CAPITOL REPORT June 2004 NATIONAL COUNCIL OF LA RAZA
CALIFORNIA LEGISLATIVE UPDATE CALHEALTH PROGRAM Overview: MediCal and Healthy Families programs provide an important safety net for Latino families, but there are a number of barriers that prevent families from enrolling in these programs. Many families seeking services have confronted obstacles that undermine health care access for all Californians, such as the lack of cultural and linguistic services, in addition to a complicated application and enrollment process. These problems are particularly acute for Latino children, who account for 62% of all uninsured children who are eligible for MediCal and Healthy Families. SB 1631 (Figueroa) would create the California Health Care Program (CalHealth) to coordinate with the MediCal and Healthy Families programs in an effort to reduce administrative costs, simplify the application process, and increase the number of insured health care recipients. By streamlining MediCal and Healthy Families into CalHealth, SB 1631 would simplify the complicated enrollment process to these programs and more effectively encourage the enrollment and retention of many Latinos who are currently discouraged from the programs due to the cumbersome process. Status: SB 1631 was held in the Senate Appropriations Committee suspense file because of the large cost associated with developing the CalHealth Program. NCLR Position: NCLR is supportive of measures such as SB 1631 which encourage and increase the participation of children in health programs since Latino children are currently among the most affected by the lack of health care coverage. One in three (32%) Latino children, ages 018, is uninsured, much higher than the uninsurance rates for White children (12%), Asian children (16%), and Black children (13%). NCLR also supports proposals that will reduce barriers IN THIS ISSUE: and make health care more accessible to Latino and immigrant communities, in particular, provisions that will (1) expand health care to all residents of California, CalHealth (2) provide continuous training of eligibility workers and outstation them in the Program community, and (3) simplify the application and enrollment process. To have a Community healthy productive California, steps must be taken to eliminate or reduce barriers Health Workers that prevent Latino and immigrant communities from accessing health care, and policy changes need to be made to ensure that all residents have access to quality Bilingual Services health care. COMMUNITY HEALTH WORKERS Overview: AB 1963 (Salinas) addresses health issues in Latino and underserved communities by requiring the Office of Multicultural Health (OMH) to encourage the use of community health worker programs and incorporate the use of promotores de salud, which are communitybased programs that utilize trained
Universal Preschool
Primary Language Assessment
Repeal of InState Tuition for
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community members to provide linguistically and culturally appropriate outreach, education, and access to services intended to improve health outcomes among Latinos. By providing culturally and linguistically appropriate health outreach, costly and debilitating preventable diseases could be dramatically reduced within Latino communities. In fact, for many Latino populations who are ineligible for health services or are located in rural areas, promotores de salud may be the only points of health outreach available. According to a recent study, 32% of male farmworkers, 90% of whom are Hispanic, said that they had never been to a doctor’s office or clinic in their lives. Another study found that only 15% of migrant farmworkers are able to access primary care services. Too often, health outreach programs and information do not reach underserved communities, further exacerbating the poor health conditions of underprivileged communities. Status: AB 1963 passed successfully in the Assembly and will soon be heard in the Senate Health Committee. NCLR Position: NCLR supports proposals that provide adequate cultural and linguistic services and outreach to the Latino and immigrant community concerning health care programs and public charge. Cultural and linguistic barriers often hinder access to adequate health care services for Latinos. The lack of health insurance and poor access to proper preventive medical attention have put Latinos in California at risk of higher incidence of diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and HIV/AIDS. It is therefore imperative for promotores de salud to continue providing trusted health information in a culturally and linguistically appropriate manner, in order to improve access to health services within Latino and immigrant communities. BILINGUAL SERVICES Overview: AB 2408 (Yee) would increase access to state government services for all Californians by clarifying existing state bilingual staffing requirements of the DymallyAlatorre Bilingual Services Act and ensuring that state agencies properly implement this existing law. Noncompliance of existing language access laws has exacerbated barriers to services. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act requires that recipients of federal funds provide meaningful access to services for limitedEnglishproficient (LEP) individuals. Further, the DymallyAlatorre Bilingual Services Act of 1973 requires bilingual staffing and services at each state agency when 5% or more of its clientele speak a language other than English. Yet, agencies have failed to comply with these federal and state laws, leaving many LEP individuals unable to access services to which they are entitled. In 1999, a State Auditor’s report concluded that many state and local agencies are not in compliance with the DymallyAlatorre Act. One of the major problems has been a shortage of bilingual staff at state agencies. AB 2408 would address these problems by clarifying the general requirement that bilingual staff should be hired in unfilled public contact positions when a state agency or the State Personnel Board has identified a deficiency in bilingual staffing at any of the agency's local offices. The agency's responsibility to hire bilingual staff ends once it is in compliance with existing law. Status: AB 2408 passed successfully in the Assembly and will soon be heard in the Senate Public Employment and Retirement Committee.
