what the causes of these are. Of course, some of last year's data was reflecting the huge omicron surge at the time when we didn't have an approved vaccine for children. But also fires, mudslides, floods and other disasters are really making a large dent in chronic absenteeism. Earlier this winter, we had storms that closed 429 schools, affecting 185,000 students across 19 counties.

A week ago Monday, 334 schools in 24 counties were closed due to the impacts of snow levels that we have not seen for decades. Those closures affected 91,000 students. So these storm systems with the drought and fires will continue. And as we cope with the challenges, it's going to be important to rethink the chronic absenteeism indicator so it can sort out the sources of absences, can be meaningfully interpreted and used productively in the continuous improvement system.

More important, I think we need to rekindle the instructional continuity plans we required of every district when COVID hit and find ways to be flexible and fast on our feet in the use of technologies for learning whenever physical presence is disrupted for any reason, whether for individual students or for entire schools and towns.

Given all that we've done and that we should continue to do to close additional divide, we should be seeking ways to ensure that learning is never short circuited and we can use these tools to ensure access to learning materials and opportunities without bureaucratic barriers beyond a pandemic need.

This is really going to become part of the way we need to do school in the state so that we have instructional plans that can work within an online learning model when students need to find what their assignments are and work on them when they're not physically in school, as well as within hybrid models where students might spend part of their time in class, part of their time using technology as a tool for learning.

We can support this both with thoughtful curriculum resources and by removing barriers to blended learning that exist in the somewhat antiquated systems we now have for counting instructional minutes by seat time or arduous reporting processes, which many teachers have said are among the challenges in teaching that contribute to their decision to leave the profession. And I don't need to tell you that staff resignations from systems that they're finding stressful are a growing problem that we face that contributes to shortages.

Finally, I just want to note that we should be supporting students return to school and staff engagement and commitment to school by coupling our many investments for mental health and social emotional supports and expanded learning and learning recovery with supports for schools to redesign in ways that move beyond the factory model we inherited and allow them to personalize instruction and supports. To do this, the State Board has been moving to make one of our dashboard indicators more important in the future.

We've moved the local climate survey requirement from every other year to annual so that schools will regularly have data about what students, staff, and parents are experiencing, and they can work every year to improve those conditions overall and for each subgroup of students. And then we need to learn from those schools who are having success during this period of time.

We have many that are struggling, of course, and others that because they've managed to redesign, to personalize, to use community school structures, to use personalized learning structures, for example, as linked learning academies and others do in small, experiential, project based settings. They're experiencing high attendance.

They're experiencing gains in achievement, in part because they are really looking to find ways to meet students' needs when I testified before the Assembly Education Committee a couple of weeks ago, I gave examples in that written testimony of urban and rural elementary and secondary schools that we're having these experiences and that we want to learn from as we are helping every school adapt to the new age we're in.

We should, as we're doing this, avoid straitjackets that reinforce the old designs and encourage new designs that are more personalized, that invite the community into the school, engage students with the community, provide ambitious instruction, apply to real world problems, use time and space and new technologies to good effect and support the innovation that we will need to meet the demands that we're currently facing. Thank you.

Okay, thank you. I'm sure we'll have some questions for you in a moment, but first, let's go to our next panelist, Mr. Ugo.

Hi, everyone, and thank you. My name is Iwunze Ugo, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. Thank you for having me and for your interest in PPIC's work. Today, I'll be providing an overview of how California students are faring as the state continues to emerge from the worst parts of the pandemic.

I'll focus on what we've learned from the 2022 student test scores, the first full Administration of the state tests in nearly three years, as well as the impacts of the pandemic on chronic absenteeism and high school graduation rates. I want to start on test scores by setting the stage. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, the Administration of the state tests, the smarter balanced summative assessments, or SBAC tests, was canceled. As the pandemic raged on, many districts were unable to reopen in person by the following year, so the spring 2021 tests were optional, and fewer than one in four students took the exams.

The spring 2022 tests, the results for which were released in the fall, provide our first look at student achievement in California since the start of the pandemic three years ago. As was broadly feared, the results were bleak. Overall, 47.1% of students met grade level standards in English language arts, and only 33.4% met standards in math.

Those are down from 51.1% in 2019 in English and 39.7% in math. The English rate, as Linda mentioned, is the lowest rate since 2016, reversing nearly six years of steady progress, and the math rate is the lowest since the Aspect test began in 2015. Looking at demographic disparities, the overall gaps in proficiency rates for disadvantaged students remain quite large, but the 2022 results show that the pandemic era declines were often smaller for some of these groups.

Proficiency rates for economically disadvantaged students fell by four percentage points in English and 6.3 percentage points in math, while students who are not economically disadvantaged saw larger declines of five and 7.4 points, respectively. Similarly, English learner students also saw smaller declines in their proficiency rates compared to noneel students.

When we examined the results by gender, we find that female students had larger declines in proficiency rates than male students and across racial and ethnic groups, white and Latino students saw larger declines compared to black and Asian students. The findings here were somewhat surprising given the substantial research showing that the pandemic exacerbated existing inequalities.

PPIC research has found that families that were Low income, black or Latino, or that did not have any college graduates were more likely to have lower rates of consistent access to the computing devices and high speed Internet needed for distance learning. Districts that serve high shares of Low income or black and Latino students also remain closed for, on average, six weeks longer than the typical district in the state.

The discrepancy here between these disparate factors and the test scores can perhaps be explained by the massive investments of federal and state funds. To address the broad impacts of the pandemic, the state distributed expanding learning opportunities grants according to the same targeted approach used in the Local Control Funding Formula, meaning that these investments were greater in districts that served high shares of disadvantaged students.

Although we can compare test performance each year, either for the state as a whole or for individual student groups, we often want to understand the growth in student achievement. This requires us to, as best we can, follow cohorts of the same students over time in order to assess their educational trajectories. This is perhaps of even greater importance now, given the uniquely difficult experiences that the recent pandemic affected cohorts have had. To measure growth, we track students year after year.

For example, fifth grade students in 2015 are linked to 6th grade students in 2016 and 7th grade students in 2017, and so on. In our most recent cohort, students took the fifth grade SBAC exams in 2019, and most did not take the test again until spring 2022 in the 8th grade. I should note that we need to shift here from proficiency rates to scale scores, that is, the numerical scores that are used to determine whether students met the state standard.

These scale scores capture the annual progress that students are expected to make, allowing us to assess performance growth over time. Comparing our most recent cohort, those who experienced the pandemic, to the results from the two earlier cohorts for which SBAC test data are available, we find that the pandemic cohort of fifth grade students saw scale score growth of 51 points in English and 23 points in math by grade eight.

This amount of growth is only about 73% of the usual progress in English and only 39% of the usual progress in math, although, as Linda mentioned, there has been some acceleration of progress in the last two years.

As a check on these findings, we compared the demographics of the students in each of these cohorts, and the differences were minimal, except for a much larger decline in Enrollment between fifth and 8th grade for the students in the pandemic cohort. While we saw an average of 3700 fewer students from fifth to 8th grade in the earlier cohorts, Enrollment dropped by 19,000 in the pandemic cohort.

Picking up on this theme of declining enrollment, the last few years have also seen a stark rise in chronic absenteeism. In 202230% of students who were chronically absent. In 2022, 30% of students were chronically absent, a near tripling of the percentage of students who were chronically absent in 2019. There were substantial increases in absenteeism across nearly every student group. Notably, students in kindergarten saw chronic absenteeism rates rise to over 40%, by far the highest out of all the grades.

Over half of black, Native American, and Pacific Islander students in kindergarten were reported as chronically absent. We do not know if these extremely high rates of chronic absenteeism in 2022 were temporary, whether they were caused by school districts isolation and quarantining policies that year, for example, or if the rates reflect a new reality of a weakening connection between students, their families, and their schools.

Further, there's a significant correlation between the magnitude of the rise in absenteeism across California school districts and declines in their proficiency rates on the state tests. The districts with the highest increases in absenteeism also had, on average, larger declines in proficiency rates on both the English and math SBAC tests. To be sure, these early findings are not causal, but the correlation could be pointing to factors that are responsible for both trends. These levels of chronic absenteeism will likely slow the pace of learning recovery.

After all, most students are better served by the state schools when they are present in the classroom. Finally, on graduation, the overall picture is different from what we see in the test scores and chronic absenteeism, but there are a few important pieces of context needed to understand this trend. Overall, graduation rates were 87% in 2022, higher than the 84% average over the last four years.

One possible reason for this improvement is that the massive investments that districts received from state and federal recovery programs went to efforts like summer school programs and additional tutoring that kept many students on track to graduate despite the turbulence of the pandemic. Another potential contributing factor is that school districts were able to relax their graduation standards, allowing grades of D and F to be switched to pass no pass.

With looser graduation requirements various stakeholders have voiced concerns that students may be receiving diplomas without acquiring the skills and knowledge necessary for a successful transition into higher education or the workforce. However, the share of graduates meeting the A 3G course requirements for admission to the University of California or California State University Systems has continued its steady climb since 2017, up to 44.7% in 2022. Despite that rising rate, only about half of graduates meet these requirements.

So it appears that whatever the costs of looser graduation requirements, they are borne not by college bound students, but instead those holding high school diplomas that might be worth a bit less, reflecting that reduced scope of competence. However, just as graduation standards were lowered, course grading standards may have been relaxed as well. So we really will not have a clear picture of the effects here on preparation for higher education until we can actually see how well or not these students progress through the state's universities.

Altogether, it is clear that the COVID-19 pandemic and all of the associated disruptions had a massive detrimental effect on the state's students. The state and Federal Government responded quickly, mitigating some of the worst potential effects of school closures. Despite that, however, student performance on the state tests showed major setbacks in educational progress. Comparisons of test score growth show that students today experienced a sharply reduced pace of progress than earlier cohorts or students.

And though long standing disparities for disadvantaged students were exacerbated by some of the impacts of the pandemic, achievement gaps did narrow slightly as these students saw smaller performance declines. As the state continues to emerge from the pandemic, these recent test scores reveal a substantial need for recovery. Rising chronic absenteeism rates are additionally worrisome, though higher graduation rates and reduced achievement gaps provide some admittedly complicated positive news.

Addressing these challenges is, of course, a major focus of statewide education policy currently and will likely continue to be throughout the near future. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. Do we have questions for the panel? Mr. Alvarez.

Just one question. What is the, I'm going to call it the drop off. I don't know what else tells to phrase it, but could it be that there was folks who were absentee, kids that were absentees, were not being tested or they weren't being counted as part of a cohort with a graduation rate? Or when we calculate these rates, are we assuming even absentee students or not?

And I'm not sure that you're understanding my question, but I'm trying to understand whether absenteeism and the lack of maybe test taking or the lack of just enrollment perhaps led to something like the graduation rate increasing and the test scores, which those are really surprising that students, especially who are Low income and English language learners, don't see a, the gap doesn't grow. It continues to be consistent to the other subgroups. Is absenteeism being captured in these or not?

That's part of what makes this really difficult to research, given that the state results are reported for a district, for example, year over year. But we don't get to see which students are actually taking the tests. And there are some potential cohort effects in that.

When we're trying to measure growth, we do try to make some adjustments because of that to get a sense of the same students taking the test, or at least whether the demographics of that sample of students is similar to years in the past. So we try and do that.

But again, when we're looking at these sort of top line numbers that are just averages for the whole state or for a whole district, there are those underlying cohort effects, and we do see some of that happen with things like absenteeism. For example, on the point about the disadvantaged students doing slightly less bad, I guess, than overall students, that's a surprising result to us as well. I think part of that is one the effect of these major investments, right.

I mentioned the expanded learning opportunities, grants and things like that. A lot of the state and federal funds were targeted to districts that serve high shares of Low income students, for example. So there could be the effect of that differential investment. Right. Everyone in the state is experiencing the pandemic, but there are these substantial additional resources for students that are disadvantaged.

So we could see the sort of effects of those investments mitigating some of the worst effects that students that weren't targeted for those kinds of funds, at least as significantly, may have experienced.

So your statistics utilize a sample of students in all of those populations. It's not a complete analysis of all students in the state.

No. The numbers here are looking at all the students in the state.

Okay.

And I think I'm saying the reason why the numbers are probably surprising are because underlying that the cohorts might be changing. And we don't capture that when looking at those statewide or district wide averages.

So did we see a drop off in total numbers that equates some significant drop off from one year to the next? That is potentially equal to the number of students that are frequently absent. Does that the data indicate that at all?

I think it's related. Right. We do see that the districts that had high rates of chronic absenteeism had sort of worse drop offs. So you can imagine that chronic absenteeism is playing a role there. But again, those sort of top line numbers where we see, I think about the proficiency rates were falling by about 4%. That's overall for the state as a whole. And of course, some of that is reduced performance.

But then also the cohorts are changing, which, just for example, on one of the first figures, when we're looking at the 2022 test scores, the 2021 test scores are grayed out because, just for example, one in four students took the test that year. Right. So it has been very difficult coming out of the pandemic to get a good look at student performance just because so much is changing on the ground at California school.

Thank you very much.

I'll just add we do have declining enrollments, which is separate from chronic absenteeism. And so there are students who have shifted to private schools. There are students who have migrated out of the state, either to other countries or to other states. And we're still trying to unpack that piece of it which is separate from chronic absenteeism.

But in General I think the question about graduation is a different one from achievement in that if you've lost a lot of students who are higher need students then maybe that would bump your scores up for that group of students. We do have high testing rates but we still have this differential in the enrollments but there has been a growth in enrollments at twelveth grade because students are trying to come back for their senior years when things were declining in other grades.

