Parents, students, and community groups successfully sued California to demand more resources for underserved students, especially low-income Black and Latino kids, who suffered significant educational setbacks during the pandemic.
The lawsuit led to a $2 billion settlement aimed at helping these students recover from lost learning and mental health impacts.
The state legislature must now enact the provisions, which include extended school days, tutors, and mental health professionals.
“I’m not getting a fat check!” one mother said. “But I’m hoping that the kids will benefit. That’s the biggest thing that I was worried about. All kids benefitting.”
“The computers were glitchy…We live in the airport flight paths; sometimes we weren’t getting internet connection. Sometimes the school Internet connection … wasn’t working as well,” she said. “We were kind of just thrown into a situation to be teachers for three different kids, you know, at three different schools … with no training at all.”
The lawsuit highlighted the challenges faced by students, such as lack of digital access, inadequate teacher training for remote learning, and the overall failure to assess and address students’ needs post-pandemic.
“This proposal includes changes that the Administration believes are appropriate at this stage coming out of the pandemic to focus use of these one-time dollars… on the students who were most impacted and continue to need support,” California Board of Education spokesperson Alex Traverso said.
“It is the most urgent crisis in America today,” attorney Mark Rosenbaum said. “And hopefully this settlement will be a model for 49 other states to say that there is nothing more important than we can do.”
“We know in California that there were between 800,000 and a million kids who had no digital access whatsoever for 18 and 19 months,” he said. “What does that mean? It doesn’t mean they got bad education. It means they got no education.”
“Since returning to in-person instruction in the 2021-2022 school year, Jordan E. has not had an assessment of his learning or mental health needs,” the suit reads.
“We’re asking poor kids to pay for the public health measures that were meant to, you know, benefit us all,” Harvard University professor Thomas Kane said.
“But the higher poverty districts like Montgomery are still a half a year or more behind,” Kane added. “Here in Massachusetts, the high poverty districts did the opposite of catching up last year, they actually lost additional ground.”
The settlement is seen as a potential model for other states to address historic educational inequities.
