To evaluate each legislator’s vote records, CSBA scored their favorable vote percentage on a total of 25 bills. Each of these bills are measures that CSBA sponsored, actively supported or actively opposed in 2022.

Important notes about the scorecard:

• The favorable vote percentage is relative to how many total opportunities each legislator had to vote on these 25 bills.
• Each of the 25 bills were heard on both the Senate and Assembly floors, giving each legislator at least one opportunity to vote.
• Education and Appropriations committee members had more opportunities to cast votes on these 25 bills than other legislators. Members of those committees are noted in the scorecard for context.
• Instances where a member did not record a vote, either due to an abstention or an absence at the time of the vote, do not count as a favorable or unfavorable vote.

A detailed view of how your legislator voted on all 25 bills is available at www.csba.org/2022_scorecard.

Among the 25 bills your legislators are scored on, CSBA is recognizing specific votes on three CSBA-sponsored bills and two additional critical measures for schools:

• Assembly Bill 2295 (Bloom, D-Santa Monica): Addresses the educator and housing shortages by removing bureaucratic hurdles and streamlining the process for school districts to develop education workforce housing on vacant school property. CSBA Position: Sponsor. Signed into law on Sept. 28, 2022.
• AB 2584 (Berman, D-Menlo Park): Protects school board election integrity through four substantial recall election reforms: (1) increasing the number of signatures required for the notice of intent to recall an elected officer; (2) applying standards for accuracy and review to the arguments offered by recall proponents as well as the response from the official being recalled; (3) requiring that petitions state the estimated cost of the recall election; and (4) allowing for the consolidation of recall elections with a regularly scheduled state or local election that occurs within 180 days after the recall qualifies. CSBA Position: Sponsor. Signed into law on Sept. 29, 2022.
• Senate Bill 490 (Caballero, D-Merced): Places schools under an unreasonable standard prohibiting the purchase of foreign food products unless the international option is at least 25 percent less expensive than the domestic alternative. CSBA Position: Oppose. Signed into law on Sept. 28, 2022.
• SB 1061 (Laird, D-Santa Cruz): Provides voters with additional information about the cost of special elections for school and community college boards and reduces the expense associated with those elections, preserving money for student services that would otherwise be diverted to pay for redundant special elections. CSBA Position: Sponsor. Signed into law on Sept. 29, 2022.

Each of these bills is called out in the scorecard, allowing you to easily review how your legislators voted on CSBA’s priority legislation.

CSBA met with great budget and legislative success in 2022. After months of advocacy from school board members across the state, the final budget delivered major wins for CSBA’s top priorities. The investments made to rebuild the home-to-school transportation program, boost Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) base funding, provide attendance relief to counteract the impacts of pandemic, and ensure the success of expanded school nutrition programs will improve the lives of the California’s students for years to come.

CSBA’s advocacy also ensured its three sponsored bills were signed into law this year: a two-bill election reform package, AB 2584 and SB 1061, and AB 2295, the education workforce housing bill.

In a disappointing turn late in the signing period, Gov. Newsom signed SB 490, which CSBA opposed. The restriction to food purchasing options is expected to cost an additional $474 million per year and will need to be funded annually in the state budget to avoid endangering the success of California’s universal school meals program. Gov. Newsom also signed another CSBA-opposed law, SB 931 (Leyva, D-Chino), which will impose additional penalties on public employers, including school districts, for allegedly “deterring or discouraging” employees from joining or participating in a union.

Several major education proposals did not make it to the finish line in 2022, most notably SB 830 (Portantino, D-La Cañada Flintridge), which would have transformed school funding by funding districts based on enrollment rather than attendance — but with undesirable restrictions and mandates. Ultimately, it did not move forward after the Assembly Education Committee declined to bring it up for a vote. Gov. Newsom also vetoed a number of major education proposals with costs not funded in this year’s budget, including bills to make kindergarten mandatory for entry into first grade (SB 70, Rubio, D-Baldwin Park), and to require districts to provide full-day kindergarten (AB 1973, McCarty, D-Sacramento). The veto messages for these measures may offer insight to those reading the political tea leaves, as the Governor warned that with lower-than-expected revenues looming, the price tag for such bills must be accounted for in the annual budget.

Schools will be in a new political landscape in the 2023–24 legislative session as a large class of freshman legislators arrives in Sacramento. Nearly one-third of members are new to the Legislature and the impacts on education may be significant, as schools now face a Legislature in which just 20 remaining lawmakers were in office when LCFF was adopted. Leadership changes are afoot as well, as Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood) has agreed to hand over the gavel to Assemblymember Robert Rivas (D-Salinas) in June 2023 and new chairs are taking over leadership in the Senate and Assembly Education Committees.

Legislators will also face a starkly different fiscal reality after two record budget surpluses, as a slowing economy leads to a projected budget deficit in the coming year. While the Legislative Analyst’s Office projects that a combination of growth in the Proposition 98 guarantee and required reserve withdrawals will blunt the impact of the slowdown on schools, it will leave little breathing room and come at the possible cost of exhausting reserves in 2025–26. Legislative leadership in both houses have expressed their commitment to protecting historic school funding gains, but taken in context with the Governor’s veto messages, it is clear that the 2023–24 budget cycle will be more challenging than in recent years.