The California Legislature passed Assembly Bill 1666 in 2019, requiring the California Complete Count – Census 2020 office to partner with local educational agencies to make information about the 2020 U.S. Census available to students and parents. Accurately counting families with young children has presented challenges for the Census Bureau over the years, and with shelter-in-place orders and other COVID-19-related challenges in 2020, states have had to get more creative to make sure everyone gets counted. Even ”Sesame Street” is trying to get the word out.
As of Aug. 2, California’s Census self-response rate was 64.2 percent. The California Census Challenge is a competition for the 482 incorporated cities and 58 counties in the state to achieve the highest response rate. To ensure the competition is fair, cities and counties will compete against other cities and counties with similar population sizes. The top three cities and counties from each tier, including their hardest-to-count tracts, will receive a plaque honoring their hard work from the California Census Office. For more information, visit https://bit.ly/2E2if6c.
On March 26, 2018, the Department of Commerce announced that the list of census questions it submits to Congress would include a question asking the citizenship status of every person in the United States. Multiple lawsuits were filed to stop the citizenship status question from being included, arguing that asking about citizenship would repress responses from non-citizens and their citizen relatives. California filed one of the lawsuits, noting that the state and its local communities would be particularly damaged by repressed responses from non-citizens and citizens alike because of California’s relatively large foreign-born and non-citizen populations. On June 27, 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the citizenship question from being included on the census.
On July 21, 2020, the Trump administration issued a memo calling to exclude unauthorized immigrants from the Census count, instructing the Commerce Secretary to include in the report the census results in a manner that would permit the President to leave out the number of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. from the census apportionment count. Excluding undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. from the census count would break with historical practice and longstanding precedent and could alter representation and funding for states throughout the country. Multiple states have filed lawsuits challenging the memo already. On July 28, 2020, California, along with multiple cities and the Los Angeles Unified School District, sued the Trump administration in California v. Trump, alleging that the memo issued would cause harm to California by cutting the number of representatives allotted to the House of Representatives and by decreasing federal funding to the state, its local communities and its schools. CSBA’s Education Legal Alliance is monitoring the case and the potential opportunity to provide amicus support on behalf of CSBA’s members.
Please note that the information provided here by CSBA is for informational purposes and is not legal advice. Please contact your legal counsel for questions related to this information.