So I think the graduation rates are for the reasons that my colleague from PPIC has already identified a function of the way in which the requirements were managed and the way in which the additional incentives were put in place. The amount of money spent on students with high levels of need almost doubled in a lot of districts during the pandemic with the federal and state resources so the kinds of services kids have been receiving have been very significantly greater which is part of the complexity.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just a couple of questions for Dr. Darling Hammond. You gave a sense of what sort of learning loss looked like and the gaps. I know we're talking about the next panel, but since you're not on it, what gaps? Um, what, what have you seen that's been successful in kind of starting to bridge those gaps? You mentioned? We obviously put a significant amount of resources from the state level, federal level. So what's been successful in helping close some of those gaps?

Well, I think that summer school, summer programming, and expanded learning time have been very important. That's adding an additional, in some cases, a month and a half or two months of school. Many, many districts use those resources early on to do that and have continued to do that. So that's clearly a piece of it.

I think that many districts use the additional resources, federal as well as state, to reduce class sizes and add personnel so that they could individualize more productively for students who had needs to catch up. So I think that's been a factor in some places. Tutoring has been a factor as well because you get much stronger gains for students when they get that one on one attention. So those things, I think, are making a difference variously across the state.

Thanks so much. And do we have any data demonstrating that or is it just more anecdotal?

Well, there are some data that some districts have collected about their summer school. They have used diagnostic test scores at the beginning and the end of summer school. So there's some data on that. And certainly for some of the programs that use tutoring, there are data that are collected for those, but it's not statewide. It's studies in different districts that are using different tools.

Sure. And is that information at CDE or how would we be able to see that?

Yeah, it's a great question. I really appreciate it. It's really, you have to kind of know, know what's going on and read the literature and look at what the individual districts are producing to pull that together. And maybe we should make an effort to really consolidate and cumulate what we are learning in these various local contexts.

Well, I think that would be helpful because all the things you listed, we've always assumed they would make a difference. But since it's been so long since we've done any of these items, whether it's around summer school or summer programming, even extended learning, there isn't as much data or information, especially for students who are in more challenging circumstances.

So I think that would be very helpful to at least have some data, even if it's district by district doesn't have to be the entire state, but I think that would be very helpful.

Yeah. Thank you. That's a really good suggestion.

Is that something we should ask the state board to do, or should we ask CDE to do that? What's the appropriate place?

I guess I will have to ask my colleagues about that, but it's something you could ask the State Board and CDE to work together on, I'm sure.

Okay. Thank you. And just going back to Mr. Ugo, so I think Dr. Darling-Hammond talked about it, but can you just clarify why you think there was that jump in graduate? Because all the data points in a certain direction. Then the last slide goes, zero, but graduation rates are up and A-G you know eligible graduates is up. That's not what I would have assumed.

Yes. Thank you for the question. It was a surprising finding for us as well, and I think how you might explain it are a number of factors. So although we have this context of student performance, sort of dropping off graduation as an outcome specifically might have been affected differently. One, because again, it could just be the effect of these massive investments keeping students on track. Things like tutoring, for example, summer school might have just kept students sort of on track to graduate.

And then another thing could be the effect of those loosening standards. Right? Some students were allowed to have their grades that were D's or F's be transferred to a pass in the past, allowing them to be eligible for graduation, that kind of thing. So in terms of explaining sort of what's going on, it could.

That doesn't make sense because then if that were the case, why wouldn't the 2022 cohorts look a certain way or the 2019 cohorts look a certain way? Because all your other data points a different direction.

Yeah, I guess one thing about that. So on the test scores, the students are tested in grades three through eight and then also once in grade 11. So in terms of sort of what high school performance is looking like, the test scores might not reflect that entirely. Right? And then given that, again, graduation is a much, I think, more, let's say, fungible outcome compared to how well you do on the tests.

So given allowances made around the pandemic and sort of the effects of that, you don't want to punish students for things that are out of their control. So when it comes to should a student graduate or not, there might be some lenience there compared to how well you do them. The aspect test, which is a much more mechanical process.

Yeah. And there was one other thing that was going on, which was that an allowance for an expectation that when districts had higher graduation requirements than the state, that the student would be allowed to graduate based on the requirements, the minimum requirements that the state creates. There were multiple strategies being used to enable students to graduate with fewer penalties and expectations than normally would apply.

But I guess that still doesn't quite explain the share of A-G eligible graduates. I'm not unhappy because I like the way the trend line is going. That's the way it should go. But I'm just saying it's surprising, given your information.

You know, when you think about the fact that, as you were saying, we were not doing a lot of these things previously at any kind of scale.

So when you think about the fact that nine out of ten districts were doing summer school for this period of time where students have the opportunity to retake classes to raise their grades, to recover learning, and there was a lot of emphasis in a lot of districts on those students who were approaching graduation, it may in part be the fact that courses that they didn't pass, instead of just not making A-G, they had the opportunities to retake and manage to pass.

Got it. And then just a final question to both of you. Our consultant reminded me that we ended up doing A-G Block Grant that we did fund. Do you know if that had any impact in this chart?

Probably did, but I don't know that we have data on that.

Yeah, I'd say among all the massive investments in this pandemic era, something like that is exactly the kind of thing that would produce these surprising results. Right. Because there's obviously an awareness of the pandemic. The state response was successful in metrics like this, keeping students on track to graduate and complete the AFIG's course sequence.

Okay, I think what would be helpful, really, in the future is so often we hear everything that's going wrong with education and that when we're doing things that are working, I think it'd be very helpful to actually have data that drills down on that, to really take a look at what's working, why it's working.

Otherwise, we're always just sort of getting kind of like, I hate to use sports analogies, but it's like just giving me the final score of the game, but not knowing why somebody lost or why someone won. So it doesn't really help us from a policy standpoint, because then we don't know what we need to improve on, other than usually when you win, you feel like, hey, everything went right. And usually when you lose. You look at everything that went wrong.

So usually you learn a lot more from when things are going wrong. So I think it'd just be helpful when you're having any kind of analysis is to really come up and just say, hey, this is what's working. This is why we think it's working. Because otherwise, even in your couple of slides, your presentation, in terms of just your data looks disjointed. It's almost like, almost like you're giving me a picture of two different states.

I'll just say quickly, I think it's definitely tough context. Right? The pandemic was a massive disruption to learning in the State. But in terms of success stories. Bless you. In terms of success stories, the State was sort of cognizant and the Federal Government as well, to respond very quickly to what they knew was going to be a very tough time for the state students.

And even though we're seeing these substantial declines in overall performance, some of these effects here where we're seeing graduation rates rising, that kind of thing, I think reflects well on that quick action to respond to the scale of what the problem was going to be. And the potential outcomes could have been much worse for that. So I think this is a time to, I guess, look positively on how the state response has been in the start of the pandemic.

And as we emerge from the pandemic, it highlights the importance of a continued investment in order to sort of emerge from that successfully and continue to close the gaps that have been in existence long before the pandemic.

Thank you. Let me follow up on that. And I concur, Mr. Ting, not just want the score, you want to watch the sports center highlights, right? I like watching the condensed game because watching the Warriors, the Suns game was a two-and-a-half hour game. You can go to the end and watch the 10-minute highlights and get the whole thing so I can save your time.

That being said, and we have the second panels from districts talking about specifics, but this is the key issue because you can't do a do over on a kid. Kids in school like, this is it. You can't be like, whoops, let's try. To do it again.

No, this kid was in fourth grade, now they're in 10th grade. And the impact is what it is for 6 million kids in California. And school districts are trying so hard. They're literally like flying a plane and fixing at the same time. The plane they're flying is getting schools reopened, kind of getting people back in the classroom as far as adults and hiring and shortages and all these areas. And so it's really hard, just the logistics. And then there's all these other issues.

And plus California, we've given them exciting new things to do. We're going to talk about later on after school programs and lunch and TK and all these other pieces, too. That being said, this is not ongoing money. It's one time, but you could spend it. I think we had it over eight years? Six, several years, many years. What can we do in the near future to really pinpoint what works?

And granted, a lot of this is massive discretion to the districts based upon our policies and local control. So they potentially could look and see what's working in our districts and groups like you could point out, or we could kind of reprioritize what things we should do. At what point do you think PPIC and others can see what elements were most effective?

I think, we'll just have to see essentially. The state's districts are doing a variety of different things to respond to the pandemic. The funds from the state and the Federal Government have been very useful in spoiling some of those investments. Things that have been on districts' lists to do for the longest time are now sort of funded by a lot of these emergency funds. And this is part of the beauty of local control.

It allows districts to try a myriad of different things, and it's as simple as looking to see what was successful or not. Right?

So since we have so much variation in what districts are doing as the sort of years go by and we get more data on how the students are doing, what their outcomes are looking like, I think that will allow some of the efforts or programs that were most successful to emerge as key points of success that districts may want to emulate, other districts around the state may want to emulate or that the state might want to make, want to sort of expand its investment in. Right?

I know we're not trying to get back to categoricals, but as best practices emerge, which we hope to see over the next few years, we'd expect, or we would hope that those best practices would be spread throughout the state so that we can see those examples of student success broaden out to other districts throughout the state.

Okay, questions for this panel. Thank you very much. We have several others to join us next. Next, we have the panel on student engagement and chronic absenteeism. We have four panelists. We have seats up here for you as well. Please join us. Okay, we'll start in the order as listed in the agenda. First, we'll start with Hedy Chang with Attendance Works.

Great. Thank you. And I think Erin is passing out slides, so I appreciate it. Thank you so much. It's an honor and a privilege to be able to speak with you today. Let me move up and that maybe you can actually hear me. So I have the opportunity to talk a little bit about chronic absence. I'm going to do some really quick leveling the playing field, just in case folks don't know terms.

So if you look at the slides you have, we're talking about chronic absence, which is missing so much school that kids are academically at risk. We've defined it as missing 10% or more of the school year. That's what's largely adopted across the country. So that you can notice kids when they miss two days in the first month, four days in the second month, thick days in the third month, so that you can act. Use it as an early warning indicator.

And then for our state, we also use it as an accountability indicator. So we're noticing the kids who've missed about 18 days over the course of the year for any reason that's different from average daily attendance or truancy, both of which can mask high levels of chronic absence. And this is a really different metric because when we approach things from truancy, which we have for years, and only look at unexcused absences, we tend to think about this in a compliance oriented way.

You know, you didn't show up to school, and we could threaten you with legal consequences. And shifting to a chronic absence approach is extremely important, especially given the kind of trauma and challenges families have faced. You're looking at when kids aren't in school, it means they've lost out not only on learning opportunities, but they've lost out on the opportunity to connect with peers and adults, as well as to get access to the services and supports that are at school.

And when we take it in a much more trauma informed approach, it means that when we, for example, talk to families about absences, we don't say, did you have a valid reason? We say, what happened? How can I help? And how can we provide the supports we need? Chronic absence, if you look at slide four, has doubled across the country. So that's what we're. Attendance works. We are based here in California, but we work across the country, have connections to probably 30 something states.

And what we've seen is that chronic absence has increased astronomically. But I also want to notice that we have stayed in contact with districts in California as well as across the country. And while chronic absence doubled by the end of last year, it's still extremely high this year. And it was extremely high in districts even before we had some of the challenging weather issues that we are facing now.

And that's because two or three years of disrupted learning aren't going to be fixed just because schools now have opened their doors. This requires an intentional, supportive approach. Some of the data that was presented earlier, I'm not going to talk about this in too much depth, but you have slides showing we have incredibly high levels and the highest levels, as was mentioned before, are in kindergartner and it's kindergarten and it's disproportionately affecting our highest need, most marginalized populations.

But I want you to look at slide seven, if you can, for a second. This is the data that looks at kindergarten chronic absence. So the impact of kindergarten chronic absence we have not yet experienced. These are kindergartners.

We don't test till third grade, but we know from research across the country that when kids are chronically absent in kindergarten, particularly if they are living in poverty and don't have the resources at home to make up for the time and lost learning opportunities in the classroom, it is a surefire indicator that they are off track for reading in third grade and then that means they're off track for graduation later on.

Our kindergarten chronic absence, it's 40% when you look at it being over half, almost half our African American, Latino, Native American, Pacific Islander kids. But if you look at that 200,000 chronically absent kindergartners, two thirds of them are Latino children. We have to take this issue very seriously because we are going to lose a generation.

But when we know who they are, we know then we can start to tailor what do we need to put in place to make sure those kids can get the resources and supports they need to get back on track. If you go to slide eight, it talks about what we know get kids back on track. And what we know is missing is positive conditions for learning. Because of the pandemic, kids and families are not feeling that schools are physically, emotionally healthy and safe.

They're not feeling a sense of belonging, connection, support. They are not always feeling our academic challenge and engagement and they're not always surrounded because we have to support the well being of our school staff so they can invest in the relationships that will support kids. We're putting in place some of those assessments, those relationships, those investments, trying to put back those conditions, but this is not going to happen overnight. It's going to really take a long term strategic effort.

And one of the challenges, if you look at slide nine, is the kids who have been, the students have been most affected by the pandemic are the ones that are most disconnected. They're the most not having access to the joy of learning. Because when families are more affluent, I think this is one of the explanations, by the way, of that disparity in the graduation data that we're seeing, families who have kids who are college bound often are more affluent.

They found ways to make kids sure that kids can stay on track. It takes time to build the systems that really can support and ensure that all kids have that opportunity to be connected to joyous learning, to support, to expanding the amount of time, because it's not going to be made up for just in the school days that we have.

We have to invest in making sure that we can understand and address those barriers and the challenges that are keeping kids from school, both knowing what are the challenges facing our older students, whether it's their increased responsibilities, whether it's going to work, taking care of siblings, or for younger kids, the fears and concerns families may have about putting their kids back in school, and a real lack of understanding about when to keep kids home and when to send them to school.

