Assembly Budget Subcommittee No. 3 on Education Finance

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to our Budget Education Subcommitee. Appreciate everybody joining us today. And today's hearing is going to be on learning recovery and the related January budget proposals. Certainly, the pandemic had some major impacts on California school children. The rates of chronic absenteeism being one of the main things that we all observed as a result of. And those levels remain double prior to the pandemic. In terms of absenteeism. Now, we've been on four years since the initial, since the pandemic began.

The impact of absenteeism is growing, and that is also meaning that our achievement gaps can continue to grow. And that's very concerning. There's been major state investments in recent years tied to research on student re engagement, and we'll continue to provide oversight on the ongoing impact and the effectiveness of all the programs that have been put forward. Today we'll begin as an informational hearing so that Doctor Linda darling Hammond, our state board President, can address the Committee via Webex.

Then we will adjourn after her testimony and reconvene as a regular meeting. So with that, I'll ask Doctor Linda Hammond if she can hear me to let us know, and then we can begin. Are you there?

I can hear you.

All right. Go ahead, please. Thank you. Thank you for joining us.

And hopefully you can see me. I bad wi fi where I am. So I'm on the phone and in video, and hopefully everything will hold up while we're talking. And thank you so much. Chair Alvarez and Members of the budget Subcommitee on Education Finance, I am President of the State Board of Education and of the Learning Policy Institute, which is an organization dedicated to conducting research on behalf of education policy. We have an enormous set of challenges, as you noted, to confront.

As California schools, students, and families are recovering from the pandemic, we have more of them in poverty and experiencing homelessness than ever before. In just the last year, the proportion of our students living in poverty increased from 60% to 63%. We have in California more children in poverty and English learners than 45 other states. And obviously, we have to think about what our children need as well as what we can learn about what investments are paying off.

As a researcher, I do feel it's important to make decisions based on data and evidence. And in my written testimony, you can see a lot of the studies that I'm referencing. As we think about what is worth continuing, we can glean some evidence from our recently enacted programs. Although there's a lag time by the time that the Legislature acts and the Department of Education gets funding out the door, and then districts create their programs and then the data comes in. There's quite a lag.

And so we have to rely both on what we can glean from our own work in the last couple of years, as well as what we know nationally about what matters and what works. Recognizing that this is a year of belt tightening, I do think it's important for us to try to stay the course on investments that we have reason to believe are going to be essential and will pay off now and in the years to come.

We have had a history in California of starting wonderful programs that have been very successfully adopted in other states and then ending them when we get a budget. And that has not been successful in the past. For us, by 2010, we had the lowest achievements. We were in the bottom five states in the country on achievements, on spending, on personnel, and we've made strong strides since that time. And we want to maintain the strides that we have made.

We're going to focus on three quick areas, overall funding strategies, funding for learning recovery and student well being, and then funding to support the educator workforce. As you know, the Local Control Funding Formula was begun in 2013, which really overhauled the way we Fund schools with much more attention to student needs. We've added transitional kindergarten in the last few years as well, and we're scaling that up.

We do have two major studies released this year showing that these investments have supported significant gains in achievement and attainment for the students whose districts receive concentration grants, and the largest gains have been for low income students. We also have evidence from those two studies and another one, that transitional kindergarten is making a difference in students readiness for kindergarten. So clearly we want to stay the course on that a set of investments.

I think this is the reason why California was one of the states that had the nation's largest gains in reading on the national assessment of educational progress between 2011 and 2022. And we did not fall back in reading on the national assessments the way other states did. We maintained our progress. We even saw some of the largest gains in the country in Los Angeles and sustained high performance in San Diego. We've gone from 48th in the nation in 8th grade reading to the national average.

We've had some gains in math, too, but slower, still significant. Our graduation rate has increased dramatically. So we need to continue some of what we've started there as we proceed to address all of the learning needs that have occurred during the pandemic. Community schools are a very important part of that investment, and they include in California, extended learning time in after school and summer school.

And we're finding that as the first grants went out in 2022, that more than 80% of schools have included more health services and mental health services and screenings, tutoring, multi tiered systems of support. 76% have added nutritional services. We've got a lot of reports, both from districts that are tracking and from individual school performance, that chronic absenteeism is decreasing in many community schools, and they have been weathering that process more substantially than schools that don't have these support. And we do have.

We will have 2000 such schools in the state after the next board meeting when we approve the currently proposed school. We also know that they all are committed to engaging in afterschool and summer school programs, which the expanded Learning Opportunities program, which is the first in the nation of its kind, is supporting for all Low income elementary school students across the state. The program is based on research about effective programs.

There's a large body of research over many years that has shown the power of well designed summer schools for eliminating the summer learning loss that widens the achievement gap between more and less affluent students who have very different experiences in the summer. One Johns Hopkins study showed that about a third of the differential between affluent and Low income 9th graders could be accounted for by the differences in learning opportunities in the summer, and that those can be substantially closed with summer school.

A Rand Corporation study, including some California districts, reinforced that. We need a broader study in California, but we have evidence from some individual districts that those investments are really paying off when they're well designed. And I think that's a question for us around how we support implementation. Thanks to the Legislature over the last few years, literacy investments have been substantial. The biggest one of those is the literacy coaches and reading specialists program, which will be in 800 schools. It's just beginning.

The first round of literacy coaches was getting training this year. They are modeled after a successful initiative in California, our early literacy block grant, which enacted in 2020 to 21. It funded the 75 schools with the highest percentage of students in grade three that were scoring at the lowest achievement level on the state test.

Among the things that those schools were doing was using the resources for literacy instruction, coaches, reading specialists, and they were getting training from the same place, the Sacramento County Office of Education that our current literacy coaches are getting training from. And we found in a Stanford University study that third graders in these schools did increase achievement on the ELA test by about 25% of a grade level, which did not occur in schools serving similar students without these supports.

So we have reason to believe that we're going to be gains from this program that's modeled after what we have already invested in. Attendance is huge. As you said, the need for kids to be in school in order to learn is huge. We have chronic absenteeism. There's 33 elements of chronic absenteeism. One is students who are disconnected from school or for various reasons, can't get to school.

That can happen with students who are experiencing homelessness, and they are, you know, couch hopping, foster care, students with changes in placements, many students who have a variety of situations at home. We also have medically fragile students. So there's that piece of it. There's also climate events that are increasing in number. By one estimate, we had at least 1300 weather events last year that caused lost school time for students. Sometimes this is when schools close entirely from flooding or fires or hurricanes.

Now, we have in California and other things, but sometimes the roads are flooded or otherwise impassable and kids can't get to school. And so that's another source of absenteeism that we want to address and ensure that that does not impede kids from getting an education. And then there are ongoing illnesses, and we still have had some surges of COVID, RSB and other illnesses.

So one of the things that we proposed in the Governor's Budget is the instructional continuity and attendance recovery proposal, which is built on what a number of districts have told us really is something they're trying to do and matters to getting kids continuous instruction, both being able to be online and beaming in when they can't get to school physically, but not losing ground in the process, as we learned how to do during the pandemic, and getting kids back to school in Saturday school and other contexts after school, summer school, using our time in ways that keep kids learning.

One of the things that happens if you can keep kids reconnecting in varieties of ways, is that they don't lose motivation and confidence, which then causes them to disconnect even more. Some of that was patterned after what we did in the continuity construction plans, what Superintendent Alberto Carvalho did in Miami Dade when he was there, when hurricanes began to bring flooding to that district frequently. I know he's considering some similar continuous learning strategies in Los Angeles as our other Superintendent.

So we want to support those efforts to get kids always educated when they can be in the seat and when they can be connecting to class in other ways as well. Finally, the Golden State pathways program. I include in this category of learning recovery because we have a lot of disconnect of students in high school, but we have the experience in the prior career pathways trust programs, which started many linked learning pathways of very substantial gains.

Those were studied by a number of researchers in California, and we find that students who have experiential learning connected to careers and meaningful opportunities with dual credit options that give them the choices of college and career, that have the supportive environment that those programs create in a small academy with teacher engagement advisory systems and so on, do learn at higher rates.

They're less likely to drop out, more likely to graduate, learn more credits, more likely to go to college, and the effects are the largest for the students with the greatest needs. Some of the schools that have been succeeding the most during the pandemic have been those link learning academies and the community schools. And I've given some examples in my written testimony. And the final point I want to make is about our work.

You know that we have very substantial shortages that we've been battling for many years. The need for well qualified and experienced teachers is very strong. There are many studies that show that district level achievement and school level achievement is impacted negatively by having a revolving door of teachers on substandard credentials. It's a big equity issue because that happens most likely in the schools that serve more students of color, more students who are low income.

And we have been reducing the shortages through the Legislature's investments in Golden State Scholarships that underwrite preparation for teaching, teacher residency programs that provide high quality training, and our national board certified teacher incentives for accomplished teachers, experienced teachers who go to and stay in priority schools and help other teachers there be mentored into a successful practice.

So the Golden State program, the grants program has made a big difference both in bringing people into the profession and keeping them there because they have to stay for four years in priority schools to essentially pay off the service commitment. It has been diversifying the teacher workforce because it enables many young people who do not have as much personal resource to come into teaching. We've awarded 19,000 scholarships. It's been described as a game changer by candidates and programs that recruit them.

It's been so successful in reaching candidates that in fact, it is slated to run out of money this year. And we need to be sure that we have a plan both to make sure that it can continue through this year. That may include some changes to the requirements that candidates have to meet to the size of the grant, perhaps, but also that we can renew it in the year to come.

Residencies are another innovation which bring districts together with preparation programs to create a full year clinical practice like a residency in medicine with support financial support, mentoring support. And we have some studies now showing that about 10% of our teachers are coming in through residencies. They are much more diverse as a pool. More than 60% of residents are teachers of color. They still high need positions, special education, stem, bilingual education. They rate their preparation programs as more effective than graduates of any other pathway.

Their employers rate them more highly, they receive more clinical support. They pass the teacher performance assessment at higher rates, they stay in teaching at higher rates than those in other teacher education pathways. And both school leaders and candidates really see the value of this way of building a stable, well prepared, diverse teacher workforce that will stay in the profession, which then will reduce shortages.

Because nine out of 10 positions each year are the results of vacancies, each year are the result of people who left the year before. So if we can have these high retention approaches, we will reduce our need for new teachers because people will be well prepared and staying. Finally, we do have a very innovative program in this national board certification incentives. And we've launched a very successful program to provide incentives for teachers to become board certified.

There's a body of research showing that board certified teachers are more effective not only themselves, but they enhance the effectiveness of the teachers in their school. And they are more effective as mentors and their mentees become more effective in raising student achievement as well. We have through this program, managed to get 743 teachers in the last three years, more each year, most of them in priority schools.

And this keeping people in the profession because they receive the incentive spread out over multiple years, it is making them more effective. It is helping their schools build a stable, high quality workforce. And that is one of the places where if we can create in these priority schools the kind of teaching that the students there need, we will see the payoff. And we are seeing the payoff beginning to occur. I want to thank you for inviting me to be here today. Talk about some of the things that I think are important for us to focus on. And I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you very much, Doctor Hammond. Appreciate your testimony. I understand you are able to stick around for at least for the hour. And we will be taking panel number one, which is on learning recovery and attendance recovery, which is very related to your testimony. I'm hoping that this panel can get through in the next about 20 minutes, 25 minutes. Get this so that we can have an opportunity to ask Doctor Hammond some questions in context of the panel.

So if for some reason we're running close to the hour, Doctor Hammond, I might pause the panel. I know I have some questions definitely for you and I am interested in your response and testimony in that. So we will, we will cut to you if we have to, but otherwise we're going to begin with issue number one, our panel on learning recovery and attendance recovery. So if I can ask our panelists to come forward, Department of Finance, the Legislative Analyst Office and the Department of Education. We will hear from each one of you and then we're going to do questions directed certainly at you. And again to Doctor Hammond. Please come forward. Doctor Hammond, did you say you're available? You broke in and out.

I think I have a hard stop At 10:00.

Yeah, we will get to you before that.

Thank you.

Thank you. Okay, so we'll start with the Department of Finance.

Thank you Mister chair. And Members Alex Shoap with the Department of Finance. So I'm going to speak on the attendance recovery proposal. Then I'll turn it over to my colleague to speak on learning recovery. So the Governor's Budget, instructional continuity and attendance recovery proposal is intended to provide one, increased instructional options for students when they're unable to fully participate in traditional classroom instruction for limited periods of time or are absent from school.

And then two, streamlined opportunities for local educational agencies to better support students and recover attendance based apportionment funding when students do miss school. So I'll provide more detail on the attendance recovery part of the proposal. My colleague will speak more on the instructional continuity piece in the following panel. So, as mentioned previously, the attendance recovery proposal is intended to provide streamlined opportunities for pupils to make up lost instructional time and offset absences, including for chronic absenteeism, and for leas to recover apportionment funding based on attendance.

So this proposal is voluntary. LEAs can choose to implement attendance recovery programs, then students can elect to participate in them. So LEAs would be able to generate average daily attendance in 15 minutes increments in order to recover up to 15 days of attendance per student provided certain conditions are met.

These include providing instructional content that is substantially equivalent to what the student would have received as part of their regular classroom based instructional program, having instruction provided under the supervision of certificated staff and then meeting 20 to one student teacher ratios and 10 to one ratios for kindergarten and transitional kindergarten. So under this proposal, leas could offer attendance recovery programs before or after school, on the weekend or during intersessional periods.

And they would be able to leverage existing programs such as Saturday school or expanded learning opportunities programs to deliver instruction to students electing to participate. And that concludes my piece of it, and I'll turn it over to my colleague now. Thank you.

Hi, I'm Hugo Solis Galeana with the Department of Finance, and I'll be speaking about the learning recovery emergency block grant proposal included in the Governor's Budget. This proposal provides changes that the Administration believes are appropriate at this stage coming out of the pandemic to focus the use of unexpended one time dollars allocated by the learning Recovery emergency block grant over the last three years of availability on students who were most impacted and continue to need support.

Proposing these changes also allowed the state to resolve the CalATJ litigation. Specifically, the administration's proposal was made up of a few different pieces. First, on the Learning Recovery Emergency Block grant, local educational agencies receiving this grant will have to develop a needs assessment to measure which students are most in need of learning recovery support and target the use and expenditure of funds that are unencumbered as of July 12024 on addressing those student needs.

As part of the needs assessment, schools will have to review metrics for English language arts, math, and chronic absenteeism across school sites and at the local level for student groups in the very low and low status levels on the California dashboard, and for all students who are chronically absent.

As you'll recall, the block grant provided $6.8 billion to LEAs in response to the emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic to help schools serving students in long term recovery from the 2022 to 2023 school year to the 2027 to 2028 school year.

Second, on the local control and accountability plan, the use of block grant funds that are unencumbered as of July 1, 2024 will have to be included in the LCAP for the last three years of the grant with rationales and research justifying the actions showing how they are expected to support the students that have been identified as having the greatest need. So the years that would be affected are 2025 to 26, 2026 to 27, and 2027 to 28 of the various things that would be required there.

Schools will have to identify plan expenditures using block grant funds within the description of associated actions and analysis of the implementation of those planned expenditures in the LCAP annual update. Third, on the community Engagement initiative component, California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, or CCEE, and the lead agency for the CEI, which is the San Diego County Office of Education, would be encouraged to incorporate learning recovery work into the training and resources they provide to leas.

And finally, on the uniform complaint procedure process, we clarify that anyone can file a complaint, including a Member of the public regarding not meeting requirements of the LCAP. This concludes my remarks, but I'm happy to take questions at the appropriate time. Thank you.

I think we have the LAO

Good Morning, Mister Chair Members. Michael Alferes with the Legislative Analyst Office. We have several concerns with the attendance recovery proposal. Most significantly, given the current budget situation, the state cannot support the cost of this proposal. We want to emphasize that there is no funding included in the budget for this proposal specifically, though as proposed it would be effective immediately and would have some associated costs since the proposal allows local educational agencies to generate attendance for funding purposes in the budget year.

We do not have our own estimates of the cost of this proposal, but we expect that the proposal would have significant long term fiscal impacts to the state, even in the short term. School districts that are funded on their current levels of attendance as opposed to their prior year or the three year average of the their prior years would see increases immediately.

And for charter schools, since they are all funded on their current year levels of attendance, they would all see increases immediately as well to the extent that they offer these programs and that students actually participate.

A related concern is that although the proposed language specifies that the intent is for students to be able to recover lost days of attendance and that students cannot generate more than 15 days of attendance recovery through these programs, we don't see anything in the language that actually ties or limits the amount of attendance that could be generated from students participating. So we think that this creates the potential for students to generate attendance for more than a full school year of attendance.

For example, if a student attends a school for 170 days out of 180 day school year and they participate in 15 days of attendance recovery, they would be able to generate 185 days of attendance, even though that the school year is only 180 days. And we also have a few other implementation issues that we like to raise which start on, which are kind of included in the agenda. I'll just kind of cover a few of them here.

One issue is that the proposal essentially creates two attendance recovery programs with different requirements. Under the governor's proposal, new attendance recovery programs would operate before and after school and during intersessions such as winter or summer school, while the existing Saturday school programs for makeup classes would continue to operate on weekends as they currently do so.

For example, Saturday school currently doesn't have any cap on the number of days the students can generate attendance throughout the school year and does not have comparable requirements around student to teacher ratios, whereas the proposed attendance recovery does have the 15 day cap on attendance as well as a specific student teacher ratio requirement. We recommend providing a more consistent set of standards such as realigning current Saturday school programs with the proposed attendance recovery program requirements or consolidate both into one program.

Secondly, we would like to highlight the overlap between attendance recovery and other programs to operate before and after school, such as the Expanded Learning Opportunities program where districts could use their ELLP funding to support attendance recovery programs.

So given students would be able to generate funding through a participation attendance recovery programs, we don't see the need for districts to be able to use their expanded learning opportunity program funding for attendance recovery and the last that I'll highlight is that the proposal provides significant discretion to leas in deciding the type of instruction that will be provided in attendance recovery programs. So the Legislature may want to consider setting more specific expectations for instruction provided in these programs.

For example, the Legislature could direct leas to focus their before and after school programs for high school students on helping them keep up with their existing coursework, while intercession instruction would prioritize credit recovery for high school students. In deciding the level of specificity, the Legislature want to kind of weigh the benefits of these requirements with the loss of flexibility that may reduce LEA participation in the program. Lastly, we don't have any on the learning recovery emergency block grant.

We don't have any specific concerns or comments on the proposed changes on that. That concludes our comments. Happy to answer any questions.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Department of Education.

Good Morning Mister chair Members of the Committee. I'm Elizabeth Dearstyne. I'm the Director for the School Fiscal Services Division on behalf of State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond. I'm joined by my colleague Cindy Cazanos, Director for the analysis, Measurement and Accountability Reporting Division.

The California Department of Education appreciates the administration's proposal to be responsive to the challenges local educational agencies have faced coming out of the pandemic and the impact Low attendance rates have had on learning loss, chronic absentee rates and funding the chronic absentee rate, which measures the number of students who missed 10% of the days they were expected to attend for any reason, decreased 5.1 percentage points from 30% in 21-22 to 24.9% in 22-23.

All student groups showed improved chronic absentee rates, with the largest declines demonstrated by our American Indian or an Alaskan native, Hispanic or Latino Pacific Islander, and African American students. In addition, the average number of days absent decreased to 14.6 in 22-23 from a high of 16.7 in the 21-22 school year. These data suggest that California has started to turn the corner on student outcomes and recovery is underway in the current school year.

While attendance yield rates have not fully rebounded, attendance data from the halfway point of the current school year showed for districts a continued increase in student attendance for all grade spans, with the exception of high school, which only saw a slight decline over the prior year. In the last several years since the pandemic, there have been several legislative changes in the instructional time and attendance reporting requirement areas that local educational agencies have had to implement with little to no planning time.

Since this proposal adds a new method to generate average daily attendance, local educational agencies will need enough time to understand the requirements and update their internal policies and procedures and attendance software systems. The Department is reviewing the impact of this proposal on its data collection and reporting systems. As the student level data system, CalPADs does not currently collect data related to the recovery of absence absences. This would require a change in the collection system.

Without a change in the data collection system, there may be unintended impact on the current data reporting for chronic absences, either through the data reporting tool, dataquest and or the California school dashboard.

Additionally, we've had initial conversations with student information systems vendors that local educational agencies use for attendance tracking and reporting, and it's unclear whether the changes necessitated by this proposal would be implemented in the 24-25 school year, both from the perspective of implementation for leas and compliance monitoring after the fact through the annual audit.

Without sufficient time to prepare for implementation, local educational agencies may struggle to adopt compliant programs and as a result, face a fiscal penalty during audit or simply be unable to implement the program within that 24-25 school year. We look forward to continuing to provide technical assistance to the Administration and Legislature as these proposals move forward through the budget process. I'm happy to answer any questions at the appropriate time.

Thank you very much. Thank you all for your presentations and your testimony. I think we're going to spend a little bit of time on this to my colleagues. So, and again, Doctor Hammond is on the line and maybe I'll start with some questions for Doctor Hammond.

I think in preparing for this meeting, and certainly now in the testimony that was provided, what comes to me in terms of the new initiatives on attendance recovery, or the proposal is why would we want to do this, especially if we don't have data reporting systems available when the intent is to recover attendance, which we hope leads to better student performance. We won't be able to apparently measure or certainly track that, and I'm not sure that we have any measurement tools available.

So, Doctor Hammond, have you had a chance to review the proposal and do you have any thoughts initially?

If you're speaking, Doctor Hammond, we cannot hear you.

So thank you. Yeah. Okay.

There you are.

All right. Terrific. The goal of both proposals, the instructional continuity proposal and the learning, the attendance recovery proposal, is to keep kids engaged in learning, which of course is the goal we all have. Why we worry about chronic absenteeism. And I note to the question about cost, that any way that we reduce chronic absenteeism will create, quote unquote, attendance costs. But we want those costs because they are benefits in terms of student learning and connection to school.

In the course of thinking about these ideas, a number of superintendents have given feedback to what they feel they need to continue to make progress on reattaching students to school. Many of them do have the capacity to produce the kind of record keeping, the data analysis that would be called for, but it might take others longer to put the systems in place.

And personally, I think we should get going on the many ways that we can keep kids learning a text to school and incentivized to be connected. And it may take some districts a little longer to put the programs in place than others, but there are many that are already keeping track of attendance in multiple ways, multiple sources of absence, and multiple ways that they are trying to reach out to students and get them engaged in Saturday school.

And so on the afterschool side of this that was raised right now in ELOC, there's a lot of great work going on in afterschool programs. The only things that could count in this context would be things that are academic elements taught by credential teachers, which is not necessarily what is going on in all of the after school spaces, recreational and other kinds of activities. But it is just critically important that we get our students in a place where they are continuously connected to learning.

And that can happen in multiple ways. And I think we should try to be as innovative as we can be to bring something like this online over time.

It may not all happen in one year, but ultimately, with the world that we live in today, with the disruptions to education that kids experience for personal reasons and that we are experiencing for climate reasons and for, you know, other reasons, we need to be figuring out how we're making education continuous if we want to improve achievement, improved engagement.

So I think what I'm hearing from you is your theory is let's keep children engaged in any number of ways potentially out there, including after school programming, before school programming, Saturday school attendance, recovery of any kind. The goal should be focused on that, which I think is certainly important.

I think the perspective I'd ask from you is in a year where we have to make difficult decisions on what we Fund and certainly would like to make those decisions based on evidence based programs, what things should we be looking for?

Because not every district keeps, maybe they keep tabs on who's recovering attendance or who's attending specific programs, but the quality of those programs vary across the state and we don't really, if we don't have a way to capture the data in a way that we can analyze the data to see what has been most effective, it'll be difficult to understand going forward where to continue to invest or focus investments in.

Yeah, I think that everything, as you know, I believe, deserves study. I don't think every district would take advantage of this right away. I think that is a process that could unfold over time. But there are districts that are really ready to dive in both on this and on the instructional continuity piece of it, so that kids are always able to be engaged if they can't be in school, also online to beam into their classrooms and to be able to continually participate in instruction.

So we have folks who are ready to do that, some who are already doing it, but they don't get any attendance credit for that in the current context or they struggle with the current restrictions in the independent study law that we currently have. And I think it will take time for others to come online. But it's a voluntary program.

The only cost is the cost that we will have as a state from getting chronic absenteeism down anyway, which I believe is something that we have decided we want to do.

Do you know? Or this could also go to the Department of Education if LEAs disaggregate their attendance reporting data to track the underlying reasons for the absences, or is it just collected as a students were absent? We don't really know why.

Many of them, many of them do actually track the differences, including climate events, including illness, and that beyond excused and unexcused, it's something that many districts have begun to develop.

Department of Education Yes.

Hi. Cindy Kazanis, Director of the Analysis, Measurement and Accountability Reporting Division from the Department of Education. The Department does collect information on students who were expected to attend, how many days they were expected to attend, and how many actually attended.

To President Darling-Hammond's point, some districts go above and beyond locally, but at the state level, what we're asking for and receive from school districts at the student level so we can disaggregate by student group, race ethnicity program subgroup is the types of absences that being excused or unexcused, and whether or not they're in an independent study space or if it's an out of school suspension.

We do not know if that excused or unexcused absence is due to illness or if it's due to maybe a family vacation or something along those lines. And so I think what you are asking for in this proposal is a lot more discreet detail about attendance. And in fact, the Department at the student level is only collecting information on absences. And so I know that Elizabeth Deerstein already provided a bit of testimony around this.

There would need to be a change in the data practices of what was expected from all LEAs, regardless of whether or not they participated in the program, to make sure that it was a universal collection and reporting, if there was interest by the Legislature to do so.

Has there been any conversations from education leaders on the significance of capturing data that's more specific like that?

Absolutely. This has been an ongoing discussion. In fact, President Darling Hammond asked us to bring this forward to the state board to further show this disaggregation of what the state was collecting. So on the California school dashboard, not only do we provide information and have metrics on chronic absenteeism, we also provide this absence by reason report, which is really one of a kind nationally. And in fact, in working with attendance works, we've tried to get data out publicly so that you can see through. Others who are in the research space have used California data to talk about this challenge. So, yes.

Is this a practice that other states utilize?

Not that I'm aware of to this degree. Some other states, just like our neighboring state Nevada, have one system vendor for their data collection process. And in California, there's not a prescriptive, there's not a requirement out there to use one system vendor, such as Aries or power school. In Nevada, for example, they all use one system vendor, so they're able to collect more discreet information because they're all on the same system. But in California, that's not the way that was set up 1520 years ago.

Okay. I think that merits future discussion for sure, as we go to the issue of what I think I understand this proposal to be. Doctor Hammond, I'll give you a chance to respond.

I know you're running low on time, but I'm concerned that we are allowing a program that was intended for what I thought was something, extended learning opportunities to now an attendance recovery program, and essentially some children not having access to perhaps those extended learning opportunities that in a lot of the cases that I've learned have been more very enriching opportunities and instead these become just come to make up for your loss, for your absence. Interesting. Your thoughts on that part of the proposal?

Yeah, and I think that that's a good point, that you want to be sure that kids are getting the full benefits of enrichment after school and so on. The proposal requires parents engagement and participation in thinking about what that programming might be.

But at the same time, there are folks who are very interested in both on the student and parent side and on the school side, such things as high intensity tutoring that have very strong gains and allowing students to catch up from what they have missed and to accelerate their learning. And finding time for that is important and desired by a lot of people. So I think we have to think about how to meet the various kinds of both needs and desires that families educators currently.

ELOP, though, does not allow access to students just because of their absenteeism rate. Is that correct?

Right. It does not. It is. The funding is for low income students and students with particular needs. That is not the only districts would not have to rely on that program. I think the question is whether they should be allowed to use some of those funds.

Sure. Let me ask about community schools. I had a chance to spend my Friday afternoon last week visiting and learning about some of the efforts locally back home for me. And I see you in your testimony, Doctor Hammond, you mentioned about community schools and absenteeism.

And one of the things, just generally, I think that I have a question about is, and I asked this to some of the recipients of community schools, is what kind of data is being gathered in terms of the implementation of community schools? Some are in year two, some were in year three. I think there were some in year one. But I don't believe there is any requirements on community school funding.

Can you share about what some of the schools that are like, you have a grantee here, you mentioned that they increase their absentee or decrease, excuse me, their absentee rate by 15%. Clearly they're measuring that. What other measurements tool should we be looking for and outcomes should we be looking for when it comes to community schools as it relates to absenteeism?

Are you asking how are we collecting It or what are...

both? Please.

Yeah, I think that their annual progress reports are being assembled for each of the community schools. That tells what they're working on and what they're doing. And there are requests for particular kinds of information in the state data set which Cindy Cazales was talking about. We do have a well designed and developed data set, thanks to her and her team.

It will be also possible to identify community schools and know what year they became a community school, how long they've been doing the work, and then track trends in things like chronic absenteeism, achievements, graduation rates, dropout rates, all of the kinds of data that we collect in California about students. Because we do have a way to identify which schools are part of the program. We're only up to our. We started our first round in 2022, so we're just beginning to bring the schools online.

But it will soon be possible for us to take a look across schools as well as through the annual progress reports that were being reported here. There is an evaluation component to the program as well that will be triggered over the years.

So I'll ask this question to the Department of Education. Are you then? My understanding now in this response is that you'll be able to overlap or query or use your data selection tools to identify community school and their absentee rate. Absent rates. And you'll compare. You'll be able to compare that. Is that something that you have available?

We would. We would be able to compare chronic absenteeism rates from community schools versus non schools that have not received the community schools funding. But in terms of whether or not they've done, I'm getting confused by the issues. I want to make sure I'm clear with my response in terms of whether or not they participated in attendance recovery. We would not be able to get into that level of detail just if the absenteeism rates had decreased or increased over time.

Thank you for clarifying that. Yeah, in this case I was referring to if they're a community school awardee, you'll be able to identify them and then you'll be able to report back. And so I guess your data is now from only given the awards we're in 22. Just one year. You have full data for one year? Do you have full data for two years? Since the first community school grants went out?

So we have data publicly available through the 2020 to 23 school year. We're going to start the collection of the current school year data for things like chronic absenteeism, suspensions, you know, everything that goes along with closing out a school year. We will have that data available publicly by November of 2024. So I have not looked at the evaluation metrics for the community schools grant, but I know that if needed, we'd be able to make available more discreet data to that evaluator, too.

Staying on the absenteeism and community schools where they cross and meet Doctor Hammond in your testimony, you include an example of Lost Hills in Kern county that I just read while you were providing your testimony. So I'm not too familiar with it. But you identify the consortium for full service community schools, and it seems like that received some federal funding and obviously some state support as well.

In your report here to us, you talk about the community school coordinator, which is typical with a community school, but you also said a social worker. Is that only in this particular consortium or was this at this particular school part of their, their process and the identified needs that the social worker was needed? Can you tell me about the social worker that was part of this community schools program?

Many community schools do have social workers. Occasionally the community school organizer can be a social worker, but sometimes it's an additional staff person and they may decide to use their funding for that purpose. And then there are other mental health funds that are coordinated into the community school and other sources of funding that then can purchase, you know, different kinds of specialists who are part of the action.

It is quite common for community schools to have a social worker as part of the team, so to speak.

So this was just part of their needs assessment and they determined this was something they needed, as we've seen at other schools. And then they engaged in some of the activities that help get kids back to school. I'm gonna pause with my questions, so I know you have only a few minutes left, but I have some colleagues here that may ask some questions that you might want to provide some feedback on. So I'll turn it over first to Mister Fong.

Thank you so much, Mister chair, and thank you to all the panelists here. And similar to a question or question that was brought up by our chair, does the use of the expanded learning opportunity ELop funds for Ada recovery threatened the purpose of these programs?

Hi Alec. Sorry, go ahead, Alex Shoap, Department of Finance. I think that the use of expanded learning opportunities funds, obviously, you know, to be able to use these, I think for attendance recovery, you know, both the requirements of both programs need to be met.

I think that one of the things I would emphasize in terms of this proposal and sort of how these two programs would interact if leas do use, you know, expanded learning opportunities programs for, for attendance recovery, is that the 15 minutes ADA recovery increments. So I think Leas would be able to implement these programs within expanded learning opportunity if they choose, but not necessarily need to crowd out other things that are happening within these programs as well.

Okay, thank you for that clarification. And Doctor Hammond, did you have a comment on that? I know you're short on time. I wanted to get to you.

Yeah, I agree with that. You can imagine that for a student who really needs it, they might be getting an hour of small group work or tutoring in an area that they're falling behind in as part of that three or four hour set of activities that they have in the expanded learning program. The only part of that time that would count towards attendance recovery would be that academic component that is, you know, connected to the work that a teacher is engaged in with them.

So it is possible in many active school programs to blend in a variety of activities that are supportive to the student in different ways. Thank you so much, Doctor Hammond. And this question is now for the LAO. While helping school districts recover attendance based funding, do you believe that the proposed attendance recovery and instructional continuity programs would benefit students?

We certainly see that these programs would be beneficial for students to the extent that they would kind of help students be more engaged and it could also generate additional funding. I think just given the kind of overall budget condition right now, we think that they can't currently support the current costs, the proposals of the current program.

So kind of this would kind of create an additional kind of pressure and on the expanded learning opportunities program, kind of just reiterating, you know, the, you know, district districts or school charter schools could use their, sorry.

Since they already generate funding through expanded learning, we don't really see the need for them to be able to generate kind of double dip in a sense, to the extent, you know, we've heard that many school districts do have expanded learning programs that do have an academic enrichment component, for example. So this would allow them to kind of generate additional funding without creating a higher level of service per se.

So it's kind of just more around what kind of expectations the Legislature would want to see out of the program and kind of what kind of direction they might want to give for school districts. But that's kind of where more of our concerns are with just kind of the funding as well as just some of the implementation challenges, like it creates different programs with different requirements and things of that nature.

Great. Thank you so much. Thank you Mister chair.

Thank you, Mister Fong. I have to tell you, walking into this, I felt very strongly about this double dipping issue kind of concern and Doctor Hammond, I know it's 10:00 I want to thank you for staying around with us, and if you have to go, thank you. We will, I'm sure, connect again. Thank you very much. I would just say for my walking into this, I was very concerned about this issue that Mister Fong just asked about, about this double dipping of the two programs.

As I've sat through this last hour listening, there is something to be said about streamlining and maybe, like, do we want to create another siloed program that maybe creates more of a headache for a school? I'm not so sure. If we could maybe find a way to fit this into extended learning since there's already an activity happening. I would be interested in that. I think what I would be hesitant with is what kind of activity is that?

Because we've seen the gamut in terms of after school programs and before school programs when it comes to elop. And it shouldn't just be you go into a classroom and check in, and that makes up your attendance. Right. It's got to be based on real programming where they are having access to tutoring to make up, to catch up. And so that still leaves me with a lot of concern with this proposal in terms of, is it ready to move forward?

Do we have all the things in place to make sure that it's one that's effective? One thing that I would say, though, the LAO raised the issue, and I wrote down the note of being able to capture beyond the 180 required days. I mean, we have a number of days because I think we believe that it requires that number of days, at minimum, for students to have a successful school year. So students should always, you know, strive to be there 180 days.

Obviously, life happens, but so we can help them make up the learning loss that occurs in the days that their absence. I'm okay with, but to, as was maybe used, take the phrase from the LAO, sort of reward for going above and beyond the 180 days. I'm not sure that that makes a ton of sense. I don't know if finance has any response to that.

Yes, that is not the intent of the proposal. This is meant to be able to recover one unit of attendance per student, per calendar day. You know, as part of our spring process, you know, we obviously go back and look at, you know, anything to make sure that, you know, the. The effect of the language matches the intent of the proposal. So that's something we'll. We'll consider.

So it's up to your intent is up to the 180, full calendar year for students. Got it. Thank you. Appreciate your clarification on that. Again, I think the reporting of the, the recovery is important. The granularity of understanding why students are absent and certainly would want to. I'd be interested in seeing this tied to success. If there's growth in attendance or decline in absenteeism. One, it'd be good to know just why, what are they doing that's working? And we should definitely look at that.

But two, allowing sort of that the district to continue to participate in these programs, to recover the attendance. But I think we have to identify or somehow make sure that it's programs that is worthwhile of the attendance, that is worthwhile of the time, and that is worthwhile of the expenditure from the state. Not just, again, I said it before, but not just another opportunity for kids to sit in a classroom or to just check in and, you know, get the attendance mark on the record.

That's not the appropriate use. So I think there's, this all requires, I think, some more work. Certainly looking forward to what may come in a couple of weeks in terms of a revised proposal, and we can further discuss that then. So until then, we'll leave this one open until that time. Thank you to this panel. Appreciate you all being here. We will move on to issue number two, which is instructional continuity and independent study.

Panel will consider the January budget proposal to replace short term independent study with an instructional continuity alternative. We have the Department of Finance, who will present the proposal, the Legislative Analyst Office and then the Department of Education. So with that, we'll turn it over to the Department of Finance.

Good morning, Katie Lagomarsino with the Department of Finance. I'll be speaking to the instructional continuity piece of our proposal. So one of the principal goals here is to ensure that students don't miss out on critical instruction and learning while they're absent from school. Without additional instruction, students who miss even one day of school can fall behind on learning. And for students who may be further behind their peers, this impacts their chances of success in school and beyond. Our instructional continuity proposal does a few things.

First, it streamlines the process for local educational agencies, or leas, to continue providing instruction to students during an emergency. Through an instructional continuity program, we remove the distinction between short term and long term independent study by striking the references to independent study being offered for more than 14 days or less than 15 days.

The instructional continuity program provides limited term options for students enrolled in classroom based programs, and students that participate would generate attendance through the time they spend in synchronous and asynchronous instruction and through completed coursework. To recover average daily attendance, or Ada through an instructional continuity program, students must be under the supervision of a certificated teacher, which is consistent with current attendance gathering or attendance generating rules for written agreements as compared to current short term independent study agreements.

The instructional continuity agreements would be more limited in scope and could be signed at any point throughout the school year, though the language encourages leas to sign them at the beginning of the school year when possible. In terms of day limitations, students could generate up to 15 days of attendance through participation in an instructional continuity program per year, though that maximum is extended for students in exceptional circumstances.

We also proposed changes to the emergency attendance apportionment funding process for LEAs, also known as the J13A application. Here we align the establishment of instructional continuity and attendance recovery options, streamlining the transition from classroom based instruction to remote or hybrid instruction.

We also make clear that independent study requirements are not required for instruction during an emergency situation that occasions the submission of a J13A and we change the provision that says independent study or online instruction has to be offered within 10 days, changing that to requiring instruction be provided within five days, and we make it clear that the quality of instruction should be at least equivalent to instructional continuity programs established.

Finally, we provide 6,000,001 time Proposition 98 General Fund for two county offices of education to conduct research on models of instruction and student information systems. Of the total, at least 4 million would be provided to a County Office of Education to research best practices for using hybrid or remote models of instruction as well as to support school districts instructional continuity programs.

The selected County Office of Education must make their research and resources available to the public through a website that links to the Department of Education's website and through widely available free trainings and convenings for leas and teachers, and up to 2 million would be provided to a County Office of Education to research local student information systems to identify opportunities for more nuanced tracking of student absence data, with a particular focus on absences due to emergencies.

The selected County Office of Education must provide recommendations to noted entities by January 1, 2026. This concludes my remarks. I'll be happy to take questions at the appropriate time.

Thank you LAO.

First time sitting up here. Thank you Mister Chair Michael Alferes. Again, our comments on instructional continuity is that if the Legislature is interested in adopting this proposal, we recommend the Lang implementation for at least one year due to logistical challenges for implementation in the immediate future in the budget year, as the proposal would kind of require CDE to develop rules and regulations around instructional continuity programs and then leas will not be able to generate funding for instructional continuity as proposed until they adopt policies in compliance with CDE's rules and regulations.

So this process will likely take some time to see through and leas would not be able to operate short term independent study programs for which instructional continuity continuity is meant to replace. As the trailer Bill Language removes the exceptions for short term independent study. A delayed implementation of the proposal for a year would give CDE time to develop the rules and regulations around instructional continuity and for leas to plan and kind of adopt local policies and compliance.

In the case that the Legislature is interested in adopting the proposals in a future year, we raised some specific issues for consideration prior to adopting. One concern is that although these proposal is intended to have instructional continuity to be used for short periods of time, the language provides a broad exception for students to participate longer than 15 days if they are facing significant personal difficulties that make them unable to attend school.

There is no limit to kind of how long instructional continuity can be used in these cases. Additionally, since the requirement for when written agreements must be signed at any time until the end of the school year, students could be enrolled in an instructional continuity program for a long period of time without having understood the expectations of the program or knowing the key details that are required to be included within the written agreements. We recommend setting narrower exemptions to the 15 day cap.

The Legislature may also want to set more specific rules for students who remain enrolled beyond the 15 day cap, for example, setting a maximum cap for all students or requiring that a written agreement must be signed by the student and parent or guardian prior to enrolling in instructional continuity program that's expected to last more than 15 days.

This would ensure that students with longer-term needs are enrolled in an independent study where LEAs are required to implement tiered re-engagement strategies to better support students who are not completing their coursework, and so on. The proposed changes for emergency attendance funding the Legislature may want to consider whether requiring leas to offer instruction to all students within five calendar days of an emergency rather than 10 days currently is feasible.

Under kind of certain emergency circumstances, providing instruction as soon as possible could mitigate possible learning loss and could benefit students emotionally by giving them the opportunity to interact with peers and adults in times of possible distress. In cases of major emergencies, however, offering instruction within five calendar days may be particularly challenging. Lastly, due to the budget condition, we recommend rejecting the $61.0 million and 1 time funding for COEs to conduct research.

The Legislature could consider providing funding for this purpose in the future when more funding becomes available. That concludes our comments. Happy to answer any questions appropriate time.

Thank you. Department of Education

Good Morning Mister chair Members of the Committee. I'm Elizabeth Dearstyne, Director for the School Fiscal Services division. On behalf of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction. Tony Thurmond, joined by my colleague Cindy Kazanis, Director of the analysis, Measurement and Accountability Reporting Division at CDE, the Department of Education appreciates the administration's proposal to be responsive to the the challenges leas have faced coming out of the pandemic and the impact Low attendance rates have had on learning loss and funding.

While this proposal adds another program that leas can utilize to claim attendance for apportionment, it also adds another layer of complexity in an environment where leas already struggle to understand and adhere to the current attendance reporting requirement rules. In addition, instructional continuity similarity to the existing independent study program has the potential to create more confusion for leas than intended. Intended. The proposal also makes changes to how local educational agencies offer instruction when they experience a school closure or loss of attendance due to an emergency event.

Specifically, it reduces the amount of time that local educational agencies have to offer instruction for the purposes of receiving instructional time, credit, and funding that was lost due to an emergency. The reduction from 10 to five days may pose an obstacle to local educational agencies who prioritize safety of their students and staff, and staff oftentimes have other responsibilities such as welfare checks during an emergency. Depending on the scope of the emergency, five days may be insufficient for local educational agencies to organize instruction.

In the last several years since the pandemic, there have been several legislative changes in the instructional time and attendance reporting requirements area that local educational agencies have had to implement with little to no planning time, and leas will need enough time to understand the requirements of this new proposal and update their internal policies and procedures and attendance software systems.

I would reiterate my concerns from the earlier panel regarding the time for LEAs and SIS vendors to adapt to changes necessitated by these proposals without sufficient time to prepare for implementation. The Department has concerns that local educational agencies may struggle to adopt compliant programs and as a result, face a fiscal consequence during the annual audit or simply be unable to implement the program. We look forward to continuing to provide technical assistance to the Administration and Legislature as these proposals progress through the budget process. And this concludes my remarks, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you. On this one. I do have questions on the implementation, I guess, and I'd ask, I heard sort of some feedback from LAO, some feedback from the Department. So I think I'll ask finance maybe for some feedback on the implementation and the realistic expectation that CDE would require rules and regulations to implement the instructional continuity programs beginning 24-25 which is this year, this school year, and I'm sure you've thought about this. So what's the thinking behind this?

Katie Lagomarsino, Department of Finance yes, we're aware of these concerns. Our intent is to seamlessly provide instruction, and we are working closely with the Department to determine a feasible timeline. And these conversations, we expect them to continue. We're open to feedback.

So, on this one in particular, just also help me clarify, there is no specific budget ask in terms of appropriations.

That's correct.

Okay, so this could be a conversation that could continue beyond this, and it seems like maybe that would be.

Prudent thing to do, given some of the feedback from the Department in particular, let me ask you about the one in this panel, the one item that does have a budget impact, and it's the research models of instruction. One of the things that caught my attention is the intent here is to do research on best practices of using hybrid and remote models of instruction. We just did that for a couple of years not long ago.

And I'm just curious, have we not identified anybody who did any research that we feel is respected and valued in terms of those two models of instruction that could help us not have to spend $4 million on researching that best practices?

Lina Grant with the Department of Finance. I'm not exactly familiar with the studies you are referencing, but this particular proposal is aimed at looking at kind of, since the pandemic, what have successful hybrid and remote learning programs looked like. And so our intent is to provide those funds to a county office that would have some expertise and be familiar with districts that have kind of modeled best practices.

And our proposal would have that selected county office to make their research and resources available to the public and to other LEAs.

Is this because you feel that we still have a demand for people who want to do this? Now San Diego city schools, which is a very large school district, is walking back on the significant investments that they made on essentially online learning, because it just is not really, it's not paying dividends. And so I'm just curious as to why it's always good to have research again. I think there's been some research done from respected institutions on hybrid and remote models of instruction.

But why do we want to research this now, I guess, is the question.

Yea, well, chronic absenteeism rates are, as the Department of Education mentioned, they are on the decline. They're improving. They're still lagging way behind pre-pandemic levels. And so we're trying to bridge the gap between attendance and the reasons for students feel disengaged when they are absent and they don't participate in any instruction.

We think that there are actually, there may be some school schools, like you mentioned, San Diego, county, that have had less success potentially with the online instruction model, but there are certainly existing programs that have been successful and have served student needs. And so our intent is to research those that have provided kind of a model for that hybrid and remote learning, learning education.

So looking at the ones that have served student needs and trying to provide those as a model for other leas to potentially mimic, because the chronic, you know, chronic absence continues to be a nationwide problem, but it continues to be a problem for California as well. So.

Yeah, well, I would just say I'm a lot less interested in the four millions of that $6 million. And I know it's millions. It's not billions, but it's still money this year spent on research that I think likely we have a lot of research on, I assume out there from respected sources. I'm more interested in the $2 million component of your proposal here, which is about conducting research on absence data. Obviously, you heard the previous panel, so we had some conversation about that we don't have.

The way that the proposal is being proposed is written, is to identify opportunities for more nuanced tracking of student absence data, of which you heard my questions earlier. I'm certainly interested in being more nuanced in our tracking. It sounds like Department of Education doesn't get that granular in terms of analysis.

But I want to make sure that this is what, that my expectation is correct, is this proposal to have a county office of, of education to help identify which systems perhaps should be implemented more statewide, to identify what kinds of nuances in absences. Can you, can you share what your expectation is?

Yeah. What you said is kind of the expectation that they would research local student information systems that are out there to provide that more granular level data about, you know, that tracks student absence beyond. I think that you had mentioned that the Department of Education had mentioned the absence by reason data report.

So I think building off of something like that to provide a more student specific kind of data tracking, tracking the student absence data, particularly with a focus on absences that are due to emergencies, is the way that this proposal is modeled.

So currently, just going back to the previous panel, what I understood is the state has access to data on excused and unexcused. And that's as specific as we get, basically, for the state.

This proposal, and I don't know if you've had a chance to review, seems to be intended at identifying a new data system that would give you, hopefully through the districts, the granular type of level of why someone might be absent due to maybe it's an illness, whatever the reason is, and I don't know if we have specific reasons listed out in code or. I don't know.

Can you tell me more about what kind of data we should expect from a more nuanced tracking system that would be useful so that my expectations can be realistic about what data we could get?

Absolutely. Again, Cindy Kazanis with the Department of Education and I work on data reporting to start with. I mean, the student level data system, calpads, could collect additional information. It wouldn't necessarily necessitate setting up a totally separate system for these absences. But what is not clear out there is what are absences that we would like to collect? Do we want to know if a student had COVID? Do we want to know if they had norovirus? Do we want to know if they had the chicken pox?

I mean, to what level? And that brings in a whole new set of data that the system is not prepared to handle around health and the health privacy of our students. I think there's a balance there of, to what degree, to what purpose this data is being collected and how it would be actionable at this point. You're right.

We don't have insight into an unexcused or unexcused absence or an out of school suspension, to what level of variety behind those reasons, but it could be simply collecting or putting forward definitions that provide us a bit more insight into that, to those reasons for absences.

Yeah, I think that's the. What I. What I would like to see if the proposal is approved is so that we know exactly what to expect, because data systems, as you know better than I do, are only as good as. As the data that you're collecting that could be then used for a purpose. And so I think more. I like to hear more about how that the expectation for the COE that would be doing the research. What research, exactly.

And what the research product will end up providing us in order to get that nuanced tracking. So I think more to be seen on that while we're on the topic, and if any of the previous panelists are on, I had a colleague who I had forgotten to ask a question, but it's all related to this and it's related to the.

I think I know the answer because we're not entirely tracking this, but the question is related to learning recovery and whether more homework or more in person with a professional, and there's any level of professional certificated to non currently anyway, in ELOP programs, for example, whether there's any significant differences that we've identified in terms of learning recovery. And let's see, who was on the previous panel. Is anybody want to jump up and share anything about that? No one's excited to answer that question.

Any thoughts you want to share about that? I feel bad because I think that question would have been an ideal one for Doctor Hammond, and I forgot to ask that. Please open mic session now on this question.

Thank you, Mister chair. Amber Alexander, Department of Finance was not on the prior panel, but happy to provide some thoughts. And I think the question was specifically around the learning recovery emergency block grant funds and perhaps the use of those funds and whether or not they have made more of a meaningful impact on in person opportunities versus maybe more remote offerings. So happy to provide some thoughts on that.

I would say I don't know if there's a lot of concrete data that has been gathered at this point because the Department is just now kind of starting to get the expenditure data. LEAs did not have to provide a plan upfront for the use of those funds, so they are accounting for those uses in the local control accountability plans.

I do think some of the changes that you've seen proposed by the Administration in the trailer Bill will help to provide some insight into the outcomes from those investments. But again, that's not something we have available now, but that is the intent in tying some of the use of those dollars to the needs assessment so that we can start to recognize the impact and better evaluate that.

Okay, appreciate you stepping up and providing some, some feedback on that. I think my final comment on this would be, I've heard about a lot of data collection and a lot of data sets and a lot of, just a lot of reporting that we have at the state, and oftentimes it doesn't seem like it's totally connected.

And so I think that's just a general concern as we talk about more issues is whatever system, this specific proposal on that's in the budget proposal, it's gotta either fit with an existing calpads, that they can figure this out and not be an entirely different system that then is not talking to each other. I just feel like there's too much of that already happening.

So those are some of the parameters I would share about an allocation for County Office of Education and the work that they do that they be narrowly focused on fitting with the construct of what we have in terms of data sets, primarily if calpads would be the. Would be ideal, but obviously there's others out there. So those are my questions and comments. Mister Fong, do you have any on this one? No, we do.

Okay, so we will move on to our panel number three, or issue number three, student behavioral health. There's a budget trailer Bill proposal regarding student behavioral health protocols for local education agencies and for staff trainings. So we have the Department of Finance, the LAO, and Department of Education once again. So with that, we will start with the proposal with the Department of Finance.

Welcome thank you. Good morning, Chair, Members Melissa Ng with the Department of Finance. I'll be giving a high level overview of the Governor's Budget proposal on the youth behavioral training investment. The Governor's Budget provides up to 35 million from the gun Violence Prevention and School Safety Fund beginning in 2025, 26 which are the revenues generated by the excise tax on retail sales of firearms and ammunition that goes into effect July 1, 2024.

So this funding would be apportioned to local educational agencies to meet the requirements related to the youth behavioral health professional development. This proposal was in response to SB 509 from 2023. As noted in the agenda, while the Bill was vetoed, the Administration supported the intent behind the Bill to better equip school staff with the tools to recognize the behavioral health needs of their students as well as ensure local educational agencies have protocols in place to guide how to address needed supports.

The Administration is committed to improving mental health and well being of every child, and this effort is intended to foster a more supportive educational environment that prioritizes the holistic development of a child by ensuring school staff have the knowledge, tools and resources to be able to recognize and address behavioral health challenges effectively within the school environment.

To that end, the Governor's Budget also proposes trailer Bill Language, which specifically requires the Department of Education to develop referral protocols for addressing student behavioral health concerns by January 12025 requires local educational agencies serving students grade seven to 12 to adopt a policy on referral protocols before the 202526 school year and requires local educational agencies to certify to the Department by July 1, 2029 that 100% of their certificated employees and 40% of its classified staff who have direct contact with students in grades seven to 12 receive the specified youth behavioral health training.

The proposal also provides flexibility for local educational agencies to determine what type of training would be best aligned with their students needs and current resources focused on student wellness or continue with existing efforts if they include the same elements or can better meet the needs of their staff and students. That concludes my remarks, and I'm happy to answer any questions at the appropriate time. Thank you.

Thank you. Sure.

Good morning Mister chair and Members of the Committee. I'm Dominick Robinson, the Director of the Whole Child Division. On behalf of our State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Thurmond, I will keep my remarks brief as I believe the other panelists have already covered the topic thoroughly. We fully support the intention behind the proposal to develop model referral protocols for addressing pupil, mental and behavioral health concerns.

However, we must note that the timing presents challenges due to the expansion in scope coupled with limited resources available for implementation, which was launched, which was included in the original statute. Specifically, we request that there is at least an additional year to complete this work, which does not. Which. Which does then require delayed LEA training. Thank you. And I'm happy to take any questions.

Thank you, LAO.

We don't have any specific comments, just happy to answer any questions.

Thank you. The first question, and it's on the agenda that came to mind when first I heard about the proposal, was on the mandate for training, and it's one time in training, and just curious as to why the decision was made on just one time training on this.

Sure. Thank you for that question. I'm listening with Department of Finance. So this one time staff training provision is focused on providing for school staff that have direct contact contact with students with the tools to be able to recognize and refer students the appropriate supports. And the hope is that this will be integrated into existing supports and build on the various efforts already underway to increase access to mental health services in schools and promote mental and behavioral health awareness and education.

We feel that this is necessary component for school staff to be part of the support systems to assist students in need and ensure that they are equipped with the necessary tools to recognize and refer the students to the appropriate resources.

So the $35 million being requested is for the policy adoption, which we'll get into in a second because the Department has some concerns on that. And then it's also for the one time staff training, and that's it.

Correct. So Department of Finance's Bill analysis for SB 509 estimated that costs could range between 11-35 million, assuming that training would cost between 50 and 150 for approximately 235,000 certificate and classified staff. So while the trailer Bill specifies 35 million or up to 35 million, the funding is dependent on the amount of revenues that will be collected by this new excise tax. So it could be less than 35 million.

But this is sort of the intense, since the gun violence Prevention School Safety Fund is intended for school based mental health and physical safety activities. And we thought this was an appropriate funding source for this proposal.

And you said to train some number of thousands of personnel, it would require. How much, say those figures again, please, one more time.

Sorry. Between 11-35 million. Assuming cost would be between 50 and $150 for the training.

Okay. $5250 per person per training.

Correct.

Okay. And how many individuals would be trained?

We estimated 235,000.

Now to the Department's concerns about the model, protocol and implementation. So this would not be. This would not be. I thought this would not be going into effect until 25-26. And then the training would have to be done before 2029. Correct. Okay. Can you, can you share more about your concerns about the timing police for the Department of Education?

Sure. So initially there was more time built into the, I guess, the timeline. Initially there was two years for us to be able to build this out right now. This would begin in January 1, 2025 which is approximately nine months from now. With the expansion in scope, including the behavioral health concerns to the protocol, we're requesting an additional year to January 1, 2026.

So just tell me, walk me through what you that entails. The work that you're expected to do with this. You'd begin. If this was authorized, you'd begin to do some work that would require how many months, and then the behavioral component you said would add you'd like to request more time because that would require, I assume, additional months of work, and you give me a little bit more context of what that work would be.

Sure. While the model referral protocols haven't been built out, we do have the trailer build language that provides some framework which includes, I would say, development and consultation. First, inclusion and collaboration, meaning we have to ensure that there's inclusion of diverse voices in the development process, including current high school pupils and parents from all school levels, including elementary, high school, and greater inclusion. Another would be guidance and the procedures would need to be developed as well as supportive measures and cultural and evidence based approaches.

In addition to that, we want to make sure that there's adaptability to local relevance, meaning that the protocols would be adaptable to very local service arrangements for behavioral health services, ensuring that every school can implement them according to local needs and resources.

All right, I was off in my years, in my head. I see what you mean. Till 2025 is now, like around the corner. I understand now. Thank you. I appreciate your concern and certainly loud and clear. So with that, we'll move on to the next item. Do you have some questions, Mister Fong? Mister Fong has some questions.

Thank you so much, Mister chair. Just a quick question to the Department of Finance. Can you provide some additional background on the gun violence prevention and school safety Fund? And currently, how much is in the Fund right now?

Yeah. So the new gun violence and Prevention Fund, it was established through the passing of AB 28. So it's going to first collect funds beginning in July 1, 2024. It's excise tax on firearms and ammunition. So right now, I think we have some estimates, but you know, those could change since I think that's why we had recommended starting this funding in 25-26 since we're going to begin collecting revenues starting in July 1, 2024.

The first 75 million is provided to, I don't remember exactly the Department, but it's provided for another Department, for another program. And then the. No, anything in excess of the 75 million, up to 50 million would be then provided to education.

Thank you so much for that context. And how much do we anticipate to generate in this Fund each year?

I think those, like those forecasts aren't quite final. I think as of Governor's Budget, we expect to possibly receive up to 35 million in 25-26 for education.

You're saying that it could possibly generate up to 75 million a year? Or is that what I heard?

The 75 million is allocated for the board of state and community corrections for the California Violence Intervention prevention program. And then anything in excess of the 75 million would then be available for education, up to 50 million.

Okay, thank you so much. Thank you, Mister chair.

Thank you. So just to understand. Thank you for asking this question. It sounds like they anticipate 75 million to come in for the first program and then an additional 35. So a total of 110 million in this first year of implementation. Okay, thank you both. We'll hold the issue open, appreciate the concerns expressed, and we'll move on to issue number four, school facility program proposal.

This panel is going to review the budget proposal from January for the School Facilities Program General Fund appropriations, which was adopted actually as part of the budget early action in Assembly Bill 106. We have Department of Finance, Legislative Analyst Office and School Office of Public School Construction with us today. So welcome to all three of you and we will start with the Department of Finance.

Good morning. Chair Member Alex Velasquez with the Department of Finance. I'll be providing an overview of the School Facilities Program SFP, which provides funding for new construction and modern station of school district facilities. As you may recall, the 2023 Budget act included intent language to appropriate 875,000,00 one time General Fund in the 2024 to 25 fiscal year.

Given the budget and revenue outlook, the Governor's Budget now proposes to reduce this amount by 500 million for a total investment of 375,000,000 one time General Fund in the 2024 to 25 fiscal year. A few notes here. The Administration anticipates that this reduction will not affect the monthly processing and it would take the General Fund support for the applications up to the 2024 year. Lastly, the Governor's Budget did also include language of pursuing a state facilities bond for the November 2024 which would be placed upon voters. This concludes my remarks, and I'm happy to take any questions at the appropriate time. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good morning. Edgar Cabral with the Legislative Analyst Office, as was mentioned by the Department of Finance or I guess, but I think this proposal has been adopted in early action. Given that the state's budget condition, we did think the reduction is reasonable. Additionally, given that the state cannot support additional spending without making reductions to existing commitments, the Legislature may want to consider whether providing any additional funds to this program outweighs other priorities. But we do acknowledge that providing a reduced amount of General Fund would mean fewer facility projects are funded.

Thank you. Please proceed.

Thank you. Mister Chair Rebecca Kirk. I'm the Executive officer for the Office of Public School Construction, and today I'm accompanied by Michael Watanabe, the deputy Executive officer at the Office of Public School Construction. We have nothing further to add at this time regarding the specific proposal that's been adopted as part of the early action budget agreement, but we are happy to address any questions that you may have on the program at the appropriate time. Thank you.

Thank you. I'll start with you, Miss Kirk, on so we've reduced the appropriations for the current year from what maybe you had planned for and expected of 875 to 375 now. So where do we stand with that funding in terms of allocations for school construction?

Thank you. At our current processing rates, which in recent years have been about $1.5 billion going out to school districts from the Office of Public School Construction and approved by the State Allocation Board for apportionment, we average about $125 million per month. So the currently authorized funding that we have for the school facility program for new construction and modernization purposes, there's about $1.1 billion remaining in currently authorized money for those programs. That would take us to probably around January 2025 at current processing rates.

In terms of putting out funds to school districts, with the current Governor's Budget proposal of an additional 375 million for the program in fiscal year 2024-25 we would see additional funds for those purposes and new construction and modernization through probably more of March or April of 2025.

Thank you for that clarification. In terms of the builders fee and I don't have the right term, please, you can go ahead and correct me.

Developer fees?

Correct the developer fees. What is the actual amount of funding that must be in and in which account? This is sort of a basic question I've never asked in order to avoid the triggering of those fees.

Yes, there are three levels of developer fees that can be authorized for school districts to assess on new development within their boundaries. The level that you're specifically referring to, I think, is level three developer fees. Level three developer fees can be triggered, essentially when the state allocation board has made a finding and determined that funds for new construction are no longer being apportioned to school districts because of a lack of new construction funding for that purpose.

Essentially, at that time, if level three developer fees are triggered or able to be assessed by school districts, they're intended to essentially cover up to 100% of the cost of new construction that traditionally the school facility program would provide 50% for in state funds.

Thank you. Thanks for that clarification on, you know, you saw probably the staff questions, or the questions here and the staff comments, which were some of my questions, and I know that in the past, certainly in learning a lot at the allocation board and getting a lot of context of historical practices and what's happened, we have funded different things beyond just the schools. And so that's why this list is here. Just last week, I believe. Yes.

Last week we had a hearing on, for example, childcare classrooms and the need for potentially, in order to really serve early childhood education to try and see if this would fit into the bond. In addition to some of the other things listed here, community schools sometimes have some demands that you heard in the very beginning of our, today's hearing, some testimony on potentially. No, you didn't. I actually read that somewhere else. I read that in a report on my way.

I woke up at five in the morning to fly flight here from San Diego. I read a report. The recommendation was we should potentially use bond financing to help support community schools because they have different types of maybe rooms that they'd like to create, parent rooms, other types of rooms that are important for that school to be successful. So I guess my question is to the Department of Finance and to, to office of Schools Construction.

Has there been conversations of that in this bond, or is it all specific to just new school construction?

Alex Anaya Velasquez with the Department of Finance. I believe the less included community schools, like you mentioned, parent schools and then ELOP as well. Given that the conversations around the school facility bonds are still ongoing, I would not be able to comment on any specifics on the bond, but I'm more than happy to take any comments or messages back to my leadership. Thank you.

Appreciate it. Have you gotten any feedback from schools on being able to utilize funds to build other amenities that are important at school sites? Particularly, I would say, childcare classrooms.

Yes, I'd say that there is certainly need statewide regarding a variety of facilities for schools at the preschool through 12th grade levels. Of course, historically, as you mentioned, the bonds that have been passed by voters, there have been five bonds in the history of the school facility program providing about $42 billion worth of funding. Those bonds historically have provided funding for new construction, modernization, overcrowding, relief, joint use purposes, career technical education and charter schools.

The potential bond for consideration by the voters in November 2024 there have been many meritorious options put forward and discussed by various parties for potential inclusion in that bond. In addition to the items that are called out in today's agenda, some of those things that I think are considered in bills pending in the Legislature are also looking at things like a potential carve out for small school districts, addressing lead in water remediation at school facilities, addressing climate change impacts, also looking at some minimum essential facilities.

So really, I think ultimately there are a number of priorities for a potential bond, and we trust, of course, that the Administration and the Legislature will consider all of those options as they're moving forward with consideration of a potential bond.

Thank you. I guess I was more you're, of all of us, you're the one who most directly communicates and has like, actual touch to schools and to districts and their schools. And I was just curious, if anything, there's needs for, for everything. But if anything, just sort of stood out as a, like this would be, you know, something we really see as a need.

I, given our conversation last week, continue to think converting classrooms to UTK is, I hear that from districts as a need, and it's something that's not, I think, currently fully contemplated in the bond discussions. And so I just wanted to hear from you because you are the ones on the ground whether there is anything that just, like, really stands out that you hear quite a bit, or is it all the things you mentioned? Because I know there is a lot of needs.

Yes. I think to your specific point, as was discussed some in last week's hearing, the last funding round or filing round that we had for the California State preschool, transitional Kindergarten and full day kindergarten grant program, we did have about 1 billion, a little more than 1 billion oversubscribed for that program. It's difficult to take, take an exact sort of assessment or nexus to need because the programs always have specific parameters and that may influence who's applying. That said, but those are all, just.

To be clear, also, those are all conversions, right? They're not like part of a brand new school that's being built it's existing classroom space, correct conversion or maybe acquisition.

I guess, or addition of classrooms, for instance, to make full day programs if they've currently only offered an AM or PM program. We do also note that our existing new construction program, which of course disclaimer is oversubscribed. But the existing new construction program does provide an option. If school districts are experiencing enrollment growth for TK and the TK level, they can incorporate that growth as part of the calculation for their eligibility in pupil grants. That factors into the amount of funding they could qualify for as part of a new construction project.

But I have some further questions about what that means because I think that was a little bit new to me, that the, the new school construction money could be used for TK news. New TK construction. But then what that, what implications does that create then? Further down the line, I guess, for the school's site and the school district is something. Do you have any feedback at all?

I didn't even ask a direct question, but I don't know if you caught any of maybe what my confusion there is.

I think my colleague, Mister Michael Watanabe, may be able to explain a little more on how the eligibility would work in those cases.

So for new construction eligibility, it's based on a five year projection, how much enrollment we see a school district thinks they'll have five years from today. So if they do have TK enrollment that they're enrolling right now or projected enroll, they include that in their new construction eligibility for their current year. And as we look towards an upward growth trend, it generates a baseline they can draw down from the to build new facilities on the campus that they have.

That eligibility is district wide, so they can add that capacity anywhere throughout the district. They can use it to build a new school. They can add one class onto a campus so they choose how they want to use their new construction eligibility.

Okay. Okay. I was trying to buy enough time for someone who I know is interested in this topic. Would you like to make some comments or questions?

Yes, please. Thank you very much, Mister chair. And I apologize for not being able to make the hearing earlier, although I was following the hearing from my office, and I appreciate all of the topics that you've been covering this morning, but I wanted to make sure that I came here especially for the school facility program.

A discussion good morning, Miss Kirk, Mister Watanabe, as fellow Members of the State Allocation Board, this is an issue that is very much a concern for myself as well as for Mister Fong, both lead authors of Assembly Bill 247, the Assembly vehicle for a state school bond. We appreciate the Governor for calling out the need for a bond in his January budget proposal, and we look forward to engaging in those negotiations for getting the bond proposal on the November ballot this year.

Miss Kirk, or Mister Watanabe. I heard you, as I was walking in, that you gave $1.0 billion oversubscribed or $1 billion in requested transitional kindergarten facilities that are oversubscribed. When you say oversubscribed, does that mean that districts have applied and are in the queue for transitional kindergarten modifications?

So specifically for the California State preschool, transitional kindergarten and full day kindergarten program, that particular program operates on a filing round basis. So our most recent filing round was conducted with applications accepted in February and March 2023. We, in that last funding round, did have a little over $1 billion in requested state funds that were not available to be provided based on the funding available for that particular grant program.

However, the school facility program, we have sort of a different way that that program operates in terms of receiving applications and oversubscribed amounts.

So when you say filing round, is that a round of applications that are open to all school districts in the State of California, could you explain what a filing round is?

Yes. So some of the smaller programs, and this is a little different, of course, than the main school facility program. Some of our smaller programs, like the I'll just abbreviate since it's a very long program name the transitional Kindergarten full day kindergarten program, operate on a filing round basis.

So in that case we do not accept applications on a continual basis, but instead, when the state allocation board has authorized us to do so, we open a filing round and announce it to school districts with specific dates during which we will accept applications. And then those applications are all reviewed and processed by Office of Public School Construction staff in accordance with the program regulations and parameters for the board's consideration.

Okay, so just for this filing round, you received applications for the transitional kindergarten and the state preschool programs exceeding $1.0 billion?

Yes, that is correct.

I know one of the challenges that I faced in terms of trying to document the need for a school construction bond, as well as the size of the school construction bond, is the lack of data on how old our schools are statewide in the State of California? I think the Legislative Analyst's office has also echoed that. We'd love to hear any further thoughts on that.

But do you have any data like, for example, how many schools in the State of California are over than 75 years old, 50 years old? Do you have any such data?

Unfortunately, I do not. We know there are about 10,000 schools in California across roughly 1000 school districts. We don't currently have a source for that particular information on a statewide basis. In terms of the age of facilities, we do know currently that more of the facilities demand is on the modernization side than new construction. Just given demographic shifts and changes in our state, as well as a lot of the areas of our state, having had a lot of booms in construction 5075 years ago.

Wanted to see if the LAO had anything to add to that.

Just to reiterate your point, as I remember that the state does lack data. School districts are not required to report the data or keep up to date data on or to provide to the state this kind of information. We expect, fully expect that they locally are keeping track of their own facilities. But when these bond conversations have come up historically to kind of Ms Kirk's point, that typically when we say so, how much do we need for new construction?

How do we for modernization, typically we just look at what's been the amount that's been allocated, what's been the demand from applications. But in terms of being able to use data to project moving forward, how that might change, the state doesn't really have a good way to do that, to kind of get a sense of, zero yeah, we have a lot of buildings that are maybe getting to that 25 year or 50 year mark, and we think that there might be more need for replacement. That kind of information the state just does not have.

I know that I've been relying on a Public Policy Institute of California study showing over $100 billion need over the next, I believe those next 10 years. I see in the staff analysis that the Auditor, in their January 22 report, estimated 7.4 billion in state funding to meet anticipated modernization requests over the next five years.

Any comments or thoughts from either the School Facilities Program or the LAO in terms of, you know, which is closer, the 7.4 billion in anticipated modernization requests over the next five years or $100 billion over the next 10 years.

From our perspective, I think it's a little hard, of course, to pinpoint looking, as my colleague at the LAO mentioned at historical kind of oversubscription rates or the amount of applications that we've received currently. As you know, the Office of Public School Construction maintains an applications received beyond bond authority list. So essentially, that's all of the applications that we've received beyond the point at which we drew a line internally and determined. Okay.

At this point, we think we have enough application workload to exhaust the currently available funding beyond that amount on our applications received beyond bond authority list. As of the end of February, we had about $1.1 billion in new construction projects requested, in addition to approximately $2 billion in modernization projects requested. So between new construction and modernization, that's about $3.1 billion over our currently authorized funding that's been requested in the form of applications submitted to our office.

