It looks like our legislators are still working out the State Budget and they are including additional changes to independent study.
Proposed legislation, AB 167 and SB 167, are aimed at resolving some of the many problems with this year’s state budget. While the language may fix some of the issues that legislators created with AB 130 the new bills create burdensome new issues. The proposed bills, AB 167 and SB 167, showed up on Monday’s Labor Day holiday. Again we are dealing with bills that have been hastily written during rushed negotiations between the Governor and legislative leaders and hearings in both houses of the Legislature. These Education Trailer Bills must be adopted by the end of this week, September 10.
Some of the issues we have with the bills are:
They preclude schools from receiving so-called “emergency ADA” attendance credit normally allowed by long-standing laws protecting schools’ funding during emergencies, including pandemics, when students are quarantined due to infection or exposure to COVID-19. This prohibition is retroactive to September 1, 2021 and would last through the end of the school year. The one exception to this prohibition is in cases of staffing shortages due to quarantines and where no other staffing options (e.g., substitutes) are available. This provision will be problematic for many schools where enrolled students are generating less-than-normal attendance due to quarantines, especially including classroom-based students forced into independent study.
In other words, it prevents schools from receiving ADA funding if students miss school because of COVID quarantine, UNLESS the kids miss school because their teacher is quarantined. So teachers matter but students don’t.
Expands a new requirement to implement “tiered reengagement” strategies for independent study pupils. Under current law that was imposed as part of this summer’s original budget trailer bill, AB 130, independent study students who do not attend for three+ school days or 60 percent of school days in a week are subject to several mandated reengagement procedures. The new clean-up legislation would expand this requirement to students who do not participate for more than 10 percent of the instructional time in a four-week period, creating a huge time-tracking challenge for independent study programs that do not typically count minutes. Worse yet, it also ties the tiered reengagement to a new synchronous instruction mandate. Students who do not participate in the (often-unpopular) synchronous instruction offering for 3+ days or 60 percent of the time in a week would also be subject to the burdensome reengagement mandate.
In other words it changes the “tiered reengagement” strategies for Independent study pupils who do not attend for three+ school days in a week, expanding it to those who don’t participate for more than 10 percent of the time in a 4 week period. This will force independent study programs and students to track their time minutes. It also will now require synchronous instruction. Forcing students to participate in synchronous instruction for 3 or more days a week.
The AB 167 version of the new budget trailer bill includes a “fix” to allow classroom-based charter schools’ students to generate independent study ADA during quarantines without crossing the threshold into “nonclassroom-based” status. This “fix”, however, is limited and only applies to ADA generated while under a quarantine order. Classroom-based schools offering independent study to substantial numbers of non-quarantined students (i.e., students whose parents are choosing independent study) would still be at risk. This provision is missing from the SB 167 version of the bill, apparently due to opposition from anti-charter legislators (O’Donnell and crew) in the Assembly (where the SB 167 version currently sits).
In other words there is a “fix” in one of the two bills to allow classroom-based charter students to generate independent study ADA during quarantine, but does not apply to non-classroom based students or non quarantine students choosing independent study. So if you put your kids in independent study for fear of the huge COVID numbers in your area, the school won’t get money for them.you have to send them to school and have them contract COVID first, then they can do independent study and the school will get your tax dollars (the money that is supposed to follow our children to educate them.
We must take action before Friday!
Please help me spread this information far and wide by sharing this post to your social media profile and your groups.
Please call your legislators offices and let them know that you want them to protect the independent part of your child's independent study program.
Share that our children have been thriving in independent study schools for many years prior to COVID school closures and distance learning, and we need them to keep the independent study options open for students who need them.
If you want to read more here are additional details:
Bill Text: