This story is part of our February 2025 issue. To subscribe, click here.
This article is a sidebar to Comstock’s special report on education.
Efforts by California’s government to help students recover from the pandemic go back to its earliest days, with the state investing more than $36 billion to deal with pandemic impacts, according to Alex Traverso, a spokesperson for the California Department of Education.
The funding has gone to Learning Recovery Emergency Block Grants, expanded teacher recruitment, literacy specialists and much more.
“We’re starting to get to a place where some of these investments … we’re going to start seeing more and more of the results,” says Brooks Allen, executive director of the California State Board of Education and education adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Various new laws have also come into effect. These include California Assembly Committee on Education Chair Al Muratsuchi’s AB 2074, which was signed into law in September. It requires the state to create an implementation plan for its English Learner Roadmap Policy. “One of the biggest takeaways from the impact of the pandemic on public education has been the widening of the achievement gap,” Muratsuchi says. “We know from data reported nationally as well as in California that students from disadvantaged backgrounds, including English learners, were the most impacted.”
There has also been a lot of work around the intersection of education and behavioral health. The legislature passed the California Community Schools Partnership Act in 2021, creating schools that focus more on programmatic areas like integrated supportive services. Sen. Aisha Wahab’s SB 1318 set guidelines for schools having mental health staff in place in the event of a student suicide. Anthony Portantino, who termed out of the California Senate in December, introduced SB 224, which mandated mental health instruction in schools.
Sen. Dave Cortese says the California Senate Education Committee, which he serves on, “was quite aware and concerned and still is about the long-term effects of the pandemic on the mental health and behavioral health of our students.”
Beyond this, California voters approved Proposition 28 in 2022, allocating 1 percent of California’s budget for music and arts funding. “That’s really great,” says Jennifer Aldridge, a music teacher at Warren T. Eich Middle School in Roseville. “It’s opening up funds to hire qualified music and arts educators, and then there’s also funds for curriculum and supplies.”
Even when education bills have fallen short in recent years, they’ve spurred change. Sen. Akilah Weber Pierson introduced AB 2774 while she was serving in the California Assembly. Her bill was unsuccessful, but led Newsom to include $300 million in his proposed 2023-24 budget for equity-related purposes.
“No one would deny that having pretty much three years of a pandemic had an impact on society, had an impact on kids,” Portantino says. “But I also think anybody who sort of uses it as a ‘Look at how terrible people are, look at how terrible the government is,’ isn’t recognizing that the instincts and the impetus and the desire from policymakers and decisionmakers was to try to do the best they could with the information that was available and with the resources that were available … and really wanted to do the right thing by kids.”
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