I would note for context that the applications on that list were received by our office between February 2022, and that's up through the end of February 2024. So essentially, about a two year period, we received applications totaling 3.1 billion across the new construction and modernization programs, with the 2 billion of which being on the modernization side.

Okay, does the LAO have anything to add on that? No. Okay, thank you. Last, the Legislature recently received a letter from Public Advocates and other equity advocates arguing that the current School Facilities Program and how district requests for funding are being met. It's not equitable that the poorest districts in the state, especially rural districts as well as small districts, are not receiving their fair share of school facilities funds. Do you have any thoughts on the concerns raised about equity?

We have received a copy of that letter, and we've, of course, reviewed and made notes of the concerns that are articulated. I'd say, of course, the school facility program does have a financial hardship program that is available to provide additional state funding for districts that are eligible and are not able to provide the typical required matching share in local funding.

So we do see success and activity on that side of our program as well, aimed at addressing some of those school districts that can't afford or provide a local match that's typically, typically required. We do also see, of course, proposed in the potential bond bills pending in the Legislature some provisions that I think are intended to address equity concerns more broadly in the program.

For instance, one provision in particular being a set aside for small school districts so that they have a better chance, perhaps, of competing and getting their applications in the door when they perhaps require a greater level of assistance than some of the larger districts that are more familiar with our program and participate quite regularly.

Other than that, we think if there is a bond on the November 2024 ballot for consideration by the voters as that the particulars of that bond are negotiated between the Administration and the Legislature, that that could provide an opportunity to address any further equity concerns, potentially through refinements to the program.

All right, thank you. Does the LAO have any thoughts on that?

Sure, I can raise. And so we did some analysis of this many years ago now, probably about a decade old, but I think a lot of the structure of the program is very similar. I think there's a couple of things I want to highlight there. You're right in that the way that the program works is sort of you're either going to receive essentially the 50/50 match for new construction or 60/40 matches, or if you can't provide funds, you can participate in financial hardship.

So sort of this either or there is a variety of, a lot of variation in terms of the assessed value that districts have per student. And so some school districts are going to find it more easier to generate locally their matching funds in order to participate in the program. We have also heard a lot of these concerns about the, you know, larger districts are able to navigate the rules about the program easier.

For example, where in previous studies in the past had been more likely, for example, to be in the financial hardship program because they know how to work, how to follow all of those specific rules. And so that administrative burden can be challenging for some of the small, small school districts. I think the facility hardship program itself also is very strict in some of the rules, and I think that's something that we've heard in the past as well.

So, for example, many school districts would say that the amount of funding that the grant, you know, it's supposed to be roughly 50/50 match or 60/40 match. But oftentimes schools or school districts are locally providing a larger share because they, you know, the costs for them based on all the things that they want their school to have is going to be greater than that. So they're providing a larger local match to build a school that meets their needs.

If you're in the financial hardship program, you're not allowed to do that. You get all 100% funding, but you cannot provide any local funding because the idea is that you didn't have any local funding to match. So those are some of the things that we've heard that creates then inequities. So if you participate in the financial hardship program, you might actually be more limited in terms of what you can build versus a school that has a larger amount of resources from their local bonds.

All right, thank you very much. Thank you, Mister Muratsuchi. I, too, received the memorandum, and I'm glad you brought it up, particularly as you examine the distribution of quartiles—or pintiles, as they are called—because there are five of them.

And it's just, it's really interesting how utilizing the current mechanism, you know, the more resource districts tend to tend to win on this and the lower resource districts don't, and how a sliding scale, a different way of approaching this, would essentially create that equity, whereas those two would flip, and yet everybody in the middle essentially gains a little bit as well.

So I'm interested in that and any other topics that we discussed as it relates to expanding like the childcare access which we discussed last week in length at our joint Subcommitee. So, encouraged by the ongoing discussions and by the data presented today, Mister Fung, do you have some questions? Thank you so much Mister chair. And thank you Mister Mursicci for those questions and comments as well. Proud joint author of Assembly Bill 247. Thank you for tremendous work and efforts around this.

When we look at it from a community college lens, do we have data in terms of the facilities, condition indexes from each of the community college districts in California and their need?

I'll speak to that. The Office of Public School Construction we typically work only with k 12 school districts with very limited exception. I think our California State preschool program does allow for community college districts to submit an application under that particular program. But typically we don't engage or have grant programs for the community college district specifically. So I don't want to overstep my current role in speaking to their facility inventory.

No worries. LAO.

Yeah, I don't have the specifics for you, but I do. My understanding is that the what is different in the community college system? They have one system that they use, for example, to track their deferred maintenance backlog. So I believe that we do have a little bit more statewide data in terms of age of facilities, information about that.

I don't have any of that specifically myself, but I can talk to my colleagues who cover community colleges and share with you and your staff some information if that can be helpful.

That'd be great. I think. Just to echo Mister Muratsuchi's point, the PPIC has noted over $100 billion in needs. Just hearing the report here today, the over $7 billion in needs. And just locally in LA the past 20 years, Prop A, Prop AA, J measure, CC measure, LA have been passed in an aggregate of over $14 billion in projects around modernization, infrastructure, technology, science labs, CTE programs, buildings. So as we go forward, and I'm grateful to hear the Governor's intent for our bond as well.

As Mister Muratsuchi just stated and how we have those negotiates going forward, I think it's very critical to when we look at our assessments and look at the need for this bond as we go forward, and just the work around equity as well. I just want to uplift that as well. So look forward to future conversations as to how we proceed in the next months ahead. Thank you so much.

Thank you. This conversation will continue. Thank you to our panelists on this. We will. That was an informational item, so we will move on to issue number five, the k 12 high speed network and school broadband proposals. We have the Department of Finance who will present the proposal. The LAO office and then the Department of Education provides some context as well, so we'll ask the Department of Finance to go first. Welcome.

Thank you, Melissa Ng with the Department of Finance. I'll give a quick overview of the. K-12 high speed network budget and then move on to the Governor's Budget proposal to extend and expand the broadband infrastructure grant program. The Governor's Budget includes an increase of 3.213 million ongoing Proposition 98 General Fund to maintain K-12 high speed network, or K-12 HSN baseline operations, bringing the total ongoing appropriation to 7 million.

Proposition 98 General Fund in the budget year prior to 2017 to 18, Proposition 98 General Fund provided between eight to 10 million Proposition 98 General Fund to support the K-12 HSN beginning in 2017 to HSN was funded from savings from the Broadband Infrastructure Improvement Grant, or BIIG 1.0 and 2.0 grants. These savings have now been fully exhausted and Proposition 98 General Fund is now being restored for ongoing baseline support for K-12 HSN.

The total budget for k 12 HSN is 18.968 million, of which 7.442 million is funded through e rate and CTF subsidies, 4.5 million from the operational Reserve balance and 7 million from Proposition 98 General Fund.

This proposed budget would leave an ending Reserve balance for k 12 HSN of approximately 1.5 million at the end of 2425 moving on to the Broadband Infrastructure grant program or BIG. The Governor's Budget includes 5,000,000 one time Non Proposition 98 General Fund to extend the broadband Infrastructure grant program through 2028. 29 the initial funding for this program was provided one time over five years through June 30, 2024.

The additional funding would be available for joint build projects between schools, local libraries, and telehealth providers in addition to providing broadband connectivity to the most poorly connected school sites, which was the purpose of the original program. This funding was made available from the 35 million that was originally appropriated to the California State Library in the 2021 Budget act for broadband projects between schools, local libraries, and telehealth providers.

Of that amount, 29 million of the 34 million is proposed to be reverted, with 5 million proposed to be redirected to extend and expand the big program. The 5 million would also be used to support the administrative costs for the program over the proposed five year period. That concludes my remarks on these two issues, and I'm happy to answer any questions at the appropriate time.

Thank you, LAO, please.

Edgar Cabral with the LAO. So I'll just separate my comments based on those two proposals. First, on the high speed network, I think the main comment we have here is given that the state does have a shortfall within Prop 98 and our office projects that revenues could be worse in May, the Legislature could consider drawing down additional funds from the high speed network Reserve. Right now, the projection is that there would be $1.5 million in reserves at the end of 24-25.

And while there might make sense to have some reserves for cash purposes, we know that sometimes federal payments can be delayed. We don't think a grantee needs to have reserves for budget purposes for economic uncertainties. So the Legislature could consider reducing that. The Legislature could also request an estimate of the unspent current year funds in May and if there are unspent funds available, could use them to offset 24-25 spending.

Moving to the broadband proposal due to the projected budget shortfall, we do recommend the Legislature reject any new spending proposals. So we would recommend rejecting this rather than, and rather than redirecting these funds for this purpose, that they would go back to the state for General Fund savings. It's unclear if providing additional funding for this purpose is preferable to funding other budget proposals or existing expenditures that are the state is now considering how to Fund.

Given the shortfall, the Legislature could attempt in this case to identify alternative Fund sources, such as leveraging federal broadband funds. So, for example, our understanding is that there's a federal federal program known as a bead program that could be used to support broadband infrastructure projects in schools, libraries and medical providers. And so that could potentially be a source of funding rather than General Fund. That concludes my comments. I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you. Department of Education good morning.

Good morning. Chair my name, Members of the Committee, I'm Geoff Belleau, Education Administrator at Department of Education, the information technology branch. On behalf of the state Superintendent, want to make a couple of comments. First, with respect to the K-12 high speed network, in current year and previous year, they sometimes have cost savings. What happens is each year the program, the grant program will order projects and the projects will take some time to complete.

And sometimes as the projects go over from one year to the next, those funds are encumbered, but they're in accounts payable and the projects aren't done yet. So they show, might show as cost savings, but they actually are projects that are still underway and they'll be completed and then they will be spent at that time.

Secondly, with respect to the big project and the other projects that we've seen that have been the coordinated ones through Biig and this one just wanted to share an example of one. One of the small schools that benefited from these coordinated approaches. Just south of here is the town of Clarksburg, just across the river from Elk Grove. Clarksburg is part of River Delta School District based in Rio Vista. There's actually three or three counties that that district serves. That school district only has three it staff.

One of them is the business administrator, iT Director, a staff Member who's responsible for Calpads, and then another staff Member who's tech support. That school district doesn't have the capacity to do a project that would be able to upgrade their schools and get them high speed connectivity. Over the course of BIIG and BIG, we've done separate requests to that school to get connectivity and none of them have been affordable or doable.

Mostly because even though there's connectivity on I five and Elk Grove, the river gets in the way. But through BIG and working with scenic and a more coordinated approach, they got a bid to connect the two schools and the library altogether. And the costs came way down. And at that time now we've act. At this time now, the schools are actually connected.

They connect back up through Yolo County office of Ed, which then in turn connects them to their home county office of Ed, which is Sacramento county office, and they receive their services. It was only because we were able to work together in this coordinated approach. The school benefited and they're able to do what they're doing now. They just don't have the capacity without this sort of help.

There's other projects like that that we could share if there was time, but I want to, for the sake of time, I defer to any questions.

Thank you very much. See if our Committee has any questions on this item, please.

Thank you. That there's a lot of numbers, a lot of information thrown, but I want to make sure I understand the basics. I'm looking at the Committee analysis. So the. The high speed network program was to provide the backbone based on the county offices of education. Correct. And so each school district was supposed to build upon the COEs as hubs for this backbone. So that, do we know what percentage of our school districts currently, you know, are connected to these hubs?

Yeah, currently all the county offices are connected. And there are some counties where there are additional hubs. Specifically, like in Southern California, there's other districts that are hubs of the districts. I want to say we're upwards of 90% of our school districts connect through the county office and then connect, connect into the Kalran backbone.

So 90% of our school districts are connected to the hubs. Does that mean that 90% of school districts at least, you know, through this high speed network, do in fact have high speed access on school grounds?

Yes.

Okay. But of course that doesn't extend to the households. So the basic idea is that while they're at school, while they're in the classroom or in the library, that all of these 90% of the school districts have access to high speed Internet service.

Yes. I guess I would add one example of another community build that just as recently come up. I don't have a lot of information on is in the town of Covelo in Round Valley School district. And that was an example where by the, with all the coordinated efforts, the schools, the library, the schools, I think in healthcare and got fiber and now the community is actually doing that. But that's not because schools did anything.

It's because the providers now there, and now they can offer the services in coordination with the other providers there in that little town. So Kovalo is one of those areas that we weren't connected. Now it is. I don't have a lot of information on that though.

Is there a General operating role in terms of how close or how far you have to be to a school site in order to access high speed Internet service through the high speed network?

Right now the e writ rules are such that the school's connectivity is supposed to stay at the school. It's not supposed to extend. If their rules were changed, I think there might be some other options for schools to extend out past that into the community. But right now the ERA rules don't permit that. And e rate right now supports California in the neighborhood of $350 million a year.

But is it like, you know, my cell phone service, like if I walk 100ft away from the school site that I lose the signal, but if I walk 50ft that I might get some signal.

Are you referring to like people using their laptop? Yeah, I don't have information. I would guess it's maybe in the parking lot, maybe out at the stadium. Wifi does not extend as far as certainly a cell phone, but there are.

No General rules that.

No, there's a lot of places where people do come to the school and use the Wi Fi just like we do when we go to Starbucks and other places if we have access to it.

Uh huh. So for example, there are, I would imagine there are school this, there are school sites where you can park in the parking lot and get access to the high speed network?

Yes.

Okay.

I would only have anecdotal on that.

Thank you all. Appreciate it. We'll hold this issue open and go on to issue number six. The office of Cradle to Career Budget proposals. The office of creditor Career will present proposals. The Department of Finance will have some response from the Legislative Analyst Office. And then we have the actual office of Cradle to career here to also answer questions from the Committee. So, Department of Finance, please get us started.

Good morning, Mister chair and Members. Natalie Griswold, Department of Finance. I have representatives from the Office of Cradle to career here to give a more detailed update on the program and the budget change proposals before you today, however, I'm happy to give a brief summary. For its first proposal, the Office of Cradle to Career is requesting position authority only for a chief information security security officer. We believe this position is necessary given C2C significant data requirements.

For its second proposal, the Office of Cradle to Career is requesting a $600,000 reappropriation so that it can meet some of its statutory requirements to explore the e transcript California system. We know that this is a re appropriation of its current year funds. C2C has experienced some salary savings this year as they hire new positions, and we consider this an efficient use of the funding given the significant anticipated General Fund deficit. Happy to answer any questions.

Thank you. Go to the LAO.

Edgar Cabral. So, on the first proposal related to the new position, we don't have any concerns there. On the second proposal related to the $600,000 reappropriation, we don't think there's adequate justification for the proposal at this time. The funds would be used to contract with outside consultants for planning and stakeholder engagement. However, the specific activities that would be funded are still unknown to the office, and the Administration does not anticipate having a clearer plan for how those funds will be used until the summertime.

And in addition, this revamped e transcript is still in the early conceptual stages, and there's still a lot of questions about exactly what the scope, the cost, and the functionality will be. So for those reasons, and given the state's budget situation, we recommend the Legislature reject the proposal and revert the unspent funds for budget savings.

Thank you, the Office of Cradles of Career.

Good morning, Mister chair and Members. My name is Mary Ann Bates and I'm the Executive Director of the California Cradle to Career Data System. With me is Eric Flores, Deputy Director for legislative affairs. Before cradle to Careers creation, California was one of fewer than 10 states without an education focused longitudinal data system. Our office is linking state information on education, jobs, and health and human services to serve as a neutral source of information for students, families, and policymakers.

We're working to help Californians make evidence based decisions about their future in three ways. First, through analytical tools that allow the public and decision makers to interact with secure, De identified data. Second, we are scaling practical tools to help students succeed in their transitions into college and careers. Third, we're listening to communities first to build data tools that they will use. Last October, cradle to career reached a milestone unprecedented in California.

The data system successfully ingested over a billion data points in collaboration with eight of our data partners. In March, we built upon the success with our first annual submission, adding information from last school year. A critical part of our ongoing work is directly related to Governor Newsom's Executive order on career education through our work with partners to revamp e-transcript California.

While this e-transcript tool is housed under the community college's chancellor's office, C2C is a neutral body sitting outside post secondary and k-12 segments, facilitating collaboration to ensure e-transcript California will meet the needs of students attending all of the higher education segments, C2C's authorizing legislation tasks our office with expanding access to e transcript California. In January of this year, C2C launched our e-transcript task force, designed to provide concrete, actionable recommendations for scaling e-transcript to help ease administrative burdens for students.

Currently, there are inconsistencies in how community colleges format, deliver, and charge students for transcripts, which creates barriers for students that could ultimately delay their progress in college and may result in students not receiving credit for classes they have completed. As one example, last year the C2C governing board heard from Mauricio Arias, who attended Fresno State University.

After facing multiple barriers, putting his dual enrollment courses and getting a flag that his college application was incomplete, he had to drive 3 hours in the summer to Fresno State to submit his transcripts and ensure he could register for his freshman orientation. Given the narrow deadline window, Mauricio's story is not unique. The task force we launched and our budget request today will address the burden students face right now as they navigate dual enrollment transition to college and transfers from community colleges.

The task force has already announced some early wins. A new data standard for high school transcripts lays the groundwork for achieving seamless transmission of transcripts across segments, and task force Members have also moved on new data sharing that will help local districts know which high school students are dually enrolled in community college courses. Planned collaborative work would minimize the problems Mauricio faced. Students would be able to get a single transcript with all community college courses they have taken.

Students would also be able to have all of their community college classes, both dual enrollment and regular, be automatically sent as part of their application process to all of the higher education segments, rather than having to ask each college to send transcripts. And there would be clear ways to document credit for prior learning. Our budget request today would build upon the momentum from the task force by continuing this collaborative work, including a California career passport that could support skills based hiring by documenting qualifications.

Finally, cradle to career's highest priority is the safety and security of the data system. A permanent state employee Chief Information security officer is critical as the data system further ingests information. Thank you and I look forward to your questions.

Thank you. Appreciate all of you. My first question probably to the Office of Cradle 2 Career. Who were the eight data partners that collaborated with recently?

Sure. The eight data partners are those who were scheduled to submit data initially. So that included the Department of Education, the Community College Chancellor's office, CSU, UC, the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, the Department of Healthcare Services Services and Department of Social Services 1235678 which one am I missing.

Thank you. I think I wrote down

The next one will be the Employment Development Department that will be merging in earnings data as well.

Employment Development Department, you said?

When are they being merged?

Yes.

They will be merged after we complete the mastering of the data, which we expect to occur this summer.

Okay.

And then with that information, we'll be able to build the first dashboards for the data system, including a student pathways dashboard that shows the progression from high school through higher education into the labor market.

So the only student data at this point that we'll have is a high school student. We wouldn't have lower grades.

We receive k through 12 information from CDE.

Okay. What kind of education gets received from CDE?

Are you asking which specific data points we received from CDE? There are many, dozens of data points that we receive from CDE. They're our largest data provider. I'd be happy to share.

Do you probably were here in the room talking earlier about absenteeism. That's being a big concern, is that information that's. Well, I'm sure it's received in terms of what the input is, which is, again, in prior conversations today, we talked about the need of potentially having more granular information which would actually serve us to. You do this every day. I'm sure you know this better than I do, but to serve as a data point that actually can help us, inform us in our decision.

The current system apparently only reports out excuse and unexcused absences. So you also probably heard the conversation about having a County Office of Education do further research on that data set. What would be your recommendation for that research? That we have a data set that is useful to be implemented with cradle to career.

So I'd have two reactions to that. One is that the data that we receive in the data system is from our state level partners and the data that they collect through our. So our k-12 data is the data we receive from CDE, which they have in the calpads system.

To your specific question, I'd be happy to get back in touch with your staff about the information that's flowing to the data system as it relates to absenteeism, and get back to you with more information on that.

I would be interested in that. Let me ask you about the 600,000 reappropriation. Mainly what happens and what likely will happen in a year like this is any unspent funds get funded, go back into the General Fund for budget deficits like this here you're asking for. For that not to be the case, particularly with $600,000 to implement what is described as an e transcript. I heard in your testimony talk about a group that got together. I think you said in January this year. I think this point has some recommendations that have been put forward. Is that where you are with this working group?

Yes. The transcript task force was formed in January, has one more meeting in May, and then the June meeting will be the one in which those recommendations are formalized and those are feeding into the process for the master plan for career education.

Okay. And I want to understand exactly on this particular program what we're being asked to and what is going to be the outcome of this funding. So are you telling me that this $600,000 will create a. A program here in California so that all students have access to this e transcript system portal? What is it exactly that a student will have access to?

The e-transcript system exists currently it's a program that the community college chancellor's office runs. And the work that we're doing is in collaboration with the chancellor's office to identify what changes, some small and some larger, could be made to that existing system so that it better meets the needs of students. So right now it's a platform that students don't interact with directly. Imagine it as the kind of behind the scenes pipes that can move an electronic transcript from one entity to the other.

And what the task force is working on is to identify how that could be improved to solve some of these barriers that students face. So, for example, if the e transcript mechanism could be used to automatically input transcript information at the point of application when someone's applying to CSU or applying to UC, that would significantly reduce burdens on students and make it easier for them if they can have that kind of integration.

I understand that. But is the $600,000 actually going to implement that?

Thank you. Let me answer that more directly. The $600,000 would be for our work as an office to. To be able to convene the entities and come to agreement and consensus on how those changes should be built and to provide some technical assistance to be able to implement that. It would not be for the full implementation of a new e transcript or future larger changes.

It would be to continue the momentum from the current transcript task force and implement the current small wins that are possible in the short term and then lay out a clear roadmap for what would need to be be built in the future.

Okay. I've heard a lot about the credits career data system in addition to just last week. I know we had a Bill at policy Committee about this. I think it's worthwhile. It would be worthwhile for us to spend more time on this, likely in a more extended setting, to understand all of the different components of this. It seems to be a very, very large undertaking, which I think is, I think, phenomenal in terms of what data could be coming out of this.

But I also want to make sure that, especially in these next few years, as we continue to be challenged with our budget, that any expenditures that get made in this program will actually lead to an outcome that is going to be something that Californians can put together to use. And so I think I'm gonna leave it at that for today. But I think this requires certainly much more in depth conversation in the future. Do any of the colleagues have any questions on this? No? Okay.

So with that, thank you. We'll hold this issue open and we will move on to issue number seven, which is County Office of Education Local Control Accountability plans. This is a report from the Legislative Analyst Office, and we thank them for preparing this report on the plans from each of the, from the coes. It's an informational item, and we will have a more comprehensive Committee oversight hearing on LCAP's later this year. Turn it over to the Legislative Analyst Office now.

Good morning. Sara Cortez, LAO, trailer legislation included in the 23-24 budget package required our office to make recommendations that change the county offices of education local control accountability plan LCAP or require alternative reporting requirements outside of the LCAP. The recommendations are primarily intended to increase transparency of CI operations and activities. The reports the sergeant distributed fulfills a statutory requirement, and today we'll summarize the recommendations included in our report.

Before I get into our recommendations, I want to briefly discuss what COEs do and how they are funded. COE's have two distinct missions. Coe's provide direct instruction to students in juvenile court and county community schools. These schools serve students who are placed in county juvenile facilities on probation, referred by a probation Department, or mandatorily expelled from their school districts. Coe's also provide oversight to support and support to school districts in their county.

Some of these activities are required by law, while others are optional, and what activities COEs do to support districts vary across the state. COE's receive state funding primarily through the Local Control Funding Formula, LCFF. However, the formula is different from school districts.

Similar to COE's two part mission, the LCFF has two main components, an alternative education grant based on the number of students attending juvenile court and county community schools, and an operations grant based on the number of school districts and the number of students in the county. COEs generally have flexibility to use their LCF funding from either part of the formula for any purpose. COEs also receive hold harmless spending through LCFF. This is largely based on historical levels before LCFF was implemented and then I'd know.

In addition to LCFF, coes receive funds to implement various categorical programs. Now I'll move to our recommendations to increase transparency of COE operations and activities. Our first recommendation is to have COEs create an annual report that describes their major activities. This would help the state and local education partners to better understand each COE role. We recommend this report include a narrative of major activities, services, and priority initiatives COE's can conduct regardless of the funding source.

Our next recommendation is focused on the LCFF operations grant and the hold harmless funding, and we really focused on these dollars because it is quite unique for a Fund source to be both unrestricted and have no reporting requirement, whereas Fund sources that are categoricals, those typically have to be provided for a specific purpose and often has reporting requirements. So for simplicity, we zoned in on the operations and the whole timeless funding.

We recommend having COEs provide expenditure information for these Fund sources and this would include LCFF alternative education funds if those funds are spent outside of the juvenile court and community school program. Since all these funds are fungible, some details about the report we recommend it be publicly available six months after the close of the fiscal year. Spending should be disaggregated into three categories. The first category is oversight and support. The second is juvenile court and community schools.

The third is direct services to students not enrolled in the JCCS program, and then we recommend information be provided in a way that is comparable across the state. Now I'll pass it on to my colleague Michael Alferes, who will discuss our recommendations from the report on the COE LCAP.

So before I get into our specific recommendations on LCAP, I'll just provide some very quick background on LCAP's in General. So to provide transparency regarding how LCFF funding is spent, the state requires CoE school districts and charter schools to adopt lcaps, which are three year plans that are updated annually in which each local educational agency outlines their strategy to improve outcomes for their students using their LCFF funding.

There are several required components of LCAP's for which the State Board of Education has adopted templates for to ensure consistency across all LEA types, these templates are in their LCAP COEs must set goals in 10 state priority areas and specify actions that they will take to meet these goals. The specified actions must be aligned with the COE's adopted budget.

Beginning in 24-25, 2024-25 COEs are required to develop additional focus goals for all schools that are receiving equity multiplier funding, as well as any schools that received the lowest performance level on a state indicator, on the school dashboard, for the school as a whole, or for specific student subgroups. For COE LCAP, they're required to only include information around the juvenile court and community schools in their LCAP. So with that, I'll now turn to covering our specific recommendations around changes to the LCAP at a high level.

There are four aspects to LCAP's that we recommend changes to. What I'll do is just walk through our kind of associated assessment recommendations for each one at a time. The first part of the LCAP we recommend changes to is the overview for parents. So since 2019 to 20, COE's LCAP's must include a short summary for parents that includes projected total revenue for the upcoming fiscal year, projected expenditures, and budgeted expenditures for planned actions and services.

Our overall assessment is that although the overview is intended to provide greater context to the funding that coes receive as well as for spending described in the LCAP, it can be difficult to interpret.

The main issue here is that although LCAP documents are really just focused on showing plan expenditures for directly serving their students, the overview shows revenue that COE's received from all Fund sources, including state categorical funding, federal funding, and local revenue, which may or may not be meant for directly serving students, even for their LCFF funding.

In the overview, the template does not disaggregate how much of the LCFF funding is actually generated by the component of LCFF that's meant for directly serving students or for the component of LCFF funding that's meant for providing district services to districts. As a result, for many CBL caps, the overview shows that only a relatively small amount of the COE's overall expenditures are included in the LCAP.

So rather than providing helpful context of the COE's expenditures and revenues of documents raise questions as to why such a small share of LCFF funding is included in the LCAP, even though coes are in compliance with all the state requirements. Additionally, including all COE revenues make it challenging to assess how spending on juvenile court and county community schools compares with the amount that they receive from the alternative education grant and other funding facilities for these programs.

So our recommendation is to make the overview for parents more consistent with the LCAP itself and really just focus on only including revenue from the alternative education component of the LCFF, as well as other funding streams that coes receive to directly serve students in juvenile court and community schools, such as the student support enrichment block grant or an antiquity multiplier.

Under this approach, it would be easier to see how the funding coes receive based on the Juvenile Court and county community schools compares with the cost of operating these programs and the other funding streams not for directing serving students at Juvenile Court and county community schools would be addressed in the expenditure report that we are recommending that my colleague Miss Cortese described earlier in the presentation.

The next aspect of the LCAP that we make recommendations on is the General information section where COE's provide information about the educational programs and students that they serve. So in our conversations with COEs, they indicated that for many educational partners that are particularly interested in knowing whether their child will be able to receive counseling services or the types of courses that the students can access out of court school.

The spending on the LCAP, however, focuses on new spending and does not comprehensively describe services available to students. Additionally, some services that students may receive cannot be included in the LCAP because they are funded by county government or other external entities.

So, although coes can use the General information section to more broadly describe available services for students as well as summarize their spending that is not included in the LCAP and overview for parents, coes are not required to share any specific details about services in either of these sections. So level of detail included in the OCAP on current services varies by COE.