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NCLR Position: Census 2000 data show that 40% of all Californians five years old and over speak a language other than English at home. Threefourths of them are Spanishspeaking. The lack of language appropriate services and language barriers deprive residents of critical services, including health care, the ability to report crimes to law enforcement, and enforcement of labor and minimum wage protections. Children are often forced to interpret for family members in situations where they lack either the appropriate vocabulary or sophistication to translate. NCLR will continue to work on ensuring that adequate bilingual services are made accessible to Latino and immigrant communities and assist in monitoring and enforcing the implementation of enacted legislation that will improve services to LEP communities. UNIVERSAL PRESCHOOL Overview: Early childhood education and development provide critical preparation for children’s success in school. English language acquisition is also critical at early stages. In California, 48% of children 05 years old are Latino. Yet, of children who attend preschool before kindergarten, only 24% are Latino, compared to 57% of White students and over 40% for both Asian and Black students. There is now a “Preschool for All” movement to establish a state program that would provide voluntary access to formal preschool programs for all children from three to four years of age over the next ten years. Status: The California Teachers Association (CTA) and film director Rob Reiner introduced an initiative for the 2004 ballot, which was pulled earlier this year. However, universal preschool proposals are currently being drafted, including Assembly Bill 56 (Steinberg, Chan, Daucher, and Liu), as well as another attempt at a ballot initiative for 2006. NCLR Position: NCLR strongly supports proposals to expand access to highquality early childhood education programs for Latino and English language learner (ELL) children, including the establishment of a universal preschool program in California. There is growing consensus around the need for high quality preschool programs made available to all communities as a means to reverse negative trends in public schools and promote school readiness for all children. Yet, the success of these initiatives largely depends on the implementation of policies that address access to and quality of early education and care programs for Latino children. NCLR is therefore working, in conjunction with Preschool for All coalition partners such as Preschool California and Children Now, as well as with several NCLR affiliates, to ensure that any effort to implement universal preschool in California is truly universal and includes outreach efforts to urge immigrant and ELL parents to enroll their children. Similarly, access will not benefit these children if they do not receive culturally and linguistically appropriate services where needed. Given that Latinos make up a significant proportion of the preschool population, universal preschool legislation should include efforts to recruit early childhood education instructors with language and cultural competence, and provide professional development in these areas for existing personnel. PRIMARY LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT Overview: Current California policy requires all ELLs to take normreferenced and standardsbased assessments in English, regardless of 1) the amount of time they have been enrolled in a public school, 2) whether they are proficient in English, and 3) the language of instruction (i.e., whether they are in a bilingual/alternative program). A primary language assessment is available to ELLs who have been NCLR SACRAMENTO OFFICE ♦ 926 J STREET, SUITE 905 SACRAMENTO, CA 95814 PHONE (916) 4489852 ♦ FAX (916) 4489823
enrolled in a public school for less than a year. However, only the scores for the Englishlanguage assessments are used in determining academic progress and growth for ELLs and their teachers. These scores are also used to determine monetary incentives for students, schools, and teachers, and to determine “adequate yearly progress” for these students. Assembly Bill 2413 (Diaz) would require the Department of Education to develop California Standards Tests of reading/language arts, mathematics, science, and history/social science in the primary language of ELL students, and would require pupil data from those assessments to meaningfully include English learners in California’s accountability system. Status: AB 2413 passed successfully in the Assembly and will soon be heard in the Senate Education Committee. NCLR Position: NCLR believes that California’s current policy is inconsistent with the intent of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The NCLB is intended to produce accurate measures of student achievement and progress. In addition, these data shall be used to hold schools accountable for helping students meet academic benchmarks and make adequate progress. Congress and the Bush Administration recognize that for ELLs this may mean nativelanguage assessments. Moreover, it is clear that testing in reading and mathematics is “practicable” in Spanish. The development of academic assessments of English language arts and mathematics in the primary languages of ELL pupils, as required by AB 2413, would produce accurate information about how well California’s schools are faring in educating ELLs, which would lead to improved educational outcomes for these students. Unless these changes are made, California’s accountability system would be out of sync with the NCLB requirements, would not yield useful information about students’ progress, and would lead to the misidentification of schools in need of improvement as required under the NCLB. REPEAL OF INSTATE TUITION FOR IMMIGRANT STUDENTS Overview: In recent years, California, along with other states such as Texas, Utah, and New York, has taken steps to be more inclusive of its immigrant student populations by offering instate tuition to immigrant students. Now that the state has established a fair tuition policy for California high school students to ensure that all of our children have the opportunity to strive for the highest level of academic success, regardless of their immigration status, SB 1503 (McClintock) was introduced in an attempt to repeal AB 540 (Firebaugh, 2001) and eliminate instate tuition for California’s undocumented high school students. Status: SB 1503 was overwhelmingly defeated in the Senate Education Committee on a 110 vote. NCLR Position: Given that our economy demands a highlyskilled, more educated workforce, it is unwise to deny postsecondary education to these highachieving young Californians. College graduates have higher earnings than high school graduates – this has implications not only for the wellbeing of the communities where those graduates reside, but also for the tax contributions they make to the state. Attempts such as SB 1503 would only exacerbate the high dropout rate that currently exists among Latino students, and the state risks losing students who are among its best and brightest. NCLR strongly opposes any proposals that would reflect a step backward for California, and continues to promote federal legislative proposals that would assist states in their efforts to pass legislation offering instate tuition to undocumented students, as well provide an avenue for certain students to become permanent legal residents. NCLR SACRAMENTO OFFICE ♦ 926 J STREET, SUITE 905 SACRAMENTO, CA 95814 PHONE (916) 4489852 ♦ FAX (916) 4489823
If you would like additional information about California legislation, please contact the NCLR Sacramento Office at (916) 4489852. You may also contact the California Policy Analysts via email: Cristina Huezo (chuezo@nclr.org) or Ana Gámiz (agamiz@nclr.org).
NCLR SACRAMENTO OFFICE ♦ 926 J STREET, SUITE 905 SACRAMENTO, CA 95814 PHONE (916) 4489852 ♦ FAX (916) 4489823