If a kid has a sniffle, a lot of doctors and nurses say they can go to school now, but a lot of staff and families think that's a reason to stay home. But if kids keep staying home, then they feel anxious about going to school because they aren't feeling connected and they're falling behind.

And so we have to really figure out how we're going to put in tiered supports that really ensure that we are using our data to figure out which kids need, which schools, which communities need the supports. And this is not about a new initiative. We have a lot of resources out there right now. What we need to do is figure out how are we going to use our data to prioritize and coordinate all of the multiple initiatives we have going on.

Expanded learning, community schools, transitional kindergarten, school based healthcare. We have resources, but I think there's incredible initiative fatigue and people having the time, the resources support to think about how they use their data to knit this together. So you have a year long, multi year approach. If you look at the last slide, I think we need to actually create a task force.

The size of this challenge is significant, and it has to be a task force that both involves the California Department of Education, but also involves our Department of Public Health, because it is health and attendance and academic achievement messaging together that we have to use to get to reinstate back a culture of attendance, a culture of school going families have heard for three years, keep your kids at the first home, at the first sign of illness.

But for kids well being in the long term, if they don't show up to school, if we don't have the supports to make sure that they have the health supports, the housing supports to get to school, then in the long term their health and academic outcomes are going to suffer. And we have to think about how we can then build both the capacity of districts, county offices of ED to make sure people get the kind of professional development they need to use new approaches to learning.

And then the last thing I would just say is, and we can use our data to look for bright spots. We can use our attendance data, find out where the places that didn't have as dramatic drops in chronic absence, and find out what they did. So thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to speak to you.

And we can use our data to be much more strategic, targeted, but we have to take a whole community, whole village approach and take this as a long term approach to moving students to the kinds of opportunities that we know they deserve, need and will allow us to thrive as a state.

Thank you. I know I'll have some follow-up questions, but let's get through the panelists first. Next, we'll hear from our representative from WestEd.

Hi. Thank you. Thank you, Chair McCarty, and thank you, Assemblymembers. I am Tom Hanson from WestEd. I direct the California School Climate Health and Learning Survey System. It's called CalSCHLS for short. I'm here, but she's not up here, but I'm here with Rebeca Cerna, who also from Westad, who directs the California Center for School Climate. The center provides school climate-related data use support for LEAs across the state.

So Rebeca is here to answer any questions we have about data use and the data use supports provided by the center. Both CalSCHLS and the School Climate Center are CDE initiatives. So what I'm going to do very quickly is briefly describe the CalSCHLS system, show you some trend data from the California Healthy Kids Survey on measures of student engagement and well-being, and then describe how LEAs can use the survey data to address school climate and student engagement.

So again, just to be clear, CalSCHLS is an acronym for California School Climate Health and Learning Surveys. I like to describe the CalSCHLS as the California Department of Education's whole child and school climate measurement system. The survey is comprised of three interrelated surveys. There's a student survey called the California Healthy Kids Survey, and then there's a staff survey and a parent survey.

Each survey has a core module required of everyone taking the survey, so data is conducted for a standard set of measures for all participants in the state, and then there are supplementary modules to assess topics in further detail. There's also custom model districts can include their own questions or questions from other item banks also on the survey. So the whole system is kind of both standardized and flexible to be responsive to local needs. I do have a handout.

Page three on that handout describes further features of the CHKS. I think the CHKS, it represents three geographic areas. There's the local, the county, and the state. And the local CHKS is designed to provide local data to districts and schools. School districts typically administer the survey every other year in grades 5,7,9 and 11. Thirty percent of districts administer the survey.

30% of districts in the state administer the survey every year, and because of its extensive use, county-level results are provided if there's sufficient district participation. In the most recent two-year period, 49 we have county-level results are available for 49 of the 58 counties in the state. There's also a state-level CHKS.

The Biennial CHKS is based on a statewide sample of randomly selected schools, so the Biennial provides results that are representative of the state as a whole, and districts can use those results as to benchmark their own results. Page four on the handout shows how many districts administered the survey. The CHKS was administered in 694 districts in about 5200 schools in the most recent two-year period. That roughly equals about 70% of districts in the state.

The staff survey was administered in 399 districts and the parent survey in 313. Okay, so now I'm going to shift. Let's talk about some trend results for three measures related to engagement in school academic motivation, school connectedness, and chronic sadness. Page six on the handout shows roughly how these measures were measured, and page seven shows trends in reported academic motivation between 2016 and 2022. So if you look at page seven, we see that for 7th graders and probably less so for 9th and 11th graders.

We see a gradual decline in academic motivation between 2016 and 2020. In the pre pandemic period, then, academic motivation declined steeply in 2021, the pandemic year for all grades, and there's very steep declines of between 9 and 11 percentage points. In 2022, levels are similar to the levels in 2021, so there's no indication of further decline, but there's no indication of a recovery yet, at least according to the survey data.

Page eight shows similar trend data for school connectedness, again a precursor, we think, to attendance. Note that in 2021, we did not collect school connectedness data from students who participated in school remotely, so we don't have data for that year. But we can see from the figure that there's more pronounced declines for 7th graders than other grades. There was a five percentage point drop between 2016 and 2020, and then a four percentage drop point drop between 2020 and 2022.

The decline was sort of less pronounced, but still like a decline for 9th and 11th graders, and it's pretty much a linear decline. The next graph on page nine shows trends in chronic sadness, which increased gradually in the pre pandemic period. It's been increasing for a long time. This has been sort of a nationwide increase in adolescent depression, and then it increased substantially in 2021. In 2021, 47% of 11th graders reported that they experienced chronic sadness in that year.

Almost half the disparities by gender are large. Chronic sadness appeared to recover to almost pre-pandemic levels in 2022, which is great news, but still the levels are unacceptably high. Okay, there's some data for you. Next, I'm just going to turn to how districts and schools can best use school climate data to equitably improve conditions for learning. Having a valid instrument and using it to successfully collect survey data is really just the beginning.

As hard as that actually is, the most important work happens once the data have been collected, and our experience indicates that districts and schools are in different stages of their data use practice journey. In ideal situations, districts and schools would disaggregate the survey results by student characteristics make and have a plan to disseminate survey results using different mechanisms and to do so frequently. Continue to explore the why behind survey results and connect it to other sources of data.

Engage in action planning with different partners, including students, staff and family members, and to establish benchmarks to continue to monitor progress in strengthening school climate. Again, in our work, we find wide variation in districts with regards to their data use practice. One best-practiced example is the work of San Diego Unified School District. This is described on page 11. A couple of months ago, we had the opportunity to present at the State Board of Education with SDOUSD about their school climate data use practices.

The district has an LCAP goal that all students experience affirming classrooms that hone and leverage their lived experience. Having a supportive classroom is a driver of student connectedness and attendance, so at the district level they monitor the school using multiple data sources. Some data is collected annually including the CHKS. Other data sources are monitored more frequently, like attendance and chronic absenteeism data or absenteeism data is monitored in real-time.

Also, schools in the district develop school climate related goals as part of their school plans for student achievement. They are using the CHKS data to inform baseline areas of growth and strengths to monitor progress. What's really impressive, I think, about SDUSD is that staff in varying roles take ownership of the data and engage with it. Data is shared extensively. Data doesn't sit with the person who coordinates data collection or an analyst. It's shared across a variety of different staff in the district.

Our work on the California Center for School Climate has afforded us the opportunity to support districts in strengthening their data use practice. The requests we get from districts are similar regardless of district size or whether they're urban or rural. Districts typically request support in identifying areas of focus and figuring out how to measure progress. They often ask about best practices in collaborating and engaging with educational partners to understand the root causes for the inequities that the data are surfacing.

I think I'm going to stop there, and we'll gladly provide more information during the question and answer session about data use.

Yes, if we can please proceed and we'll ask our panelists. We have one more panel and questions and public comments, so please keep within your allotted time given to you. Next, we have the Orange County Office of Education, followed by Mr. Funk with CDE.

Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm Jami Parsons. I'm representing the Orange County Department of Education, the lead agency for California MTSS. I'm a Member of the State Executive Committee for California MTSS and have been a part of the leadership team since 2016 when we initiated California sums or scale-up MTSS. Thank you to the Committee for the Invitation to the hearing today. Thank you also for the great description in the agenda explaining California MTSS.

In addition, handouts have been provided to the Committee as well with some additional information. They are two-sided and look like this. In addition to the definition in the agenda, I would like to expand on the definition of what is California MTSS? Just for clarification. California Multi-tiered System of Support is a general education initiative that is intended to support the needs of all students.

Implementing California MTSS allows schools to organize and align academic, behavioral, social, and emotional and mental health instruction and interventions in a fully integrated system of support for the benefit of all students. Through the use of teaming and coaching and the use of data for decision-making and evidence-based practices, schools create a system in which students have access to the support they need when they need it, thus not waiting until they fail to intervene.

California MTSS offers the potential to create needed systemic change at a school through intentional design and redesign of services and supports to quickly identify and match to the needs of all students. I'd like to review the California MTSS framework which is on the back of your handout. The framework includes 5 domains and 11 features. The whole child domain up at the top is the focus of the work and other domains underneath are in place to support this focus.

This framework provides opportunities for LEAs to strengthen both school, family and community partnerships while developing the whole child in the most inclusive, equitable learning environment, thus closing the equity gaps for all students. In the most recent iteration of the framework, we have added mental health to better support schools in understanding how that can be delivered within a continuum of support and how to best leverage credentialed personnel on their campuses and supplement through intentional use of community based providers as well.

I'd like to review the California Continuum of Support which is located underneath the framework on your handout. The continuum of support is both a fluid and flexible structure which is grounded in universal design for learning and best first instruction. And if you notice, on the continuum of support, the universal support is on the top. We have moved away from the pyramid structure that you often see with RTI or sometimes PBIS. The universal is intended to be at the top.

It is critically important and it is for all students. Teams use universal screeners for academic, behavioral or social, emotional and mental health needs along with other sources of data to identify students needing supplemental and intensified support. We ask the question, along with schools, what are we doing for all students to increase access to the content and what are we doing to remove any barriers to the learning? If students need additional help, schools organize staff to work with small groups on targeted skills.

If a few students need more intensive help, support specialists are assigned to provide intensive instruction to remediate the skill gaps. As students obtain mastery of those skills, they are removed from those additional supports. The supports are layered on to core instruction for as long as they are needed. As the pandemic highlighted, certainly many students have a variety of needs that the framework is well suited to support. Those schools who have the framework in place are finding it easier to support learning acceleration and recovery.

And to Mr. Ting's point earlier, on the back of your handout you see testimonials from five different districts across the state. We've included testimonials related to school climate and to learning loss in particular, and the success. They're finding having the framework in place already, now that the pandemic has occurred, it's helping them with the learning loss move more quickly. On the back of the handout is the timeline for California MTSS. As I know some of you are new to the work that we're doing.

So we are in the third phase of California MTSS. We began with phase one in 2016-2017. Phase one focused on building state as well as region and district capacity. We highly focused on the district's ability to support schools moving into this type of work. At that time, we began the work. We were partnered with Butte County Office of Education to give the rural perspective on school needs, and we also were partnered with Swift out of the University of Kansas to build the framework.

In phase two, we partnered with UCLA to conduct research and we wanted to leverage the California MTSS framework to evaluate the impact on school conditions and climate. And we're working with 35 schools. It's a very small scale pilot. UCLA will complete their research at the end of this fiscal year in June and that will be embedded in our annual report in September. Phase three began in 2022 and will go through 2026.

This moves into school site implementation which is now focusing on the trailer Bill Language, which asked us to emphasize building out a continuum of support for social and emotional learning, mental health, and trauma informed practices.

For this round of the funding, we are partnered with the California ISP Project, which is led by the Placer County Office of Education and it's the Placer Consortium along with Santa Clara, Kern County, and WestDd, and they will be focused on building content around SEL, mental health, and trauma-informed practices for the next two years and doing a deeper dive into that level of the work with the schools that we've already been working with.

With phase three, funding was provided to three different types of awardees, schools as well as consortia as well as county offices of ED. Through a competitive grant process, funding can be used to provide staff with stipends for time outside of the school day or school year to complete the asynchronous online course that we developed in phase two as a result of the pandemic. The course is designed to provide both synchronous and asynchronous learning for schools and district staff.

The course includes the foundational elements of the California MTSS framework and continuum of support, including the what, why, and how of a multi-tiered system. Course content builds educator capacity in the areas of academic behavior, social, emotional, and mental health instruction. After educators complete the foundational level of the course, they embark on role-specific pathways which allow all educators to make connections and utilize resources to support their roles.

Pathways that we built include those for teachers, administrators, school counselors, school psychologists, school-based mental health clinicians, paraeducators, and noninstructional staff. Funds from this grant can also be used for technology or other curricular materials or PD needed to support the implementation. Coaching is a critical component of this program so far.

A county or district coach goes through our certification course to vet their knowledge and ensure fidelity to the model, and coaches are assigned to all school leaders in the state whom they meet with them regularly, and they develop a PD plan and an implementation plan and provide feedback all along the way.

In addition, they use Fidelity measures such as the FIA, the Fidelity Integrity Assessment Tool, and the SIT, the School-wide Implementation tool and these are self-assessment tools that allow school leadership teams to engage in reflective conversations to assess fidelity to the model, and the Lisa is also used in LEA self-assessment tool to measure their capacity to support schools.