So because of this, we're recommending modifying the General information section to require including a description of services available to students and the range of courses that students can access. This would allow kind of state and local partners to understand at the high level of the existing programs and services to students in addition to the new spending included in the LCAP. So the third aspect of the LCAP that we touch on on the report making recommendations towards is the increased and improved services section.

This is a section of the LCAP where COEs must include information on how they're increasing or improving services for the English learners, low income students, and foster youth in proportion to their LCFF supplemental concentration funding.

Kind of our overall assessment is that given the studio student population, this distinction between base program and increased and improved services seems arbitrary, creating a for juvenile court schools, all students are categorically considered low income, for example, and for county community schools, we highlight that 82% of students statewide are unduplicated students, though virtually all students in county community schools have significant needs. Given the needs of these students, COEs are typically integrating additional supports within their base program.

Requiring separate reporting creates an arbitrary distinction that is not consistent with COE operations. Because of this, we're recommending eliminating the increase in improved services section of the COE LCAP COEs would still report the actions that they are taking to achieve goals around state priority areas, and most COEs would also be required to set focus goals for equity multiplier schools and schools with Low performing subgroups on the school dashboard beginning in 202425.

Based on looking at the data, we expect most UE run schools to be required to develop these focus goals, and so this action on eliminating the section would shorten the LCAP by eliminating a section that is duplicative of other portions of the plan. The last piece on LCAPs on the report is around the kind of performance metrics that are used for all LEAs.

We find that some of the existing state required metrics aren't well suited to assessing the quality of COE run programs, as students typically have relatively short stays and can enroll at any point in the school year. Given these first days, metrics such as tracking four year graduation rates and assessments on math and English language arts are not particularly useful for metrics for assessing juvenile court or county community school.

For example, on academic performance tests, the high degree of mobility in Juvenile Corps and county community schools often results in only a small share of students being enrolled long enough to take the standardized test. In addition, many students are significantly behind grade level and will show Low performance, often on the standardized test, even if they made substantial academic progress while enrolled at these programs.

So our recommendation is for state reporting requirements for these schools to include academic performance data that measures how well they serve students in the short term. We know in the report that although not required, many coes already use local metrics to monitor their own progress based on short term measures of performance, such as the share of students that successfully transitioned back to the traditional schools. So in our recommendations, we think that these types of metrics measuring short term progress are better suited to assessing COE programs.

The state could take a variety of approaches to measuring outcomes for students at these schools. Two promising metrics that many schools already use include scores on pre and post tests of skills and the number of credits students gained while enrolled at these schools. So that kind of concludes the overview of the report.

Our recommendations are intended to kind of provide clarity around how COE's major activities and services increase transparency regarding how LCFF operations, grant and whole harmless funding is spent, and better monitoring spending and outcomes through the LCAP. With that, we're happy to answer any questions that you might have.

Thank you. And I'll admit I actually had not read the report that you provided your testimony on today. So I was trying to just listen and capture the testimony. I do have some questions. I think the intention of putting this on the agenda today was to, to sort of initiate a conversation that we think is important to have and we will need to have with more time, likely after this budget period.

So I'm just sort of giving a heads up that I think we want to have a conversation. I think one thing that would be helpful, I'm sure there's a lot of good information in this report, but.

The sort of takeaway in trying to understand this and your report is that we were attempting to use LCFF, which we use for districts to also fit with County Office of Education, and they do things a little bit differently. And so a lot of your recommendations are based on those differences in trying to capture the data that we need to capture to ensure that, one, certain funds are being used for the intended purposes, and two, that there is a way to measure the impact of those investments.

And so I think one thing in my mind as a visual learner I was sort of imagining is at least to help me get some more basic understanding, is a comparison of districts versus coes on LCFF, which will be helpful to understand what are the unique differences in the two as we go forward. But I don't have any other specific further questions.

I think I certainly need to spend more time on trying to continue to understand this, and I do think at a hearing later in the next few months, we'll talk about just LCAP in general, both for school districts, how it's impacting, how we're measuring that impact, and also for Coe. So that's my feedback for now. And with that, thank you for your time, and we will move on.

This is an informational item, but we will have more information on this and discuss it further again in the not too distant future. Our final issue, we actually have a vote on today. We will be voting on issue number eight, which is two technical trailer Bill proposals and a budget change proposal that has been requested as part of the January budget. We do not have a formal presentation, but Members of the Subcommitee may ask questions on these or make comments on these proposals if they'd like.

And we'll again take public comment on this after we review this proposal or we have Member questions on this. So we don't have a quorum at the moment to make a vote. But this is a recommendation that will be made to full budget. And if we do have a quorum, we will take action, which we might establish a quorum now that we are at the end of all of our items and we are taking public comment.

And so I'd ask you if you have a comment on any of the items on today's agenda to come forward. We'll give you a minute to make your statements and then I will let you know when your minute has concluded. And if you don't need the full minute, that's okay too. Just being brief and concise also is helpful. So with that, we will begin our public comment section of today's agenda.

Yes, hi, my name is Emmerald Evans with Grace End Child Poverty, California, and I'm commenting on the issue of the cradle to career system to flag and request your support for a related item powering the real outcomes of the Cradle to Career for a database system that brings it to life. The It Takes a Village Act resides in the Human Services Department and is a CDS-led initiative that has been championed by Assembly Member Bonta and Assembly Member Jackson.

And we're here just to ask for your support today because it includes strong k through 16 educational components that will play an important role in closing equity gaps and alleviating poverty. To quickly highlight, there are cradle to career networks located throughout the state from Del Norte county all the way down to Chula Vista, which includes the Chula Vista Promise neighborhood which is in your district. These place based initiatives that serve children at every stage of life from the birth all the way through college.

Career Chula Vista, as a part of South Bay Community Services has made tremendous impact in the community by providing comprehensive services that align with the outcomes in the cradle to career database system from the border crisis accessing public benefits to college and career linkages. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon Sara Bachez with Children Now commenting on items 1 and 6, demonstration does not include a restoration plan for the $1.1 billion reduction made to the learning recovery block grant in the 202324 Budget act. We believe that this must be addressed. We also want to ensure that we honor the CIAJ settlement requirements to mitigate the effects of school closure had on our most vulnerable students to ensure that the proposed changes align with the conditions that best meet our students need.

And lastly, we continue to support the ongoing investments to the cradle of the career that ensures proper implementation of a robust data system for our students. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon. Lindsey Lindsay Tornatore, on behalf of the California County Superintendents, is commenting on several issues. First, the attendance recovery instructional continuity J13 requirements. The California county superintendents agree with all of the concerns raised by the Department on Behalf of the SSPI, specifically those of implementation related to the learning recovery emergency block grant funds.

County Offices of Education, who serve as the geographic lead agencies in the system of support, are working with state board staff, CDE and CCEE to develop resources professional development aim to ensure districts and charters are spending these funds effectively for maximum impact for the students served. Finally, the Leo analysis we want to really applaud the Leo on their analysis. They went above and beyond to truly understand the nuanced complexities of county office budgets and LCAPs.

Mister Chair, thank you for your comments about the district and county offices and the variance between those. We look forward to future discussion. We found the LAO's recommendations to be helpful, thoughtful. We are in discussion with Assembly staff as we develop new ideas about what county offices can do to increase transparency. Thank you so much for that agenda and analysis. It was very well written and the thoughtful considerations and questions that were being asked today.

We are opposed to the five day timeframe in terms of the changes to the emergency attendance instruction and we are concerned with some of the potential collective bargaining implications and potential lack of services for students with ieps should they be transferred to annoying bearings district. So we are recommending rejecting the proposal and keeping the current 10 day timeframe. We do want to appreciate CDE and Leo's also comments on the implementation when it comes to the instructional continuity and attendance recovery programs.

We do support the intent to ensure that we are providing instruction. However, with the implementation, trying to implement this without guidance is really concerning. So as much as we want to have our leas take advantage of these options, the fact that there isn't guidance and there's concerns around fiscal penalties when it comes to the audit is very concerning. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good morning Anna Ioakimedes on behalf of Los Angeles Unified School District. Los Angeles unified supports the governor's efforts to provide additional means for students to recover lost time in the classroom and for schools to be compensated for the effort of serving those students through average daily attendance. However, we share the concerns outlined by the Lao regarding alignment with existing programs and the implementation timeline.

We recommend that the proposal be aligned with the existing Saturday school program, including using existing ratio and class size guidelines, and that implementation be delayed until 2025-26 to allow time to develop the program. On issue four regarding the budget trade offs, we appreciate the Legislature's early action preserve 375 million of the original allocation to the School Facilities Program as we await agreement on the school facilities bond and the November ballot. This funding ensures that the program can be fully operational until voters have the opportunity to approve the new bond.

Thank you.

Good morning Megan Baier with the Association of California School Administrators. We are very concerned about the governor's emergency school closure proposal. Lost learning is a very important and real issue. However, in an emergency the whole community is impacted. Students, staff, administrators are going to potentially be evacuated without access to power Internet. We don't think this proposal is feasible and respectfully request you to reject it. Thank you.

Good morning. Almost afternoon. Barrett Snider on behalf of several clients want to align myself with the comments. Miss Baier from AxA on behalf of the San Diego County Office of Education, San Ysidro School District, Ventura County Office of Education and the San Benito County Office of Education and High School District. Thank you.

Thank you, Mister Chair Jeff Vaca, representing the Riverside County Superintendent of Schools. I would like to align myself with the comments made by others regarding the j 13 emergency closure proposal. Would like to align myself with the comments made by Miss Tornatori with the county superintendents regarding the good work by the Lao in the report. And then lastly, on the issue of school facilities. The issue regarding equity, we believe is an important conversation to engage in.

We are a little bit concerned about efforts to try to do that and tie it to the passage of a statewide school bond. We have been supporting Assemblymember Murasuchi's legislation, AB 247 for the November bond, and we're committed to continuing the conversations about equity after we get a bond on the ballot and approved by the voters. Thank you.

Hi, I'm speaking on item number four. My name is Amy Campbell Blair and I'm here on behalf of True north, working in collaboration with Public Advocates to express my support for a school facility program proposal that is equitable for all schools and districts in California. I come from the community of Del Norte county that has a poverty rate of around 17% where almost 78% of our land is either state or federal public non taxable land. Our district has 11 schools.

Eight of these schools are between 60 to 70 years old. One is 95 years old. Our local community is working on getting a local bond passed this year. However, our existing facility concerns would require at least triple what our current bonding capacity is. I believe that a sliding scale state match program is needed to level the playing field for Low wealth districts like mine. My community shouldn't be forgotten just because our population is small, has less resources and is more isolated. Our kids deserve healthy and vibrant facilities too thank you.

Good afternoon. My name is Nicole Gon Ochi. I'm with Public Advocates. I'm here to discuss the school facility program proposal. As we heard today, there is an urgent need for an equitable school facility bond. And as discussed in detail in our February 21 demand letter on behalf of students, families, and grassroots community organizations from across the state, students and educators in Lowell school districts across California, in both rural and urban areas, both small and large districts are subjected to outdated and unsafe facilities because they cannot raise the necessary funds to modernize them.

Our letter also illustrates how many low wealth districts lack capital funding to create the spaces needed to fully embrace state and local priorities for whole child supports, including community schools and early childhood education. So in moving forward with a much needed education bond, it's imperative that the Legislature and Administration first fix the regressive and unconstitutional structure of California's capital finance system. The current system allocates modernization funds through universal 60% state match and 40% local contribution.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Kim Lewis representing CENIC, the Corporation of Education network initiatives in California, speaking on issue five. And we would just note that we do a lot of work with the k 12 high speed network to do robust planning processes to do network upgrades on a timely basis to meet the high speed broadband needs of our schools and students, as well as dedicating engineer staff to support online testing so that there's seamless and no interruptions when the students are doing their testing on the broadband infrastructure grant program.

We would be prepared to proceed starting July 1, should the funding be approved, to be able to do some extended projects beyond schools. And we know that the example noted in Clarksburg, we were able to bring fiber to a community that has long desired to have fiber in their communities. Appreciate any consideration for these funds. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good morning Mister chair and Members Pamela Gibbs, representing the Los Angeles County Office of Education. First of all, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. We'd like to thank the Superintendent of State Board of Education, Superintendent President Linda Darling Hammond for her comments today. We'd like to align ourselves with the remarks and her calling out students experiencing homelessness and students receiving supports from community schools.

Of course, as you know from our budget letter, we support these initiatives in the budget and ask that you continue to Fund these issues. We feel like today has been an issue related to serving the whole child, including broadband. These issues related to community schools also providing reports for county offices of education. So we'd like to rely align ourselves with the county superintendents, Associate California county superintendents and also those who raise the issues related to J 13.

Lastly, on item seven, related to school facilities, we have continually supported AB 247 and look forward to continuing with the effort right now to Fund our budget, our bond, school bonds, and also we have figures that we'll share with you that are Lake Ho wide that'll show the impact for the county as a whole for serving these issues and addressing equity. Thank you for your support.

Good afternoon. Patti Herrera, on behalf of the Oakland Unified School District, the Corona Norco Unified School District, and the San Diego Unified School District, speaking on item two, the districts are considered concerned about the one size fits all approach to the j13, a proposal by Governor Gavin Newsom, and believe that current law rightfully acknowledges the variability and the unpredictability of emergency events that may make providing instruction to students within five days of an emergency event impractical. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you all. Thank you. Chair Alvarez. My name is Allison Osorio and I'm here on behalf of the California Partnership for Future of Learning. The California Partnership for Future of Learning agrees that there is a high need for an education bond. California cannot live out its vision of community schools and early childhood education without an equitable bond. In moving forward with an education bond, it is imperative that the Legislature and the Administration first fix the regressive and unconstitutional structure of California's capital finance system. Thank you all.

Thank you.

Hi, good afternoon. Carol Gonzalez here on behalf of Ed Trust West to express our support for the reappropriation of the unused funds for the office and cradle to career to expand the e transcript tool. The expansion of the tool will allow for data integration between k 12 and community colleges, and this will help reduce remove the barrier that dual enrolled students currently encounter.

The expansion for facilitates the process for dual credit crediting of high school students to receive both credit and a through g matter requirements and ensure that it counts towards satisfying their certificate for degree at a community college, UC or CSU. And so for those reasons, thank you.

Thank you all. Appreciate all your testimony that brings us to the end of our hearing hearing today and look forward to seeing you at the next hearing. Thank you. We're adjourned.