California's Children

The Mission of California's Children

California is home to 56,138 foster children. Another 300,000 live informally in kinship care -- and 91% of all kinship families live below the poverty line. In California, a child is born into poverty every 5 minutes.

Over 2 million kids – 24.3% of the state’s total child population – live in poverty, and over 1 million of those children (11%) lives in “deep poverty” – the equivalent of a family of four living on $2 a day.

In the last four years, 1 million California children (7%) have been affected by home foreclosures; 1.2 million children have at least one parent who has lost his/her job. The Children’s Defense Fund tells us a child is abused or neglected every 6 minutes.

In California, every 3 hours, a child dies before his or her first birthday. Every 20 hours, a child or teen is killed by gunfire. At some time during the year, over 200,000 children between the ages of 12-17 will be homeless.

The challenge is clear. Our 9.25 million children needs us – all of us: experienced and compassionate professionals, volunteers, advocates, legislators, families – to collaborate, cooperate and communicate.

The role of California’s Children is to break the silos and feed that conversation.

 

Charters, nutrition & AEDs before Ass'blyAppro/Comm today

May 24, 2013: The Assembly Appropriations Committee, headed by Mike Gatto (D-Burbank), will consider more than 300 bills today, determining which pieces of proposed legislation will be passed on to the full Assembly for a vote. Among those are several affecting the lives of children:

AB 626/School Nutrition, rewrites education code to align state laws with federal laws and regulations set forth by the Healthy,Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, according to Food Policy Advocates in Oakland. The alignment affects "maintenance and appropriate use of the cafeteria fund (in which a district's school food revenues are held), as well as details about competitive foods sold outside the formal school meal program (e.g., vending machines, school stores). Among other changes, the bill specifies that "only beverages that meet specific nutritional standards may be sold to a pupil at an elementary school." Bill was sponsored by Nancy Skinner (D-Oakland) and Bonnie Lowenthal (D-Long Beach).

 AB 913/Charter Schools, a bill that expressly states that a charter school is subject to the California Public Records Act, the Ralph M. Brown Act, or, if it is operated by an entity governed by the Bagley-Keene Open Meeting Act, that law -- i.e., a charter will be required to follow the same open meeting, public disclosure and conflict of interest laws that govern traditional school district boards. Authored by Ed Chau (D-Alhambra). The California School Boards Association is a co-sponsor of this bill. It is opposed by the California Charter Schools Association: ("The changes in AB 913 cut to the heart of traditional charter school governance and contradict longstanding charter law offering autonomy and opportunities for different operating structures than districts.")

AB 939/Pupil and Personnel Health: Defibrillators, is on the "watch" list for the California School Nurses Organization (neither support nor oppose). The bill, with the intent of encouraging all public schools to obtain an Automatic External Defibrillator (AED) and to protect the district from lawsuits regarding its use (or nonuse),  would authorize a public school to accept "nonstate funds" to acquire and maintain the equipment. Authored by Melissa Melendez (R-Murrieta).

 

AB 1152: keeping Cal-SAFE safe from flexed categoricals in Ass'bly Appro'Comm today

UPDATE, May 24, 2013: AB 1152, to exempt Cal-SAFE from categorical "flexing" under the proposed Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) of the Brown '13-'14 budget [see backstory below], is up before the Assembly Appropriations Committee today, where it will either be passed on to the full Assembly or shelved.

February 27, 2013: "It is one thing for a school board to think about which of the K-12 programs are most important to the K-12 students in their district, and decide priorities. It is quite another to pit two different groups of children (K-12 students and young children of teen parents) against each other for funding." -- Nina Buthee, at left, executive director of the California Child Development Administrators Association (CCDAA).

CCDAA is sponsoring AB 1152, a bill authored by Assemblymember Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco), that would exempt California School Age Families Education (Cal-SAFE) Program from categorical "flexing" -- protecting funding for programs for teen parents from proposed changes to categorical programs. If passed, the bill will also require that unused Cal-SAFE funds not be retained by local education agencies (LEAs), but be returned to Cal-SAFE's state-wide budget line. 

