California's Children

Senate passes Farm Bill; Boehner's thumbs up for $20bil SNAP cuts in House version

UPDATE, June 13, 2013: The U.S. Senate passed the farm bill (see history of current session's bill below) Monday (June 10); the House is expected to take up its version next week, with Speaker John Boehner announcing yesterday that he would vote for it.

The Senate bill that has passed cut $4.1 billion from the SNAP (food stamps) program; it is expected that the House bill will cut $20 billion from SNAP -- "a move," says Ron Nixon in the New York Times, "that will almost certainly be rejected by the Senate." (In 2011, the last year for which stats are available, 45% of food stamp recipients were under 18.)

California Food Policy Advocates notes that the House bill would also reverse CA's efforts to simplify paperwork and streamline enrollment in SNAP by removing the 'heat and eat' initiative (as in S 954) and by restricting the use of 'categorical eligibility' policies which promote asset development and retention. 'Categorical eligibility' policies are pivotal in preventing Californians from hitting 'rock bottom' and exhausting their resources before applying for SNAP. 

UPDATE, May 16, 2013: The House of Representatives Agriculture Committee approved a $940 billion farm bill late last night in a 36-10 bipartisan vote. Erik Wasson, reporting for The Hill:

...Overall, the farm bill crafted by [committee chair Frank] Lucas (R-OK) and ranking member Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) cuts $20.5 billion from food stamps... No major changes were made in committee to the nutrition...programs [e.g., Women, Infants & Children (WIC)]. The food stamp cuts saw the most sustained attack during the markup. Liberal Democrats attempted to reverse the food stamp cuts in the farm bill but their main amendment... was defeated by a vote of 17 to 27. ...[Opposition said] the cuts are needed because the Obama administration has engaged in a “concerted effort to increase the dependency class” during a heated debate that ultimately involved dueling citations from the Bible on how to treat the hungry...The food stamp cuts in the House farm bill are $16 billion more than are included in the Senate Agriculture Committee bill, which has $4 billion in cuts...

UPDATE, May 15, 2013:The Senate Committee on Agriculture approved a farm bill yesterday (details below the jump); the House Committee on Ag will vote on its version today. California Food Policy Advocates says that, if enacted, both of the farm bill proposals would have a significantly negative impact on California households by "slashing monthly benefits or by eliminating benefits altogether."

Budget compromise includes $51mil more for CalWORKs planning

UPDATE, June 11, 2013: In the budget agreement reached last night between state legislators and Governor Brown, $51 million in non-general fund money was included to "bolster CalWORKs grants." This amount is set to increase to $150 million in budget year '14-'15, according to David Siders and Jim Sanders writing in today's Sacramento Bee. As the Los Angeles Times noted last week, this money will go to counties to "help...develop aid plans faster for eligible families and to create more subsidized jobs in the private sector for welfare recipients...Brown has resisted raising the direct cash grants for CalWORKs families, arguing that the economy needs to recover further before the state takes on additional costs..."

Fact check: In January 2013, 23.5% of Californians (8.7 million people) were reported to live in poverty. Over 1.7 million of these people are children -- nearly 25% of all children in the state. 

June 6, 2013: A week ago, on May 30, the state Assembly passed AB 271, a bill to repeal the Maximum Family Grant (MFG) rule in CalWORKs (overruled a law that benefits to a family did not increase when a child was born into a family that was already receiving benefits). The MFG policy had been voted down as an initiative in 1992 by voters, but became law as a budget rider to a then-Governor Pete Wilson package in 1994. As stated by AB 271's author, Assemblymember Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles), at left, "In the years since the family cap became state policy, there is still no evidence that it has worked to disincentivize welfare abuse or to slow the birthrates of affected families. Yet one out of six Californians lived in poverty as of 2011, including nearly one out of four of the children in the state..."

2012 API rankings available online in CDE data base

May 29, 2013: The state Dept. of Education has released revised data for the state, county, district, and individual school levels on those entities rankings on the Academic Performance Index (API). (APIs are based on test results from the Standardized Testing and Reporting program -- STAR --CAPA.

The links to individual rankings may be accessed here.

Born in N'Cal in '74: your birth records "have been compromised"

May 21, 2013: A reel of film containing the images of 2,000 State of California Birth Records for 1974 was found "in an unsecure location," according to a tight-lipped press release from the California Department of Public Health earlier this month.

These birth certificates, the CDPH says, "contain names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and some medical information...CDPH has no evidence that this incident has resulted in any unauthorized use of this information...[and] continues to collaborate with the California Highway Patrol in this investigation."

Who is at risk? If you were born -- or you are the parent of someone who was born -- in May, June, July, August or September of 1974 -- in any of these Northern California counties: Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Shasta, Siskiyou, Solano, Sonoma, Stanislaus, Sutter or Tehama.

If you believe you may be affected, please call 855-737-1796 (8-5, M-F), or email 1974birth@cdph.ca.gov.

CDPH recommends that anyone who believe his or her information may be contained on that film place a fraud alert on their accounts with the three major U.S. credit reporting agencies, get copies of their credit reports, "and take other appropriate steps to monitor and protect their identities." 

"You can leave your hat on" ... LAUSD ends "willful defiance" suspensions

UPDATE, May 17, 2013: The Los Angeles Unified School District board voted on Tuesday, May 14, to end suspensions for "willful defiance" (see history below). According to CBS News, the policy, which was affecting black and Hispanic students in disproportionate numbers, allowed staff to suspend "disruptive" students for such offenses as refusing to remove their hats or turn off their cell phones.

UPDATE, April 17, 2013: Reporting yesterday in EdSource, Louis Freedberg announced that Friday State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson will release a new database showing that fully 50% of California school suspensions (and 25% of expulsions) are for "willful defiance" of authority.

Meanwhile, tonight, the Santa Clara County Board of Education heard a report on SC county suspension numbers. As reported by Jennifer Wadsworth in San Jose Inside: 

...In Santa Clara County, which counted an enrollment last school year of 265,618 pupils, 52 percent of the 19,770 suspensions last year were “discretionary,” ordered for things like “willful defiance,” cutting class and smoking on campus, according top a 2012 report from child advocacy group Kids in Common.

Dana Bunnett, director of Kids in Common, and Mariel Caballero at left, of the Santa Clara County Public Defender’s Office, will deliver a report titled “Zero Suspension Policy,” which outlines not only recent stats but also suspension alternatives.

From Freedberg's article:

The new database shows that African American students, who make up only 6.5 percent of public school students, comprise 19 percent of all suspensions. By contrast, white students make up 26 percent of student enrollment, but only  20 percent of suspensions. Latino students are suspended at approximately the same level as their proportion of the total student enrollment.

California Department of Education officials provided a preview of some of the new data at a hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Delinquency Prevention and Youth Development chaired by Assemblymember Roger Dickinson, D-Sacramento. “The California data is long overdue and I am very pleased that the department has collected the data and is releasing it,” he said.

Legislation authored by Dickinson (AB 420) that will restrict the use of the ill-defined “willful defiance” category [see history below the jump]...

The new database [was] collected as part of the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System (CALPADS)...

In the 2011-12 school year, there were 710,869 in-school and out-of-school suspensions in California schools, but many students were suspended more than once. The new database shows that a total of 366,629 students were suspended during that year – a suspension rate of approximately 6 percent. That means that about one in 16 of all public school students were suspended at least once during the school year. Because students are suspended much more frequently in high school, suspension rates for grades 9-12 are likely to be far higher than that.