California’s most vulnerable students may be seeing increased funding soon

About 133,000 students in California attend alternative schools.

Alison Yin/EdSource

If California’s proposed budget is approved as it currently stands, county offices of education will get an increase of $80 million in ongoing funding to be used toward juvenile court schools and alternative schools. It’s an amount that staff in county offices say would help them better support the students they serve and that education researchers hope will include accountability reporting for greater transparency into how county offices allocate such funding.

The proposed increase in Proposition 98 funds would go toward both juvenile court schools and alternative education schools run by county offices of education. Alternative schools serve those who have faced challenges in their traditional public school, including expulsion, suspension and chronic absenteeism. Some of these schools enroll students with unique needs, such as teen parents, students experiencing homelessness, and students in the foster care system.

A set of formulas outlined in Proposition 98 are used to determine the minimum funding level for education in California, year after year. One of these formulas takes students’ average daily attendance into account, which assumes that students are enrolled in a single academic institution for long periods of time. This is most often the opposite in the juvenile justice system, as the population of students they serve remain in their schools anywhere between several days to a few months.

As the state’s juvenile justice system fully shifts to being entirely county-led at the end of June, juvenile court schools will also be serving some students that were previously held in state facilities for years at a time. But for most counties, it’s far more common that the majority of their students will not be enrolled long enough to finish a single semester.

“There’s something inherently wrong about the idea that this particular population has a funding mechanism that is so variable and inconsistent, when I think everyone in California would say that that is absolutely not what they want,” said Susan Connolly, assistant superintendent of student services in Placer County.

“They want these particular students who have had the most traumatic experiences and who have had potentially disproportionate disciplinary experiences and maybe not positive school experiences, to have absolutely the most stable funding and access to all of the supports and services that they require.”

As legislative leaders and the governor negotiate on the final budget, the possibility remains that the $80 million increase may not make it through.

In the Northern California county, the daily student attendance has ranged in recent years from four to 30 on any given day, according to Connolly. And this doesn’t account for emergencies, like when a fire broke out a few years ago and they needed to suddenly house six additional students from neighboring El Dorado.

While it may not be uncommon to see 30 students in a single classroom, such a sight is rare in juvenile court schools, which serve students involved in the juvenile justice system. Students are rarely placed in a single classroom, or even the same living unit — where they are placed depends on various factors such as the seriousness of their infraction and their age. Given the unpredictability in day-to-day enrollment, administrators must still fully staff their schools with teachers and other education staff like behavioral therapists and social workers, Connolly said.

Connolly said they may have a classroom with one to three students or several classrooms with a higher number of students. They may be housing a seventh grader plus 24-year-olds, for example, each requiring a different level of education, she said.

“I have to have appropriate staff for that amount of units regardless of the number of students that I have or the number of units that are open on that particular day, because it could change very quickly,” Connolly said.

About 120 youths entered Placer County’s single juvenile hall this past school year, and the average length of stay was 21 days, she said. About five of these students were there for more than 90 days.

Some say the proposed funding increase should include transparency measures to better understand the quality of instruction being administered by county offices of education.

A 2023 report from the ACLU Southern California, National Center for Youth Law, and the East Bay Community Law Center found that the top five largest county offices of education in California lacked the transparency required to evaluate the quality of education being offered due to a lack of “clear public-facing information about curriculum or student support systems,” the report authors wrote.

“The main thing that we’ve been hoping for is that the Legislature would build in some additional accountability and transparency mechanisms with this $80 million,” said Atasi Uppal, director of the education justice clinic at East Bay Community Law Center and co-author of the report.

The Legislature has not indicated if such accountability measures would be included in this fiscal allotment if it were to be included in the final budget.

San Diego County has two court schools and 26 alternative schools, which are often referred to as county community schools. Each of those 26 alternative schools has different funding needs, said Paul Gothold, San Diego County’s superintendent.

The school that enrolls student parents, for example, offers child care along with a pregnancy and parenting program.

“In a district, you do your enrollment projections, you staff up, you open school, and you have this wiggle room to shuffle folks around and deal with the numbers when kids are actually there,” Gothold said.

Echoing county staff from other regions of the state, Gothold said funding court schools and alternative schools similarly to traditional public schools is “a basic and fundamental flaw.”

“The kids come from incredibly extraordinary circumstances, a lot of that associated with being incarcerated and the trauma that comes with that,” he said. “The level of support, the level of need for our children is really unprecedented.”

On Census Day, the first Wednesday of October during the 2021-22 school year, San Bernardino County in Southern California had 93 students enrolled. By the end of the school year, they’d enrolled a cumulative total of 661.

The majority of these students, as is the case for other counties, stayed for a short period of time, according to Myrlene Pierre, the county’s assistant superintendent of student services.

Because San Bernardino is a large county, Pierre has more people on her staff than Connolly does in Placer County; still, she said additional funding could help them expand their services.

“We always have the basics covered regardless of the funding, but when we’re looking for extras to really make it a rich and valuable experience for the students, which is important, that’s where we’re looking for additional funds,” Pierre said.

Those extras include activities such as learning to use artificial intelligence programs like ChatGPT and access to language classes, she said. The proposed budget increase would also be used to fund behavioral health counselors, providing additional professional development for teachers, and ensuring students have access to A-G coursework.

“These are our most vulnerable children and they have the most unstable funding and resources, so I’m very excited to have this idea of something that makes sense for our students that’s crafted to support their unique needs,” said Placer County’s Connolly.