Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Tuesday, March 2, and I’m writing from Los Angeles.
After weeks of negotiations and almost a year of distance learning, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic legislative leaders announced an agreement Monday to offer schools $2 billion in incentives to reopen elementary campuses. The proposal is expected to pass in the Legislature on Thursday. It stops short of mandating that schools must reopen, with that decision ultimately still a local one. Parents will also have the right to keep their children at home and learning virtually, if they choose to do so.
[Read the story: “Newsom, legislators strike deal to offer schools $2 billion in incentives to reopen campuses” in the Los Angeles Times]
As my Sacramento colleagues Taryn Luna and John Myers report, the plan would prioritize California’s youngest students first, aiming to incentivize districts across the state to return transitional kindergarten through second-grade students to the classroom by April 1. Those incentives would be offered in counties with fewer than 25 new daily confirmed coronavirus cases per 100,000 residents — a threshold almost all California counties currently meet.
“We expect that all of our TK-to-2 classrooms open within the next month,” Newsom said Monday. “We want to see more happen beyond that,” the governor continued, saying that counties in the state’s red tier, with seven or fewer cases per 100,000 residents, would be required to extend classroom learning to all elementary school students and at least one grade of middle or high school to access all available funds.
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