In addition to the positive highlights that you see on your handout, we do have some findings from our work so far in phases one, two, and three. I'll just give you a few examples from phase one. Schools felt they were better-organized systems and stronger and had more robust tiers of support to address students' needs. In evaluating their systems, they saw how tiered interventions could be increased or enhanced.

And even though changes in student outcomes are not expected until implementation of the framework is more widespread, some have begun to see increases on scores for ELA and math assessments, as well as reductions in suspensions in some cases. As you'll note from the quotes on the back of the flyer, office discipline referrals, absenteeism, and referrals to special education. I think that's where we've seen our greatest success is in the reduction of disproportionality in terms of referral to special education.

In phase three, we are very excited to work with the California ISP Project, and then we are also engaging with the Swift Center again to update their FIA to align with our framework. I want to leave some time to address some questions that have been specifically posed by the Committee. I'll start with, how is MTSS addressing chronic absenteeism and learning recovery?

So schools and districts are using teams to look at data on a regular basis to identify student needs, whether that means academic behavior or social and emotional needs. Once the need is identified, whatever that is, an intervention and or enrichment is recommended by the team and a plan is put in place to support the student with attendance. This might mean that a school works closely with the parent to look at the root cause for excessive absences.

Some strategies might include small group or individual counseling, referrals for family counseling, family services or health clinic information or other community based providers, transportation assistance like bus vouchers or similar, and on the converse, incentives for improved attendance such as recognition or other reinforcements. With learning recovery, the process remains the same. School teams identify what students should know and be able to do by grade or content area. When they identify there's a learning gap, multiple strategies are used.

Teachers use universal design for learning in their lesson planning. They may also try small group review or explicit instruction for specific skill gaps to reinforce the learning. Those tend to run for six to eight weeks, and they're flexible and fluid. As students learn the material they no longer need, small group intervention are moved back into the whole group. How are LEAs leveraging California MTSS?

And this would be to include issues around school climate. So districts are certainly benefiting from dedicated coaching provided to them through the grant. Each administrator or consortia has a local coach assigned to them who knows their context to support the implementation. School site leaders are using the reflective tools that they've been provided to conduct self-assessment with their school leadership teams, and they're focused on integrating the continuum of support to meet the whole child's needs.

Administrators are working with other support specialists, working together with school counselors, psychologists, and special educators to enhance school engagement, improve school climate, and design interventions to support leaning. Teams take a strength-based approach to evaluating what supports are already in place for universal supplemental and intensified intervention. And in terms of the last question, which is how is MTSS leveraging transformation funding like transportation, community schools, ELO-P, and Universal TK?

In a multi-tiered approach, districts are definitely aligning and braiding multiple funding sources to support their district LCAP goals and services, many of which include implementing universal supplemental and intensified instruction and interventions designed to meet the academic, behavioral, and social-emotional needs of students. And of course, the California MTSS framework provides the overarching structure to enable the braiding of funding and initiatives.

Community school framework has a lot of overlay with California MTSS around integrating student supports, family and community engagement, collaborative leadership, and extended learning time, and opportunities. Extended learning opportunity programs can be used to provide supplemental instruction and support for students needing more time and more help before or after the school day. We would include that the following quality standards for expanded learning definitely align to California MTSS safe and supportive environments, skill building, and collaborative partnerships.

So using the ELOP funding as it is intended meaning aligned to the quality standards definitely enables our districts to implement programs that will expand the MTSS structure for before or after school. This concludes my remarks and I will stand by for additional questions related to my content. Thank you for your invitation today.

Okay, thank you. Our final speaker in this panel will be Michael Funk with the California Department of Ed.

Thank you, Chairman McCarty and Committee. And thank you, Chairman, for your continued support for after-school programs in so many ways. And thank you, Jamie, for plugging the quality standards for expanded learning. Taking some of my material, I'm going to be well under time. I'm going to cover three things and it's going to be calling out the importance of the definition of expanded learning in Ed code. Every word is important.

I'm going to share with you specific data that shows how expanded learning actually reduces absenteeism, and I'm going to tell you why. Hang on. Expanded learning means before school, after school, and summer or intercession learning. The word learning is very important. Summer school has been referenced, that's the thing. Expanded learning, high quality. That's tied to the quality standards. We call them summer learning programs. They meet the academic, social, emotional, and physical needs and developing the interests of students through hands-on, engaging learning experiences.

This is from Ed code, by the way. Every word is chosen carefully. It is the intent of the Legislature that expanded learning programs are student-centered, results-driven, include community partners, and complement, but do not replicate, learning activities through the regular school day. And now about the evidence through a third-party report from WestEd. That was the report to the Legislature. Using CALPADS student-level data, we know that decades-long research through many studies has shown that high-quality after-school0 programs increase school attendance.

Now we have data that is specific on California's aces and 21st century programs. The summary in the short paragraph. Program participants that attended the programs 60 days or more when compared with students of the same demographic characteristics that attend the same school, attended 1.5% more school days. That's 2.7 more school days than their peers at the same school. This was based on that's 2.7 more school days out of 177 school year. Additionally, this increased school attendance by expanded learning participants created financial gains.

If you consider what ADA was gained, revenue was gained from the ADA of that lack of absenteeism. It calculates. WestEd calculated this out to be over $38 million in resources in the educational system. There was a study two years ago or two years prior to this that actually had much higher numbers of students of days attended school than this particular report did. Why is that so? The panel before mentioned what happens with high-quality learning, engaging activities. Eddie, you referenced these things.

There are five things, five characteristics of learning that were the foundation of the creation of the quality standards for expanded learning. We called them the learning and after school and summer principles. Students attend school more because in after-school, high quality, they learn in ways that they love, learning that is active and project-based. It's hands-on, learning that is collaborative. They're working more with other students, especially impactful for English language learners. Number three, learning that is meaningful. What does that mean?

In high quality programs, staff expose kids to different things so kids can find out what they care about and apply the academic work on things that they're passionate about. It has meaning, learning that supports mastery. So kids stick with things long enough, and a child learns that they can get good at something, they learn that they can get good at other things. It supports mastery, and learning that expands horizons. For 20 years, I ran programs on the west side of San Francisco.

Eddie was one of my parent volunteers. We were four blocks from Ocean Beach, and we would take middle schoolers to Ocean Beach for some kind of environmental work or cleanup day. And for a significant number of those students, it was their first time to go to the beach. They looked out of their middle school classroom onto the beach, and they never went there. Expanding kids horizons. We take kids where they didn't imagine they could go.

So students discover what they care about surrounded by adults that care about them. In many instances, we hear from the kids that they are coming to school because they want to attend the afterschool program. That's my testimony. Happy to respond to any questions.

Okay, thank you. Questions? Mr. Alvarez.

Thank you all for your presentation. As a father of a middle schooler and an elementary schooler, school student in San Diego Unified, and they were cited today. I get, obviously, feedback from my children about what's happening. And at the middle school, at least, it seems that the absenteeism issue is quite prevalent at the school that my daughter attends, oftentimes much less than 20 students in the classroom, which is pretty substantial for a middle school classroom, which typically has between 28 to 34 students.

And so I think this issue is really critical. It's perhaps one of the most critical issues in education. And to our first speaker, and I'm sorry I don't have everybody's names, but I appreciate you calling out something that we should be paying attention to. And that's the rate of Latinos in absenteeism and particularly in kindergarten, when they're just starting out and what that could mean for the future of our students and our workforce.

And I feel that it's going to be really important to sort of get better data, desegregated data, to understand what's happening in which schools. I'm trying to pull that information up as you're all sharing your thoughts, but we've got to find a way to really identify what that data is in terms of absenteeism. I still believe a lot of people, kids are dropping out as a result of absenteeism, and that's not being captured in the data.

And this problem is far worse than we're probably even able to comprehend at the moment. And I hope that we can find a way to really desegregate that and provide a real picture, because I think it's actually quite potentially a catastrophe on our hands. And if we don't start investing now with those children, we're going to see even more severe learning loss gaps and certainly achievement gaps between different groups.

So I guess my first question is related to this idea, which I really find interesting, of an interagency task force between the Department of Education and Department of Public Health. There seems to be a lot of confusion in families of when a kid should go to school and when they shouldn't. And there seems to be similar confusion among staff that I get a chance to interact with. It's always changing. It's changing for us in our employment.

And I'm wondering what kind of impact that's having on families deciding to take a decision to keep their kids home, because that, I think could be leading to this problem. The other thing about absenteeism that I think isn't being captured is that it's my belief, and there's no data to prove this.

And I'd love to hear your feedback, but in a classroom, when you've got a lot of kids missing and a teacher feels the passion that they do to make sure that every student is learning, there are other students who perhaps are learning and could be exceeding even more, but they're also being held back because of the need to make sure that everybody else who has been missing catches up.

And so that means that in schools, I think, and I'd love to hear research on this, but in schools, like, unfortunately, the ones that I represent in San Diego, where absenteeism is the highest in the entire county, we are going to see even bigger disparities, because perhaps children who perhaps be getting pushed a little bit more, as we know, every classroom has different kids, and some kids are ready to be pushed a little bit more.

But when you're focusing so much of your time on making sure that the ones that have been absent can catch up, those that perhaps could be exceeding a little bit more, being challenged a little bit more, might be getting held back. I'm really concerned about that and that we'll see more data that shows that that achievement gap continues to grow as a result of that. Any thoughts on any of that?

Well, first of all, there is actually research that backs what you know from common sense. So Michael Godfrey has research that shows that the non-chronically absent peers of kids, when you have high levels of chronic absence in a class, their academic achievement also suffers. So one, that's common sense, and there is some research that demonstrates that.

I think one of the things that we have to, why a task force and also building district and school capacity is so important is we have to be able to look at systems issues, not just individual issues. A lot of our approach to truancy has know Michael was absent. I'll just figure out what happened to Michael. We have now so many kids. It's not just a one kid issue.

Let's take the issue of access to health care, which we know in low-income communities, there's often limited access to health care. When you're talking also about communities that may not speak English, but speak another language, whether or not we have it access into there. And then if you also have issues of documented undocumented, that can also create lots of fears and challenges around using healthcare.

If health care is an issue and you're not sure whether your kid is positive for COVID or not and should go to school, and you don't also have access to someone who can give you good guidance, then you're probably going to keep your kid home.

What I've been hearing from nurses and doctors, I think there's starting to be an emerging consensus among the medical field that we're going back to pre pandemic norms that unless a kid steps, if they test positive for COVID, that's one thing you have to isolate, and then you can come back after five days, but otherwise just a sniffle. And if you test it, you should go back to school. But that means we have to invest both in making sure people can test for COVID. Right?

But then messaging to people, you should be going back to school. And with kindergartners, if they're feeling anxious, what do kindergartners do? They have a stomach ache. Right? If a kid has a stomachache and they're feeling anxiety, the most important thing you do is get them into the routine of school. If you continue to allow them to not go to school, it's actually going to get harder to get into the routine.

And so how we message to families. How we explain to families the importance of school and the regular routine of school for well being, how we can help them know what they can do to stay safe but also still show up to school as much as possible is really critical. I was talking with a reporter from San Diego.

You probably saw the article, and he was starting to notice the connection between where you had the highest levels of COVID deaths and also where you have the schools with highest concentrations of chronic absence. That means we have to really be investing in both the supports to families, but the trauma-informed supports. That is part of MPSS. Absolutely. But we have to deepen those investments in schools.

And the one last other thing I think we have to really invest in is how do we make sure with schools there is a trusted adult that every family feels connected to. So when they have questions, when they have concerns, and that is one of the questions in the healthy kids surveys. But we don't ask it till the kids are in third grade, and that's when we can ask them. But we have to make sure every kid and family has a trusted adult.

So when they have questions, they have a way to connect. And that means thinking about how we structure schools. So relationship building is central to the way we organize schools and central to the way kids and families are connected.

So it's both health messaging and the organization of schools and using data, not just in the education system, but maybe health, other kinds of data, and geomapping it so we can look at where we have to take a more systemic approach to addressing barriers to kids being in school.

Thank you. I appreciate the comments on that. The second sort of part of the conversation was on the healthy kids survey. And I'd like to ask you, Tom. Right? Can you just help clarify? I know that not every school is required to take this specific survey. Is every school required to take a climate survey and how often?

Yes, that's correct. As part of the LCAP requirements for the local indicator. School districts are required to administer some sort of school climate survey to assess progress in school climate. It could be any survey.

And this would be district wide.

Yes.

Okay. This is where I also have a concern, because oftentimes what you're capturing, because I've done these surveys, is surveys that go to parents who have access to the Internet, who are comfortable with responding to surveys and your data is only as good as your data collection. And the families where my kids go to school aren't as comfortable with utilizing surveys or other instruments like that to respond.

And I think we're missing a lot of information about some of the fear, some of the whatever it is at some of the schools, which, again, happen to be the ones that have the chronic absenteeism levels that are the highest, at least in the case of my area where I represent, and I can assume that's the same statewide. And so we're missing, there's language barriers.

There's, again, still a digital divide in the state, even in places where the digital divide doesn't exist, perhaps on paper, it still exists in reality with people who don't have access or an email. And so I think we're missing a lot more than we're actually able to capture in the story that we're able to tell.

And I think it's actually probably much more challenging than the data that we have before us, specifically for the students who are in those communities and in those cohorts that we know that the achievement gaps exist. And I'm really concerned about that.

And I would appreciate any feedback we can get from any of you and anybody else in the audience about how do we address those things with real data and in a meaningful way, especially with the schools that I know because I'm around them, where we're really not capturing accurate information about how bad it really is.

Not to be a doom and gloom guy, but it's really tough for a lot of the families that I see when I get a chance to drop off my kids and pick them up at the schools, which are 90 plus percent low-income schools where we attend and where we live. So I don't know, besides saying that, what else to ask?