The Cal-SAFE program, begun in 2000, works with teenaged parents, providing academic and support services to help keep them in school. According to TeenNow California, Cal-SAFE's in-school program has had a 75% graduation rate (compared to a national graduate rate of 33% for teen parents.) 

In an e-mail to California's Children, CCDAA's Buthee said: 

Buthee added, "Most of the categoricals serve K-12 students (Miller-Unruh reading program, text book funding, home to school transportation, etc., etc.).  CalSAFE’s child development dollars are targeted at a different group of children – the children of teen parents...

"Education for K-12 students is mandated by the state Constitution, and local boards cannot eliminate education for any of those students – they must spend the money on those students, it is just how to spend the money on them.  There is no mandate to serve the young children of teen parents.  What happens when there is budget pressure, including the pressure of negotiations with unions?  One group the board must serve, the other it can eliminate."

CCDAA is seeking additional co-authors.

Written by Taylor McCulloch.

Pop tax bill goes flat in Senate Appro'Comm

UPDATE, May 24, 2013: Just in time for the first official weekend of summer -- great news for Big Pop -- the state Senate Appropriations Committee held back SB 622; it will not be advancing for a vote on the Senate floor in this session of the legislature. April 25, 2013: SB 622, a bill proposing a tax of a penny-per-ounce on "sugary drinks" (the monies collected would fund "the Children's Health Promotion Fund, which this bill would create"), passed its first hearing Wednesday in the Senate Committee on Governance and Finance on Wednesday in a 5-2 vote along party lines. The bill was authored by Sen. Bill Monning (D-Carmel).

Sen. Yee on minors in solitary; SB 61 @ Sen. Appro'Comm today

May 23, 2013: The San Diego Union-Tribune online published an editorial this morning by State Senator Leland Yee (D-San Mateo-San Francisco); Yee holds a doctorate in child psychology. In January,  he introduced Senate Bill 61 to address the issue of juveniles in solitary confinement. It is being heard today in the Senate Appropriations Committee. Below, an edited version of Yee's editorial:

... the mind of a juvenile is still developing ...Young people are still able to learn from their mistakes and turn their lives around... Yet many policies commonplace in the juvenile justice system make rehabilitation less likely. One such policy is the use of solitary confinement on children.

At left, a photo by Richard Ross, whose latest project is "Suitable Placement: Juvenile Justice in America." This is from the Harrison County Juvenile Detention Center in Biloxi, Mississippi.

... I have introduced Senate Bill 61 to set uniform limits on the use of solitary confinement for kids...

Throughout ..California, minors in the juvenile justice system are being held in solitary confinement. Some of those kids spend 23 hours a day in a small box with no human contact, being allowed only a brief break to bathe and stretch their legs. Nationally, over half of youth who committed suicide while incarcerated were in solitary confinement, and 62 percent had a history of being placed there. The United Nations has called for a complete ban on inflicting this punishment on juveniles as it has been repeatedly proven to increase risk of suicide, worsen mental health, and make those subjected to it more likely to reoffend upon release. Despite all this, the practice is rampant. ... Six states — Connecticut, Arizona, Maine, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Alaska — have already banned the practice of putting juveniles in solitary for punitive reasons. Separation from other people for extended periods of time can easily result in disorientation and hallucinations, depression, anxiety, psychosis, and self-harm. Why would our state have a policy that inflicts or worsens mental illness?

Currently, there is no standard definition for solitary confinement in the juvenile justice system. The offense that can land a minor in solitary, the length of the stay, and the follow-up conducted by staff all vary from facility to facility. In addition, county reporting standards are nearly nonexistent; making it difficult to adequately understand the impact solitary confinement has on individual children. A uniform policy throughout the state will help to curb abuses of this practice...

Continuing this practice costs the public far more in the long run, as a lifetime of mental illness or recidivism that results in further jail time will be at the taxpayer’s expense. Considering it costs an average of $47,000 a year to incarcerate an inmate in California, this practice is too expensive both fiscally and morally for our state to afford.