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On Friday, Governor Newsom released his $222.2 billion 2020-21 Budget Proposal.   This is 11th year of recovery since the recession or as investors have noted "economic expansion."  General Fund (GF) revenues are up over $5.8 billion for allocation to new investments and reserves (NOTE:  LAO projected a nearly $7 billion surplus in November).  The projected reserve amount at the end of the Fiscal Year (FY) is $21 billion.  In the 2019-20 budget a majority of funding was captured as one-time and not ongoing.  This appears to be the case too for the 2020-21 budget.

Looking at this proposal from the lens of supporting a family-centered and child-centered agenda, an agenda where families and children living in poverty and disconnected from the needed supports to lift them up are addressed, this is a welcoming start.  A few highlights from the 2020-21 proposal:

Child Care & Early Learning

Other

The release of the 2020-21 proposal is a good start for conversations, but for struggling working families and children that need access to child care in order to lift themselves up from poverty and break cycle of poverty, there are better more strategic investments that must be made.   While our economy has grown and strengthened, over 2.2 million income eligible children have been left behind with no access to any care.  Of the over 2.2 million in need, there are fewer than 59,000 child care slots for our poorest of working families to access for their babies while they try to secure and maintain employment.  

Poverty in California is not a linear issue.  To make meaningful investments in the lives of these families and children, we need to invest in the core infrastructures  of child care, housing, food, transportation and health care that intertwine to lift families up.  

Finally, creating a department that focuses on early childhood is visionary.  However, to truly be impactful and meaningful then it too must also take oversight of all of the programs that interface and impact the lives of the most vulnerable children.  If the focus of the new department is solely to look at the "early care and educational" aspect of a child's life, then keep all of the programs under the California Department of Education.  That way there is some coordination of the child care and early learning programs with the preschool, transitional kindergarten and our K-12 system.

California 

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Link to Asm. Santiago's Biography.

The most competitive races in the Assembly are evenly split three ways: swing seats Democrats recently acquired and must defend, toss-up seats the GOP will try to hang onto, and open seats in partisan strongholds where members of the same party will fight it out. One Riverside-adjacent district is a test case for independents.

Though Democrats expect to retain " gigamajorities" in both chambers, each party contains multitudes. Key races are intra-party battles - pitting far-left candidates against liberals, arch-conservatives against moderates, establishment faves versus iconoclastic outsiders. The outcomes will trace the ideological trajectory of California politics, and determine what policy is possible.

In each of the key races below, a chart shows how the district is currently being represented along a left-to-right ideological spectrum.  CalMatters created these by gathering each incumbent's "yes" and "no" or skipped votes from the 2019 Assembly session and feeding that data through software. The software - created by political scientists from UCLA, the University of Southern California, Rice University and the University of Georgia - groups lawmakers based on how frequently they vote with one another.

Election Day is March 3. And then what? Under California's top-two primary system, the first and second place winners, regardless of party, will move on to the general election ballot in November.

A broad group of San Diego County youth advocates, community leaders and agencies are uniting in a new coalition that aims to reduce child poverty in the area by 50 percent over the next decade.

"What we're really trying to do is connect the dots to elevate what already is being done," said Erin Hogeboom, director of  San Diego for Every Child: The Coalition to End Child Poverty," which officially launched Wednesday.

Data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows 40 percent of the county's children age 12 and younger lived below 200 percent of the  federal poverty level in 2017. Hogeboom said the coalition is using 200 percent as a poverty indicator because the cost of the high cost of living in San Diego.

The data means more than 190,000 children had unequal access to healthy food, stable housing, reliable healthcare, quality childcare and early education.

Thanks to California's new education funding law that intentionally underfunds California public education, the State is now $1.3 trillion in debt (mostly school debt).  California has $337 billion in local school facility bond deb t. This does not include state school facility bond debt, and federal CREB bond debt used to pay for Solar Panels and other Green Energy Projects.

The Federal government should pull all Federal education dollars from the State of California until the State meets its constitutional obligations to California residents. Under the State's new education funding law, per pupil funding is limited to 2007-08 levels plus inflation. This means that the Capistrano Unified School District's per pupil funding will remain at or below $10,000 per pupil into the foreseeable future.