But again, appreciate any of your inputs on how to make sure that we're really focusing on the kids that really need us and the families that really need us at this time. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. I just have some follow-ups. So looking at a lot of data here and a lot of charts and numbers, which I love numbers because they don't lie. Right? But we have to make sure we have accurate data to really drill into what's happening with our students and our schools. So the piece, I also sat on a school board, and I was one of those very active parents. Maybe little hover, possibly.

But what I'm seeing here is I think parents are a big missing piece of who we're doing. And correct me if I'm wrong. So the first survey that's sent home is in the fifth grade for the healthy?

Healthy kids, and for the most part, those surveys are conducted within schools of students in schools fifth grade.

At fifth grade, okay. But we know data that if we're not reading at a third-grade level, by third grade, we're already very behind. So if we aren't asking until fifth grade.

Right.

If school environment is where they feel healthy, safe, and thriving, then we're already two years behind with data on just specifically school climate, correct?

That's correct. I will say that some districts administer the survey to third graders and fourth graders as well. We've done sort of facility analysis with those data, and there doesn't appear to be sort of. The survey items seem to work. They're psychometrically valid.

I have one of your surveys that I had printed out for me, which is really good questions. This is a high school survey in regards to drug use, alcohol. I mean, this is very relevant to a high school student. But I'm wondering about our kindergarten kids not coming. Did you not want to come to school today because your stomach did hurt or because you were being bullied or you don't like what was on the lunch menu?

I mean, there's a lot of reasons that five-year-olds don't want to go. Only 300,000 parents were surveyed. And if we have 6 million students in our state and only 1.2 million responded, that's not a very good. I mean, to me, at least, maybe we could have 50% of our students and 50% of our parents telling us what we need to do. So. Ms. Chang, correct? Well, I want to just comment on your passion. I so appreciate it.

I can hear it in your voice, how much you care about our students and families as a whole. And I so appreciate that and that we really do have to drill in. And it's a collaborative effort to make sure that our kids are in school and that they're thriving.

Well and I would suggest that Healthy Kids is maybe going to give us some analysis in the state. We need to equip every school to be able to deeply connect with their parents. One of the things that we suggest is that you build in, at least in elementary schools, I hope most are still doing parent-teacher conferences at a minimum. I realize at some places, but that's a key point.

We're in the beginning of the year and you build in and it has to be done in a caring, respectful way where families feel like they're partners with their kids. And I will say not every parent teacher conference comes off that way, but you are equipping teachers and then they are understanding what's happening with individual kids and collecting data.

If a bunch of kids parents are saying, my kids actually feel sort of anxious and you're hearing that, then you need as a school to think about what are your strategies. So I think we both need things like surveys that give us big overall pictures, and we need to build the capacity of schools and districts so that we are equipping them to connect with, whether it's parent teacher conferences, parent surveys.

We have these things called attendance cafes, different ways where you hear the voices of students and families on an ongoing basis throughout the year. And then the one other thing I would offer is that one of the places that sometimes you can get insights from kids and families is actually in your expanded learning. As a parent, who I could talk to was the expanded learning provider, or you could even hang out afterwards because you're not trying to get to work.

And we have not fully leveraged the power of expanded learning, which often has people who are staffing them that look more like the community than the school teachers themselves, necessarily, to be that bridge between school and community, and then using our chronic absence data to make sure that the kids who've been missing out get into these exciting, engaging learning opportunities so they want to show up more.

I couldn't agree more, and I really appreciate your passion as well. We emphasize in the center work the need to really triangulate data, connect sort of the survey data with local data and action-oriented data at the school. I just want to say one thing. So the survey is typically administered in the odd number grades, so five, and actually less participate in the elementary survey. So 7, 9, and 11.

So when we see these numbers, it's not going to come close to matching sort of the enrollment in the state. And also, oh shoot, I lost my point.

No, that's very helpful to think about that. This is not all the students, this is just the students in those grade levels that you're surveying

In those grade levels, in those districts that administered the survey. So it's a voluntary survey. The response rates, when we look at the response rates by grade level in school districts, they range around eight for students, they range around 85% to 90%. They were much lower in 2021, but typically 85% to 90%. The response rates for the parent surveys are notoriously low. I mean, it's really hard.

So usually the parent survey data is a very select group of respondents, but it's still helpful for districts to use that data as long as they understand the biases. So that's sort of a follow up there.

Just a quick follow up, too, in terms of parents. Hedy, thank you for saying that about expanded learning staff looking usually from the neighborhood, like, I imagine the staff in your programs are from the neighborhood. I've seen it in my own work in the community.

But also during the pandemic, when schools shut down and well intended schools lost touch with families, we gave expanded learning program staff the flexibility to go out in the community and do the support for families, do well being checks, deliver food, bring activities for the kids. And when they came to the door of the families, the families would open the door, because a lot of times, they knew the family.

So what we need to do, and we've had some conversation about this, is put together some very specific strategies to help schools that are new to expanded learning understand how to leverage expanded learning. And the community educators, which is what we call our staff, leverage the community educators as an intervention towards chronic absenteeism.

Thank you. And the final thing I'd add is, just as you're thinking across the board on all the multi-tiered, which, as I'm learning about this, I just think our parents are key. And if they know how important education is for the future of their children, all parents, I don't care what economic level you want the best for your kids. So I just think that that might be one of the pieces that we really need to dig into and focus on. So thank you.

Okay, I have some questions on after school programs and then on just absenteeism in know, I was talking to Mr. Alvarez. There is that report that came out, and I think the San Diego paper a couple months ago about chronic absenteeism in that district. And I'm not sure if it was data driven, but one of the people talked about just the overall economic conditions and high poverty and high inflation and the struggle that families just face with poverty.

And that's really not lack of sleep, bullying, all those other real issues COVID just economic factors. How much of that do you think is the reality?

What I would say is historically chronic absence followed the contours of poverty, and this is why community schools was such an important strategy. I will also say there's a slight demographic shift that I'm seeing in the data, which is chronic absence has always been a challenge for lower income, higher poverty kind of communities that we have, have suffered those challenges, but there is now chronic absence among, I would say, non economically challenged families and a growing number.

And it's actually growing at a slightly faster rate than among the. Because the levels were already so high in high poverty communities, when you grow, you're not growing that quick, but it's a smaller number, but faster growth. And I think that is because the anxiety issues, the health concern issues are ones.

So in high poverty communities, it's the issues of housing, lack of reliable transportation, lack of access to health care, those unsafe communities that are sort of driving some of the absenteeism, along with maybe the conditions in school not being as engaging and connecting among families who are less challenged in those ways. It's the concerns about health, concerns about anxiety. And I think there is an overall level at which families, school's been going to school in person has been sort of deprioritized.

Like families are like, well, why can't they just make up? And people don't even realize there isn't, like online. Like if your kid missed that day, there isn't some online thing that allows them easily to make up for that lots of time in the classroom. Another challenge was that last year when we. Couple of things happened last year.

First of all, when we reopened schools, typically the first month of school is really critical to kids getting connected, scaffolded learning, making sure that they're getting into routine of school. We had the Delta variant hit in the first month of the year. Then when you're trying to get them back on track, the second semester Omicron hit, and in the second semester when that hit, it was also hitting the staff because staff were getting sick. So the relationships and connections really did not get built last year.

And we are still paying for those consequences. And I think the lack of connection engagement didn't just affect our lower income kids, it actually affected some of our middle or more affluent kids. So we have to have an intentional strategy of relationship building, connecting. And again, I feel like this issue of helping people remember again why school matters. We have this ticket, this toolkit showing up matters for real because it's an opportunity to build routines.

And routines are really important when you have had a chaotic experiences. It matters for engagement because school is where you'll see your friends, see your adults. It matters for access to resources and then it matters for learning. But people don't just respond to the learning message because they've missed so much school and they're not understanding the importance of showing up in person anymore. And we're going to have to send a whole community messaging campaign to reestablish school.

I know we have to move on, but one more question on the survey, I guess it was your survey that the highest number, which kind of surprised me of the reasons why. Well, I guess the highest reason is illness, but the secondary other ones was not enough sleep. And I guess Mr. Portantino and his Bill in the high school changes is like aha. But it's even before that was implemented in my understanding, and it's for even 9th graders. So what's the deal there? Why aren't kids sleeping too much homework or not sleeping or other issues?

You'd have to here. But I also just want to put out there. I think kids are not in routines and kids are also technology and social media. And when I talk to parents there's a real challenge of how do we figure out how to get kids into a routine. And I think we have to deal with all the issues of technology and what could. You know, I have kids. One of the battles was turn off your phone when you go to bed. Seriously.

No, I have two 14-year-old girls. And don't give your kids cell phones at early age. We regret. If I could give any advice for those triplets over there is have a minimum age for social media accounts. I think we should have a law on that too. But back to teenagers and the after-school programs. As you know, I'm a big supporter of making sure we have those programs in after-school and high school programs.

Those are the times that we lose kids too, with absenteeism and grades and know other issues. So we don't always have it. I'm just looking at a survey here at our districts in Sacramento. Some don't and some do. Grant the ones that do, I think are the areas that there's more economic need so those parents can't afford the after-school sports programs or other ones as much so I get that. How's the rollout to make sure we have this universally available? That's the plan here.

The rollout for older youth or the rollout for expanded learning in General?

Yeah, for after school for not just up to 6th grade, but through middle school and beyond.

Oh, I think the middle school and beyond is wildly successful.

How do we ensure that it's universal? For example, middle school.

Well, it's not universal for middle school.

I know. How do we ensure that it is?

Well, I think the expanded learning opportunities program can go up to 6th grade and that gets into some middle school. So schools can explore that. And if a district meets the requirements of the Expanded Learning Opportunities Program, they can spend the money on older youth. But that's not, to me, a path towards universalism. The older youth is primarily going to multiply with middle school grants for 21st-century federal money and the Aces Middle School Grants and the high school assets programs.

And there's not enough money in those two programs to fund the demand.

Well, if we want to address these issues, and this is where you lose kids more for truancy and so forth, is not fourth grade, it's 7th, 8th, 9th grade.

Yeah, I would agree wholeheartedly.

So what do we need to do to expand, to make it universal for those key grades?

We need more money, more funding. We give out every dollar we have for high school, middle school, and there's a long line of applicants that don't get funded. The waitlist. We fund about half of the applicants.

Okay, I would have a bunch of questions here, but we have other panels. I want to be respectful, and we want to hear from the school districts to talk about what they're doing. So with that, the next piece is the State of Learning Recovery efforts. We're going to briefly hear from the LAO and CDE. Briefly. I'm asking you to consolidate, have a word diet on your presentation, and then we'll get to the school districts to talk about what they're doing.

Okay, we will start first with LAO.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good morning. Sorry, good afternoon, Mr. Chair and Members. Michael Alferes with the Legislative Analyst Office (LAO). We were asked to provide some information on the recent state and federal funding that districts received in recent years to address a variety of issues, including the effects of learning loss, as well as the higher cost of education from the COVID-19 pandemic. We have a handout that should be available in front of you and is also available on the LAO website.

For those following along, with this handout is provide a brief overview of the recent actions that are state and federal one-time funding and describe some of the requirements, and then what we know about how much funding has been spent for these programs. So, turning to page one, we have a figure here that shows schools in California received $41 billion in flexible one-time state and federal funding in recent years, about $23 billion in federal funding and $18 billion in state funding.

I won't go into detail on everything in this table, but you'll see that for each item on the table there is a description of the allowable uses as well as the allocation, methodology, and amount provided at a high level. The federal portion of the table discusses the three rounds of federal relief funding through the elementary and secondary school Emergency Relief Fund, known as ESSER, that went directly to schools that totaled about 21 billion across the three rounds.

In addition to this, there was also statewide flexible funding, federal relief funding that was provided that the state could have discretion to spend. The state portion of the table shows five different actions that the state took in the 2021 and 2022 budget. The two block grants that are here, the Learning Recovery Emergency Block Grant and the Arts and Music Block Grant, was from last year's budget, the 2022 budget and then the other three items were from the 2021 budget.

One quick note just on the Expanded Learning Opportunities Grants. The amount here shows 4.6 billion, but this reflects 2.5 billion in state funding combined with $2 billion in statewide flexible funding from the federal government for this purpose. Skipping to page three of the handout, we have a figure here that shows funds can be used over a multi-year period for each funding source. Here we have the bars represent the date that the funding was enacted and the timeline that districts have to spend the funding.

So you can see from here that districts have most funding available for the current year and in some cases have multiple years after this year to spend the funding, with the exceptions being the first round of ESSER funding and the in-person instruction grants which had the expenditure deadlines of last year, and our understanding is that most of the funding was spent.

But for any of these programs, funding that is unspent at the end of the expenditure period here reverts back to the state or federal government, depending on where the funding came from. Moving on to page four here, we highlight state and federal reporting requirements differ. For state programs we have this table here that shows that the reporting requirements differ by program. For some initiatives, they have interim and final reporting requirements versus some of these other ones require only final expenditure reports.

For federal funding, all of the reporting requirements are the same and that's that they have to submit quarterly expenditure reports. So in the table that I discussed earlier, that was just the three rounds of ESSER funding, as well as the federally funded portion of the Expanded Learning Opportunities Grant Program. The state also receives information from school districts every year that's unaudited expenditure data. That's just, as of the end of the school year, how much they've spent.

Onto page five here, we just highlight the state has some information on the expenditures release programs to date. However, most of the one time state programs either were recently enacted or do not have expenditure reports available yet. But for two state programs that were enacted in 21-22, recent spending data provides a snapshot at the end of the 2021-22 school year.

