The health order says that individuals should continue to adhere to requirements laid out in the current COVID-19 Public Health Guidance for K-12 Schools in California as well as the COVID-19 Public Health Guidance for Child Care Programs and Providers and guidance on day camps and other youth activities. An update to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s K-12 operations guidance is expected in the near future. “I will continue to monitor the scientific evidence and epidemiological data and will amend this guidance as needed by the evolving public health conditions and recommendations issued by the CDC and other public health authorities,” said Tomás J. Aragón, director and state public health officer.

I’ve read countless articles about students with no internet or poor connections, about struggles with mental health and social isolation, about disengagement from school and declining academic performance. Our English learner students are coping with all these challenges — often at a greatly disproportionate level — while simultaneously trying to learn in a school system that is not designed to serve their needs. As a result, the pandemic has compounded the ongoing disparities between English learners and their peers.

Maintenance of equity provisions are meant to help ensure that schools and LEAs serving large proportions of historically underserved groups of students — including students from low-income families, students of color, English learners, students with disabilities and students experiencing homelessness — receive an equitable share of state and local funds allocated for pandemic recovery.

These schools and LEAs historically have been under-funded and are more reliant on state funding than are schools and LEAs with lower concentrations of underserved students. Accordingly, if state or local funds are cut, the maintenance of equity provisions ensure that LEAs and schools serving a large share of students from low-income backgrounds do not experience a disproportionate share of such cuts in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, and that the highest poverty LEAs do not receive a decrease in state funding below their FY 2019 level.

Referred to as “Budget Bill Junior,” the bill outlines many of the agreements reached between the Governor and the Legislature but leaves several items outstanding. It remains to be seen which of these outstanding issues will be resolved in budget trailer bills, which may be released in the coming days.

That’s why CSBA is providing an update to Charter Schools: A Guide for Governance Teams, a guidebook made specifically for board members and superintendents serving as charter school authorizers in California. This update is available in a convenient e-book format on Amazon’s Kindle Store (https://amzn.to/2RMqw4Z).

Since this guidebook was last published in 2016, significant changes to California’s school funding, accountability and assessment systems have impacted all public schools, including charter schools. Charter schools are adapting to a host of new academic content standards and accountability requirements, and charters, districts and county offices of education are all being affected by the implementation of Assembly Bill 1505, signed into law in 2019 and effective as of July 1, 2020. These, and many other updates, are changing the way in which charter schools operate and how governance teams fulfill their responsibilities as they relate to educating all students.