During this March 29 webinar sponsored by Kidsdata.org and the California Department of Public Health, panelists discussed how to describe the burden of childhood adversity in your community, how to frame your message most effectively, and how to engage and mobilize your community to address the roots and effects of childhood adversity. You can review the recording and presentation slides by clicking here; you can check out the responses to questions asked during the webinar by clicking here. 

Posing significant challenges for educators, about 1 in 8 students in California schools has at least one parent who is undocumented, according to a new brief from the Education Trust-West. You can read the article by Louis Freedberg on the EdSource website by clicking here.

Despite the recent demise of the AHCA, health care will still face serious federal threats. Children Now is keeping up the drumbeat to protect health coverage for California's children and youth. As part of their ongoing efforts, you can review their recent blog post about the importance of the ACA provision to expand Medicaid for former foster youth, which over 18,000 former foster youth living in California currently benefit from, by clicking here. You can also check out their op-ed for the Fresno Bee, which details the importance of Medi-Cal for low-income kids in California, by clicking here.

California's school funding law, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), gives school districts flexibility-and an unprecedented opportunity -- to spend district dollars on early childhood education. It also provides parents, community members, and early childhood champions a chance to weigh in on how districts spend their resources. To help local advocates garner much needed funding for early childhood programming, Children Now created these helpful resources:
Step-by-Step Guide: You can review a step-by-step guide to help contact local district leaders and encourage them to fund early childhood programming in their local school districts by clicking here.
Sample Letter: You can read the sample letter that Children Now created for local advocates to use in encouraging their district board members to adopt a resolution that identifies your district as a preschool-12 district by clicking here.
Sample Resolution: You can review Children Now's sample resolution by clicking here.

Children Now recently sent out a new set of parent engagement messages to help schools communicate directly with parents about Common Core and the Smarter Balanced Assessments, which students are taking again this spring. Children Now's messaging was shared with more than 10,000 schools across the state and is based on the findings of parent focus groups that Children Now recently conducted with EMC Research. You can review the focus group findings by clicking here. You can also read Children Now's messaging in English and Spanish by clicking here. Another set of parent messages focused on the assessment results will go out to schools in the summer when the score reports are released.

Children Now continues to work hard to ensure fiscal transparency and accountability in education and recently ran a sign-on campaign in support of Assembly Bill 1321 (Weber), which will ensure that the state begins reporting actual school-level expenditures so that parents, students, community groups, and the public can see where education dollars are going and engage in the local planning and decision-making process. You can read a recent op-ed that Children Now wrote for the East Bay Times on the topic of budget transparency in schools, by clicking here. You can also check out a KQED interview, "California Launches New School Assessment Dashboard, Drops API Score," with Managing Director of Education Policy Samantha Tran discussing the recent release of the state's accountability dashboard, by clicking here.