And this is for the Educator Effectiveness Program, $1.2 billion out of the $1.5 billion is unspent as of the 21-22 school year, and $622 million of the state funding portion of the Expanded Learning Opportunities Grant Program was unspent.

For federal funding we have more recent information and had a better sense of how much funding has been spent. The recent expenditure reports show that $11 billion dollars of the ESSER funding from the second and third rounds remain unspent.

This is about $1.4 billion that's available until September 2023, that's this year, and $9.5 billion that districts will have to spend until September of next year. Additionally, there's $1.2 billion of the federal portion of the Expanded Learning Opportunities Grant Program that remained unspent at the end of September 2022, and districts will have until September 2024 to spend.

Turning to the last page of the handout here, we just note that as the Legislature develops a 2023 budget, it may want to consider the one-time funding that remains available for schools. Although, some of these funds may be spent during the 22-23 school year, schools likely will have several billions of dollars in funding available for future years, specifically or particularly from the third round of ESSER funding and the two block grants that the state provided last year.

In conjunction with the 2023-24 funding, remaining one-time funds will be available to support many of the additional activities funded in recent years to better support students and address learning loss that occurred during the pandemic. That concludes the presentation. Happy to answer any questions at the appropriate time.

Thank you. Next CDE.

Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and Committee Members. Malia Vella, Deputy Superintendent on behalf of State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Thurmond. I'm joined today by my colleague, our federal policy liaison, Joe Saenz. I want to start my comments today by remarking on how deeply our students are currently being impacted by a myriad of natural disasters, which is actively disrupting their learning opportunities.

We have young people and their families, along with teachers and school staff currently in evacuation shelters and others without access in or out of their own neighborhoods. This adds another layer of complexity to addressing learning recovery and learning acceleration and is something that all of our LEAs and the CDE is keeping in mind. I do want to note as an aside that the CDE is currently working with CDPH on updating symptom guidance on protocols for keeping students at school or staying at home due to illness.

CDE's school nurse consultant expects this guidance to be released this spring, and we're hopeful that this guidance will help inform parents and students to address chronic absenteeism issues. The agenda provides a good understanding of the various programs that have been implemented since the start of the COVID pandemic, as well as the state and federal funds that our schools have received. California's local education agencies continue to spend funds in a strategic manner that promotes learning acceleration, re-engages our students, and supports student mental well-being.

The agenda includes a table detailing the most recent expenditure reporting period, which covers through the end of 2022, that provides a good snapshot of where we currently are for LEA expenditures. As noted, there's approximately 6.8 billion of COVID Education Relief Funding that has passed the grant deadline. That includes the Coronavirus Relief Fund, ESSER I, GEER I, and the Learning Loss Mitigation State Funds, over 99% was spent by our LEAs before the end of the grant period.

The majority of those funds that were unspent were attributed to closed charter schools. We also want to flag a few items that pertain to the concern raised by the LAO that about 55% of ESSER funding, collectively the largest funding source available to our LEAs, remains unspent. While this is true, it's important to highlight that the expenditure data that's being used for the basis does not reflect obligated funds, so actual funding commitments are even higher than reported.

And while there are funds left unspent, one should not conclude that our LEAs have not thoughtfully planned how they will use these funds over the life of the program, particularly for funds with a longer duration. In fact, all LEAs have plans for their ESSER III, which include a robust public stakeholder process as required by federal law.

Our LEAs are required to develop a plan for how they will use funds to address their students' academic, social, emotional, and mental health needs, as well as close the opportunity gap. LEAs have provided no indication that they will be unable to use the remaining funds by the end of the performance period, and the CDE sees no cause for concern there.

As for what LEAs are using this funding for, to this point, LEAs have spent their federal recovery funds on devices and connectivity, addressing the impact of lost instructional time, closing learning gaps, and addressing unfinished learning, as well as PPE and safety equipment. We have also seen LEAs spending on student mental health services and social emotional learning. For the ESSER III funds that the LEAs have to reserve specifically to address learning loss. The largest proportion of reported expenditures have been for other evidence-based interventions, summer learning or summer enrichment, mental health services and support and tutoring.

The CDE has analyzed expenditure data and trends that demonstrate that LEAs initially spent the recovery funds on responding to immediate health and safety needs as well as supporting the transition to distance learning. As time progressed, LEAs have been focusing more on students' ongoing, needs and responding to student academic, social, emotional, and mental health needs, in other words, investing in learning recovery and acceleration.

We see LEAs successfully braiding their various one-time funding sources to build longer term programs that respond to the entirety of the needs created by the pandemic, not just the immediate needs to protect health and safety and support distance learning, but to fully support not just learning recovery, but learning acceleration through proven strategies including tutoring, expanded learning settings, and mental health counseling services. This is critical because estimates suggest that students may need help long after the federal relief dollars expire.

As we know, LEAs have until September 2024 to make their final allocations of those federal dollars, and it is expected to take much longer for the groups most affected by the pandemic, including our low-income students and students of color. We know that learning recovery is going to take time. Our state math and English language arts scores, which are only one measurement, are still down from pre-pandemic levels as we heard earlier from Dr. Darling Hammond.

The scores were stronger than the 2021 scores, which is a hopeful sign of recovery. And our California science test scores are showing to be generally consistent with pre-pandemic levels. We do have a long way to go, and that is why these state investments in learning recovery are so critical and set us ahead of many other states.

We are the only state that has made these critical investments, and they're showing hopeful signs of return in terms of braiding these funds to help our students in the long term. In terms of our state investments, we also want to just talk briefly about the Learning Recovery Emergency Block Grant. Our LEAs continue to use these critical investments to plan through the 2027-2028 school year. CDE does recommend annual data reporting with quantifiable metrics to better understand the impact of that block grant and those dollars.

The first round of expenditure reporting for the block grant is not yet complete, but given that CDE has closely tracked the spending trends of LEAs since the start of the pandemic, we can use that data to provide insight into how LEAs will use their LRBG funds. Furthermore, we have spoken with LEAs about their planned uses of these funds. From this, we understand that the funds will be used to continue learning recovery and learning acceleration efforts that were started with early funding sources all are evidence-based and promoting the highest usage of those dollars.

We're encouraged by both the actual expenditures we've seen and the planned uses. We have also worked to support our LEAs with their planning efforts by creating a repository of learning acceleration and recovery resources, including successful LEA adoption programs, as well as hosting multiple webinars to support both properly and promptly utilizing these funds.

We'll continue to support and monitor these funds throughout their lifecycle, as well as for our federal program monitoring reviews that we conduct to ensure federal stimulus funds are being used for allowable purposes during the allowable grant period and for sharing best practices using funds and braiding funds because it's critical that we address the full effects of this pandemic. Thank you for the opportunity to speak on this important issue. We're happy to take any questions at the appropriate time.

Okay, thank you. I'll get right to the panel from the local districts. I think that's where I have majority of my questions today, just from a practical perspective. So we have the Salinas City Elementary School District. Welcome.

The Elk Grove School District representative couldn't make it because of illness, but we do have the L.A. Unified School District on Webex, I believe, yes, and we have Matt Navo for the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence (CCEE). So we'll have you go first, Mr. Navo.

Well, good evening. I've lost track, Board Member Chair McCarty. Thank you for having us. We'll be brief because I know Aldo traveled almost 4 hours to be with you, and I really want to give him an opportunity to do that. The CCE, we were asked to talk about who we are, why we're here, and what we do.

But I think what would be really of interest to you is the work that we're doing around learning recovery and the efforts we're making across the state, as we refer to it as learning acceleration. With that, I'll have my colleague Stacey Wedin, Assistant Director, share with you what we're doing. CCEE was created in 2013 to advise and assist districts in accomplishing their LCAP goals.

We were created under then Governor Brown and Board Chair Michael Kirst, practitioners for practitioners, in an effort to support their efforts with regards to the local control accountability plans and their goals that they've set forth. So under statute, we're designed to be very flexible and nimble. We also are designed to respond to the needs of those in the field, and in doing so, one of the other obligations we have is to respond to the needs of the Legislature.

And so in preparation for what was going to be significant hurdles with regards to learning recovery, the Legislature passed the $50 million Learning Acceleration System Grant that was designed to create a professional development infrastructure across the state for universal, targeted, and intensive supports that will help students and teachers around math, literacy and English language development. And so with that, I would like to turn it over to my colleague; she'll share a little bit more detail about that particular grant, and then we'll take any questions you have.

Thank you, Matt. Good afternoon, Chair Members. Stacey Wedin from the CCEE. I'm very happy to be here with you today to share some information about the ways that the CCEE is supporting learning recovery efforts across California through the Learning Acceleration System Grant.

With the $50 million in funding provided for this purpose, the CCEE is working with our selected County Office of Education Partners to build an education network that makes professional learning and evidence-based accelerated learning strategies across academic content areas, mathematics, literacy, and language development available to educators across the state. This is the first full year of implementation, so we're just getting started.

With grant funds available through the 25-26 school year, the Learning Acceleration System Grant funds three different projects that represent varied approaches to building capacity at all levels of the system through universal targeted, more intensive support. First, I'd like to highlight the California Collaborative for Learning Acceleration, or CCLA, which is led by the Santa Clara County Office of Education. CCLA brings together an impressive cohort of seven counties across the state to help leverage expertise and elevate a common definition of and consistent focus on learning acceleration.

CCLA has partnered with Stanford University, San Jose State University, and the California Partnership for Math and Science Education to design and develop the professional learning content. In this first year, they have made free online asynchronous courses available on their website, across the content areas and across grade spans, which highlight evidence-based, practical teaching strategies to move students forward in their learning. Teachers and administrators can access these courses at will, and complete them at their own pace, which offers some really necessary flexibility.

In future years, the CCLA will engage in deeper work with select number of schools in each region consisting of on site support and coaching for teachers and leaders to implement accelerated learning strategies in very concrete ways and also leverage some of the efforts already in place with the funding that's been provided thus far around learning recovery.

Next the Learning Acceleration System Grant funds Project Clear, which is led out of the San Diego County Office of Education in partnership with Merced and Lake County Office of Education, as well as St. Mary's College. Project Clear offers free postgraduate level coursework through the Comprehensive Literacy Center at St. Mary's College for educators to expand their expertise in reading intervention through either a one or two year training program. Tuition, training fees, books, materials, all paid for through the grant.

Training includes job-embedded professional learning, on-site practice in schools, and daily work with students. Currently, Project Clear has 35 teachers across 10 LEAs in training with plans to launch new training cohorts each year. So it is an investment on the part of the teacher, but they really do deepen their expertise.

Finally, the Learning Acceleration System Grant funds the Rural Math Collaborative, which is led out of Lake County Office of Education in partnership with Butte County Office of Education, as well as the California Math Project at Chico and Sonoma State. The Rural Math Collaborative is very specifically focused on serving the needs of our small, rural, remote schools and districts to improve mathematics instruction and accelerate student achievement. To date, Rural Math Collaborative has engaged 17 of our state's smallest counties as partners in this work.

The project has developed four pathways to accelerate learning and achieve the desired impact on student achievement. The first is through training and lesson study, which is an evidence-based approach used to improve teacher efficacy in a collaborative professional learning structure. Second is high-impact coaching. Third pathway is through asynchronous modules to provide training on concepts and strategies aligned to our California Mathematics Framework. Those are under development and when they're completed, they will be freely available to any educator across the state.

And then the fourth pathway is through mathematics intervention programs as well as high impact tutoring. Right now, we have 26 teachers across three districts in Lake and Butte County that are piloting an evidence-based, tier two mathematics intervention program. Based on the data collected as far as impact on student achievement, and feedback from the teachers implementing this program, the Rural Math Collaborative will then decide if further scaling of the program throughout the region is warranted.

So they're taking a very diverse approach to learning acceleration, which I think is very warranted and smart. So the CCEE, along with our partners, we're really excited about the potential positive impact of this work. We look forward to having more to share, including evaluation data that we've really been collecting from the beginning as this first implementation year ends. With that, we're happy to answer any questions you might have. And I'll turn it back to.

We'll try to move it along, so we want to hear now from our local representative from the Salinas Elementary School District. So, I know a lot going on in the central coast right now and flooding, and I think that Salinas is one of the spared areas so far, but I know there's a lot of rain there. So thank you for joining us today.

Thank you, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here, Committee Members. Once again, my name is Aldo Ramirez. I'm the Associate Superintendent of Educational Services for the Salinas City Elementary School District and also a PhD candidate for Claremont Graduate University, and I'll share a little bit about that as I engage with you proudly to share some of what the Salinas community is doing in terms of learning acceleration and chronic absenteeism. I'm going to share it in a form of a story.

I know we've been hearing a lot of narrative, a lot of expository information shared with you, and I'll just share it hopefully to add a little levity to this session. I'll start the story of Salinas City Elementary School District during the 2021-2022 school year. We were coming back from virtual learning expecting to have some normalcy, and very quickly, we found out that that was not the case. We were faced by staff shortages and very shortly after that, having to quarantine students and staff as well.

And so this completely disrupted what we normally do in Salinas City Elementary for our kids, because folks from central office were actually in the classroom, substituting, including myself, in special day classrooms and all kinds of classrooms constantly throughout that year. And as a consequence, we went from a 12% chronic absenteeism rate to a 36% chronic absenteeism rate that year.

And towards the end of that year, we were actually looking pretty hopeful and thinking that 22-23 was going to be a little bit different, and it is a little bit different. On slide on sheet three, you'll see our current trend in the yellow line, where we are doing better on chronic absenteeism than we were in 21-22, and we continue to work on that collaboratively in our district.

However, our rate is still well above the dashboard target of 5% for having a low chronic absenteeism rate, which is a rate that is actually much more healthy for education. And so, I actually think that the story on student achievement in California and the chronic absenteeism little bit of bounce back that we're getting right now, goes farther back about a decade. My research on my dissertation topic is the impact of resource adjustments on the educational outcomes of unduplicated students; that's what we call them in California.

And we have been investing in California in education for quite a while through LCAP and LCFF and then through some of the COVID supports that we were offered due to the pandemic. And some of this information was mentioned earlier. Here's a different snapshot for you. In terms of the NAEP assessment, which is a national assessment on student outcomes. Our black students in reading, when we look at national rankings in 2019, were in 41st place.

In 2022, they jumped up to 10th place out of similar students across the nation. That's 31 spots. So I attribute the resilience within the California system to the investment that we've been making in education for quite a while now. And I'm going to encourage you all to continue to invest in California's kids and their education. It will pay off. Now, I say that with the caveat that chronic absenteeism is absolutely hampering our ability to recover from the pandemic and accelerate learning.

On page five of the slides, you will see that Salinas City Elementary is working very hard to improve student outcomes. And this chart here shows that from the beginning of the year to trimester two, we were able to increase the number of the percentage of students reading at grade level by 15.6%. So that's huge, right? So we're going from around 20 to about 35 in two trimesters of instruction. That's a testament to the efforts of our students, our families, and our educators.

However, that's for students with good attendance. For students with chronic attendance, we were only able to increase that percentage by 11.1%. So we can see that chronic absenteeism is getting in the way of academic acceleration. The good news is that all students are accelerating. The bad news is that chronic absenteeism is getting in the. So what have we done?

What we've done in Salinas City Elementary School District is used all the funding sources that we've received, thankfully, from state and federal government to increase different things like counseling services, extended learning programs, health services, tutoring, so on and so forth. And it's creating a much better environment for our children. And I have a quote; we recently surveyed our families to see how they were responding to our expanded after school program, which went from about 600 kids to about 1600 kids this year thanks to these funds.

And this is what this parent said. This is one of my favorite quotes. I think it definitely applies to this: "So my child is very happy to be attending this program. When we signed up for this program, we were having a lot of trouble with his attendance. And when we signed up for the program, the rules were, as long as you go to school, you can go to the after school program. Now, he has only missed a couple of days since starting the program."

He is constantly making sure he goes to school so he can be able to go to the program. He is always smiling when I go pick him up from the program. And you can just tell that he is very happy with everything that's going on in this program. And so I think that's a live example of how these programs can have an impact on our students. In addition to that, our district has engaged in two very focused chronic absenteeism efforts.

First, on the right side of page seven, is a chart. We focus a lot on using positive outlier analysis to drive systems change. So at the beginning of the year, our administrators came together and using a research brief that was produced by CCEE, in full disclosure, I was part of the team that helped produce that.

We looked at what CCEE had found about effective strategies for chronic absenteeism, and then we allowed each of our 14 brick and mortar schools to design their own response to chronic absenteeism. The hope was that after a few cycles of improvement, we would begin to see certain schools having much better outcomes, and then we would study those and replicate them in the other schools. And lo and behold, and luckily, by October, that had exactly happened.

If you look at the graph, you'll see that DIAS school made tremendous gains in chronic absenteeism. Still very high, but a lot of gains. And so, in December, we all came back together. We explored what they had done, a lot of it was about building relationships with the kids, so having an adult who could check in and check out with students that maybe were disconnected from the educational environment.

And so, in January and February, after exploring that, our administrator teams then adjusted the plans at the other schools to include some of the strategies that DIAS used. And you can see there's three little arrows pointing to some of the early adopters from those schools. And right away, their chronic absenteeism began to improve, which is really great to see. We hope to continue with this as the year continues. In addition to that, we are participating.

We actually helped start a research practice partnership with CCEE and the Monterey County Office of Education, along with three other LEAs within our county, and it's all focused on chronic absenteeism. And we hope that through this work, we can find additional strategies and ways to help our students feel more comfortable coming to school or overcome any barriers that they might have coming to school on a regular basis. So, some progress, some exciting things are happening, yet it's taking a little while.

It's not as fast as we would like it to be. And there's a couple of things that we have noticed that are critical, and I think are important that we call out. And first of all, in Salinas's community, and yes, there's COVID-19, there was fires before that, there's been flooding this year; there has been a lot going on. And in general, we've noticed that there's anxiety within our entire population.

And going back into the data from my dissertation, I know that the US Census Bureau produces a Household Pulse Survey, and they do this every two weeks. And in the week 54, which was the first two weeks of February, they asked the adults in the United States how often they feel anxiety during that time period. So for those two weeks, 27% of adults indicated that they feel anxiety 50% or more of the time. That's huge.

When we look at the data a little bit further, 18 to 29 year olds reported feeling anxiety 50% or more of the time at a 41% rate, and 30 to 39 year olds reported it at a 33% rate. This age group is the age group that interacts with our children the most. They're the educators, and they're the parents, and there is a huge sense of anxiety out there. And so I'm going to echo a lot of what Hetty said earlier in an earlier panel.

This is bigger than education, and it needs to be a multidisciplinary approach in conjunction with education that helps us to support our community and our families. In addition to that, our students didn't build connections during virtual learning, and they're still catching up with that. And I'm going to echo what the Chair mentioned earlier about data and the data systems right now.

It is very cumbersome for schools to be able to organize the current data system in a way that allows us to make decisions, and that is real-time. And so that's a huge factor. Lastly, from very robust research, we know that funding adjustments take a while to show up in the data.

I produced a couple of slides from Jackson and colleagues who did a study in 2016 on what happens with court mandated funding adjustments, and they used a regression discontinuity structure, which is the gold standard for this type of research. And they studied the past 60 years of these types of court mandated funding augmentations for students, and they find that for low income students, it has definitely a positive impact. More resources help with their educational outcomes, not so much for non-poor households.

What's important here is that these positive outcomes don't start showing up until about eight years after the mandate. So it takes a while for the benefits to accrue and for us to be able to see whether or not this is effective. I think there's two important things to take away from this piece, and that is we need to sustain the funding levels that we have given to schools in order for this to work over time, that's critical.

Secondly, if anybody comes to you and says that they can tell you whether a policy change has had an impact within five years of that policy change, you need to question that, because it takes a while. And there's a lot of reasons, including the fact that we have to hire folks and that takes some time. The fact that we have to train them and high quality training takes some time.

The fact that once they're trained, they have to get good at mastering what we train them on, and that takes some time. And then lastly, that a lot of the interventions are cumulative and they add over time. And so that takes a while. So be wary of folks that try to tell you whether or not something is working right away. That's not how reality works at the ground level.

So we have some recommendations, some of which you probably have heard already: continue giving us funding in a way that is over a long time frame so that we can organize it and have continuity with the implementation; support districts right now in figuring out how to continue to braid the different funding sources to create one cohesive experience for our children; expand our technical support partnerships that focus on collaborative, continuous improvement and positive outlier analysis, such as the one we're participating in; increase the efforts to transform our data systems so that they're more robust and allow us to make decisions on the ground.

And lastly, that multi-agency approach to try to figure out how we can help with this high-level of anxiety within our communities is going to go a long way. So part of looking at that might be the amount of counseling resources that we have at the school sites. And I love the community schools model. I would love to do it in Salinas, but we're using our facilities at 100%.

So we need to couple that effort with our facilities efforts so we can provide the facilities to be able to do some of this stuff in our districts. We are blessed, our schools are full of children, but that means we don't have space to do other things right now. So we need to add spaces to our schools. So, thank you.

Thank you. I want to ask you a series of questions about the buckets of money and what you have done with it. So hold on, so just kind of get ready to walk us through as kind of a case study. You'll be one of a thousand districts kind of giving your perspective here. But first, we went too long, so we lost our Superintendent, L.A. Unified, but we have the Deputy Superintendent who's going to join us.

So the Superintendent is trying to keep that school district going without, I guess, going on strike down there. So important work down there. But we have Mr. Pedro Salcido, who's joining us on Webex. Familiar face and voice to us up here in Sacramento. So just start talking, Pedro, and then your face will show up.

Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Chairman McCarthy and Members of the Committee. First off, I just want to kind of set the foundation for where L.A. Unified has come from.

Pedro Salcido, Deputy Superintendent of Business, Services and Operations: With the one-time resources that we received from the state, which is about $629 million, and another $4.9 billion that we received federally, we've been able to braid dollars to really kind of establish a foundation of investments that kind of address the academic, social-emotional, as well as just general well-being of students and families in our community.

But it starts from a place where as a district, we have seen significant declining enrollment in the previous years, especially exacerbated during the pandemic. Fortunately, what we had anticipated to be a 4.9 decline in enrollment ended up being about 1.9%. One of the key things that we started— [Technical Interruption] —the missing from our roles in the 22-23 year, and that concentration at interventions to make sure that we were going out identifying the needs of our students.

Half of our students last year: chronically absent. That means they missed 15 days or more, not your general 10 days or more that would generally identify a chronically absent student. But most of our students 50% missed 15 days or more. The combination of quarantine and as a result of the COVID pandemic, but also other impacts that we saw in our community. So we knew that we had to make investments early on to kind of address that particular impact.

So as we led the way with a $600 million investment in standing up a testing and vaccination program for our students and families, ensuring that our employees, students and families were given the foundation of safety and protection that was needed to at least provide reassurance for students to come back to school. When you look at our holistic approach to academic, ELA and math support, social emotional wellness, and just general safety investments in our schools, we have focused $1.9 billion. That is our target investments to our most fragile, highest-need schools unified. We have the Student Equity Need Index, which kind of ranks the need of our.

It will take time. And so we know that these investments that are one time in nature are very much adding fuel to a more projected strategy that we need to have in place as a district. The early intervention that we're doing and literacy is around prime promise.

These are interventionist, highly trained teachers that we have provided professional development on, ensuring that they're implementing research-based practices that focus on pairing a teacher with an aid and providing that concentrated time around targeted students that we know are well below basic and what we measure around dibbles and getting them to a level of recovery that we know will set a strong foundation in the early grades. These are K3 students. Much of the focus has been in first grade.

We have expanded that strategy, are currently expanding it to middle schools focused on math. One of the other areas that we are investing in is around we know from a special education students, our students with disabilities, that there needs to be also additional recovery compensatory time recovered for students.

That recruitment time has required us to actually bring on additional staff to make sure that not only do we meet our kind of compliance requirements that were impacted as a result of COVID but also ensuring that students get back in track. That was a commitment that was in a student's IEP. We also have our BSAT schools. I think I mentioned their black student achievement program, targeted investment of 180 schools tiered out with a concentration of focus on culturally relevant intervention and support for our black students.

This is something that our Superintendent, our board is very focused on and making sure that when you talk about the detrimental impact of the pandemic layered on already preexisting learning and academic gaps, that this is an area of focus that we are doubling down on as a district. One of the areas that we continue to struggle with, and I think you see it statewide, is around attendance.

We launched the I Attend Campaign which focuses on monthly all-hands-on-deck intervention and support, folks hitting the streets, knocking on doors, phone banking. A focus on targeted student populations where the data is telling us that our homeless students, our foster youth students, students that we know, may have this overlapping economic need of work part-time and come to school that were doing the necessary intervention to make sure that they're getting reconnected with their school community.

And so just recently, we found a significant gap in students that were coming into the community getting placed in shelters as a result of placement, either from USCIS or other implications that resulted in them being in shelters, that they weren't getting the academic needs and nor participating in the day to day instruction in our schools.

So we actually went out and focused on making sure that we were connecting with our shelters and giving them the resources to make sure families were getting students enrolled, as well as meeting all the immunization requirements. So we sent out teams out there to make sure students were immunized so they met all the minimum requirements for enrollment at our schools.

One of the areas that also has been highlighted by our community, has been referenced by previous panelists, is just the trauma and the social emotional needs of our community. We hired this year, over the last two years, 360 psychiatric social workers, family navigators to help families connect with the necessary resources that not only meet the academic needs of students, but it's the whole child support.

We know families are struggling still with housing insecurity, the impacts of loss of family members, and just the general fear that has, I would say, just enveloped some of our communities that have been highly impacted by the pandemic. And so part of the recovery is making sure that we actually set that foundation and set up the strong foundation that families need in order to really kind of bloom and allow folks to actually come back to school.

The other area that we have focused on is around workforce development and workforce investments that focus on professional development, that really arms with our educators, with the resources and the skills that they need today to really help our students navigate today's expected learning acceleration, but also having this support students in the classroom, knowing that they're actually facing some of these other conditions from the community. Lastly, one of the things that is very apparent from the pandemic is that various inequities were highlighted.

Whether we're talking about food insecurity, technological and device needs in the home, whether we're talking about just the mental health and social-emotional. As of today, 100,000 families that have been able to get connected to the internet, either through the deployment of LTE-enabled devices. Those are devices, a Chromebook that has the ability to connect to the internet through a service provider, whether it's Verizon, AT&T, et cetera.

But we have also 8000 plus that are now today getting free services, broadband services, through our partnership, making sure that we address the digital divide. This has all come about through these one time resources. I think what we're now seeing in our community is making sure how do we sustain this, how do we continue to make these investments, and we're really laying the foundation to continue to support that. So thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity to share the great work that's happening in LA Unified.

Okay, thank you, Pedro. And if you can kind of get ready too, I want to just maybe if you can walk us through as two examples of a smaller district. What's the population of Salinas Unified?

8,600 students, preschool to 6th grade.

So 600,000, 8,000. Very different, but still large chunks of one-time money. I just kind of want to see if we can paint a picture of where we are utilizing your learning loss recovery block grant dollars and kind of aggregate all of them together. So why don't you go first, Superintendent?

Yes. So we have ramped up counseling services, ensuring first that every one of our schools has a counselor. And then building on top of that equity, some of our schools are much larger with much bigger unduplicated students. So providing funds to supplement the counseling resources that are there. We've expanded our extended learning programs, tripled in size our after-school program. We've quadrupled the scope of our summer school program, going from 4 hours to 9 hours and from around 1000 children to 2000 children last summer.

We're hoping to go up to 4000 children this coming summer. We've increased our health services at the sites significantly. A huge tutoring program. We've provided tutoring to thousands of our students after school in reading and mathematics for the last couple of years. We've been able to bring in arts education during the school day to help teachers have time to collaborate in grade level teams. So we've made that happen. We've provided funds to school sites to create learning centers to support reading progress at the site.

We've also invested heavily in supporting our students with IEPs and having more behavior technicians and behavior experts come in and help us organize, especially our classrooms with autism. We're exploding with children who are diagnosed with autism and so helping them create high quality environments. We're still in the process of continuing to improve those classrooms.

We've done a massive staff development and support effort for the first time in a very long time, if not ever, we've been able to differentiate staff development for our different educator-teacher groups, for our paraeducators, and we're now even starting to provide staff development to folks that work in the cafeterias or custodians. They're all part of the MTSS process.

And so we've done those pieces along with really working on our technology and making sure that our children have the most current and the best access to technology.

So if you could, with all due respect, we hear those menus from lots of districts. I was just curious if you could kind of tell me maybe like 20% for counseling, technology. Just kind of like paint me a picture and I won't hold you to it, I promise you. And no one's watching online.

Yeah, I don't have that off of my head. I would say it's a little bit of all of it.

Well, that's somewhat the problem is, and you're one of a thousand, we're 30 billion, only have a kid one time. And so if we're doing everything, how do we know how much we're doing and what's being successful? Right?

Correct. That's where the recommendation of making sure that our data systems are robust enough for us to be able to understand, because we're not doing everything everywhere, we're doing more things in some places than others. And that provides an opportunity for us to be able to look and see what is having more of an impact in different places. To get to the answer that I think you're seeking, I think you want to know what works best for our different student groups.

Where's the majority of the money going so far? In two years? Since you started getting the resources out to the 21 budget in your district of 8000 kids, is it for hiring people? Was it things like buying products and technology? Or is it sitting there in one time waiting to do stuff with it?

So the vast majority of it is sitting there in one time because we're being very strategic and spreading it out. So I said earlier that we need sustained efforts and so we are definitely utilizing the span of when the funds can be used. So if it's seven years, then we're looking at, okay, so whatever effort we want to start, we want to be able to continue it for the seven years. And so we've strategically aligned and planned for the effort to spend that time frame.

And second to that, I would say that we're spending it on staff resources for services for children. So, for example, in order to be able to expand summer school options, we're in education. That's a people-intensive field.

That is smart. You can use this over six years. So we're saving some of that over the multi years. So the money that you've allocated so far in just your district, do you think more of it was spent on one time for things like devices and hotspots and Internet stuff, or on people and programs?

It's shifted over time. So at the beginning, a lot of it was spent on devices and hotspots and one to one upgrading our infrastructure. So it didn't crash when a lot of devices came on because of the nature of the pandemic. And now it's actually going more towards the services and the personnel and the staff. So if I had to give a percentage, I would say 30% has been spent on stuff, 30% is being spent on people. And then there's 30% that will continue to be spent on people and services over time.

And with the people. We had a joint education hearing similar to this topic three weeks ago. And then for our other kick, 12 hearings so far on all these issues, it comes down to not finding people.

Yeah.

So how are you dealing? I'm not sure what the economic unemployment rates are in the central coast and Salinas if you're having much of a difficult time finding people in other places of California. So how's that working out?

We are in a very tight labor market. Last year was incredibly difficult. We were not able to fill all the positions that we were looking for. This year is a little bit better. We're getting closer and closer to having all the positions that we desire.

And these are limited term, like one time positions.

One-time positions do not get filled in this labor environment. And that's part of the reason why we're spreading it out. So we're hiring folks and we're trying to keep them for an extended period of time. Multi-years. Yeah. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to hire.

I know you said counseling is one, but is it like instructional aides, tutors? What type of people are you hiring?

So counselors, psychologists, behavior specialists, tutors, paraeducators for the summer school programs we're hiring, I guess they're kind of like paraeducators as well. So, folks that have meet a minimum requirement to be able to work with kids based on ESSA, we've also hired folks to continue to help maintain our facilities at a high level for our children. We've partnered with private sector organizations who also bring in services, especially for the after-school and summer program, different experiences.

And they hire folks as well to be able to do things like coding and NASA and NASA academies, art academies and such. Does that answer?

Yeah, it does. Thank you. I know it's hard for you to be the voice for 1000 school districts because we purposely did not want to have this with one size fits all. So maybe back to you, Pedro. In the largest school district in California, nearly 600,000 students. If you could, briefly, if you could. I'm sure you heard that kind of put the money in the buckets of where you said north of 5 billion has been allocated or tentatively set aside to be allocated.

At the end of the day, 80% plus of the dollars are going to be spent on people. Right? And on our workforce that are necessary to serve our students. And so it's going to come in different forms. It's going to be, I think as Mr. Ramirez talked about, Superintendent Ramirez talked about focused on summer learning, whether it's enrichment opportunities with outside contracted partners. We also have support staff that support throughout the summer to do extended learning throughout that time for our acceleration days.

That is primarily people led, but this is actually leveraging the asset and the resource of teachers, educators in our schools to volunteer their time to support those four acceleration days throughout the year. One of the areas that we have invested heavily in is around tutoring. Whether it's high dosage tutoring one on one, or whether it's virtual with a number of partners, and then the other one is around kind of the interventionist model where we did identify individuals who were excelling in the classroom as literacy teachers.

We have pulled them out to support multiple teachers to really kind of hone in on their skill set, on that literacy recovery that students need to really kind of focus on. We're digging ourselves out of an impact of nearly 20 years, a regression of 20 years for academic learning for students. And so we know we need individuals to individualize their time with students.

And one of the best investments right now is kind of that, I would say five to six year investment in people to connect with students in that space, whether it's a psychiatric social worker, a pupil services attendance counselor, a family navigator. On that social emotional side, psychologist is one that was referenced. But when you look at the breakdown of dollars, I would say about 80% is going into people services positions.

What we're trying to do is manage a growth in investments while also being able to sustain it with general fund in the out year, and do it in a strategic way where you spread out the one-time nature of these dollars so that we have a good landing in the year five or six that is sustainable by our general fund. I think that one of the areas that was highlighted and I was going to bring up as well is we have very ambitious plans.

We have the dollars committed and planned out. We are struggling with folks actually showing up to fill those positions. I'd mentioned that we hired 360 psychiatric social workers in our budget. We actually budgeted 900 psychiatric social workers, and we barely just hit the 360 mark over two years. And so our goal has been to get there, but there just isn't enough psychiatric social workers actually graduating with the credentials and being able to put into the pipeline.

Well, unfortunately, Superintendent Ramirez and I are probably competing for some of the same workforce to come to our school districts to serve our students. So I would say that that's probably the biggest challenge that we see is that I think we all know what we need to do. It's, do we have the people and the services to actually deliver on that promise and that planning? Because even when we've contracted outside, there's capacity issues there as well.

Whether it's with tutoring companies, with folks who want to provide social emotional work, they also are struggling with the same type of workforce recruitment.

So back to the people, like we heard from our Superintendent from Salinas, they're not temporary positions. I assume you're trying to hire people for longer term. But then you said, are there, like some groups or contractors that you hired as well? And how did you piece that together? And granted, the scale is so big.

Yeah. So what we do is we concentrate personnel at targeted sites, and we then pair that with contractors and service providers in particular areas that they serve. So it's just mapping of resource and assets to student need. At the end of the day, there's service gaps in particular areas of the district that when you talk about 710 square miles and where particular services are nested, many of our nonprofits, many of our service providers tend to be in the central hub of the city.

What we end up doing is then hiring personnel to help meet the needs of some of the regions that just don't have the same community assets.

For both of you, do you think that the resources over the two budgets and the federal money is adequate to meet your needs? I mean, it's almost a blank check, but what other pieces are there to help you be successful in focusing what we want to do, which is get students up to speed and address whatever loss we've seen during the pandemic.

I think there's going to naturally be a need for an extended runway. I think some of these dollars are endings have to be expended by a particular day. And when you're talking about a shortage in personnel and being able to fulfill the expenditure of particular strategies and plans. We need to start talking about how do we extend whether it's ESSER dollars, federal dollars that have a time certain, as well as some of the state dollars.

But I think at the end of the day, there's great need and we have to think thoughtfully about how do we sustain some of the current investments that were one time in nature that were meant to deal with the immediate learning recovery of needs when that learning recovery is going to have a much longer runway.

Go ahead, sir.

I completely agree that for the short term, given the staffing constraints, I think we have enough resources. Long term, as was mentioned, we're actually trying to make up something that's been in the process for a few decades in the state. So the efforts need to be sustained. If we had the staffing resources, we could provide probably a lot more high dosage tutoring and more individualized programs to students that would make things go a lot faster.

But now we're talking about huge amounts of resources and the fact that we don't actually have the staff and the workforce to be able to do that.

And have you found, like they said there, sometimes it's easier to find existing community nonprofit partners and have them and hire them to do it because they can bring their own people or staff at different levels of staffing without the hurdles that you face?

That is actually what we're trying to do. Many of them are facing the same challenges we are in trying to find the staff. You're looking for the same expand. We're all looking for the same people in a certain sense. I think people are out there. They're probably doing something else, and we need to find them and then train them to be able to help with the educational process? Yeah.

Maybe CDE or LAO. Do you have a perspective from the overview that you kind of gave us, especially the state money, how much of that has been allocated or spent versus is held back throughout the districts?

Edgar Cabral with the LAO I don't think we have any particular concerns. I think, just to clarify, because I know the Department mentioned the numbers that we had in the handout, I think we don't have any particular concerns. Our intent in providing that information to you is for you to have a sense as you're building this budget, knowing that there is funding that districts have that they will be using over the next several years to provide programs.

So if all you can afford is cost of living, for example, in this budget, it doesn't mean that that's all that's available. There are other resources if you look at the information, for example, on the pieces where we do have. Educator effectiveness is a good example. They have five years to spend, and they've essentially spent one year worth of funding. So they're essentially on track. We think that makes a lot of sense.

I think in our conversations with districts, we've heard many similar things that they've mentioned today, that there is challenge. And if most of this requires people, and you can't just hire people short term, or you're not going to be able to find them, and you want to be able to provide the support over multiple years to have an effect. So what districts are doing makes a lot of sense to us.

I think the big question is helping them with that issue of what happens at that end of that period when the funding runs out. How can we ensure that you do have some stability in that and that you don't just have districts essentially falling off of a cliff?

Is there a way to track so we can see throughout 1,000 districts and roughly where we're at?

I think the federal funding, and I think the federal funding requires quarterly expenditure. So you can see that a little bit more. The state spending, I believe, is not at that level of granularity. So I don't think we can kind of automatically do that based on the current requirements.

Mr. Chairman, I would say that there's a couple of things that are worth noting, at least on the federal dollars. We are seeing more capital expenditure plans come in. We do have to review those. So we are seeing some of those big ticket item requests coming in to be reviewed and then on the obligation period.

I think sometimes we are seeing folks kind of budget and get things on track and obligate and start to obligate, but we'll see what happens with some of these capital expenditure and facilities proposals that are coming through.

Okay, any more perspective from the panel here on this? Ok, open-ended question?

Open ended question. I think we definitely need to allow districts to strategically organize these funds over the next few years so that we don't end up just buying a lot of stuff and storing it somewhere. Right? We actually want to do something that's going to make a significant difference for our students. And I did mention earlier, and thank you for bringing it up again, that some of this is not just limited to people, but also our facilities.

And our facilities in California, I'll speak for Selena City Elementary. They're quite dated, and they've needed a lot of improvement and repair over time. And so if there's an area where I think there is an opportunity to do to have a real positive impact on our school system, it would be to continue to build our facilities out so that they are 21st century ready and so that we can bring additional resources to our community.

Maybe a new school bond with some modernization money, right?

Yeah, we just passed two in Salinas.

Okay. Any further statement from you, Mr. Salcido?

No. I just appreciate also the connection to some of our capital needs. At LA Unified, we've made some significant investments with our kind of local and matching state bond money, but those generally deal with modernization and either building new facilities or modernization. We have ongoing capital needs that generally tap our general fund, and that's paint, just general repairs that, even with our current RGM requirements, just doesn't meet the needs.

We're trying to find local solutions, but to the extent that there's opportunities, we are leveraging some of these dollars to support some of the HVAC replacements and things like that that have been impacted as a result of running air filtration systems that put greater onus on our HVAC systems. There is an opportunity to have a conversation that would invest in schools in a very different way from a facilities perspective, that isn't just about modernization and new facilities.

There are just basic needs that schools have that unfortunately, our general fund dollars and our existing dollars aren't sufficient to meet on a day-to-day basis.

Okay. Thank you. And thank you all for helping today understand this issue. And as I said from the outset, there's no silver bullet solution here. And we need to stay at it because there are no do overs with our kids throughout California. So this gives us food for thought going forward. Thank you.

Thank you.

And then with that, we do have public comment. If anybody is here in the audience who wishes to address the Committee, please come up to the middle microphone. Thank you. All right. Seeing none, we will adjourn. Thank you.