Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Journal

California’s education system is in a unique position. As Covid-19 restrictions are being lifted across the country, schools and childcare facilities are losing the pandemic emergency funding that kept them barely hanging on as attendance waned and students fell through the cracks. However, in California, Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed off on a $307.9 billion state budget that features a record $128 billion toward reviving TK-12 public schools and community colleges. Understanding what to do with this significant budget allocation in order to serve California’s children best will be vital for educators and politicians in the coming years. This piece addresses how the state may use the influx in funding to address inequity. This is particularly pertinent in California, a highly diverse state with vast differences in socioeconomic status, ethnicity, identity, and need in the children served from district to district. Focusing on the Los Angeles Unified School District as a case study, the article delves into how the community school model has transformed suffering schools, and child outcomes, with pupils who faced high rates of dropout now regularly attending secondary education. Looking beyond the urban public school landscape, the article then presents how a rural school district has managed to defy the odds, focusing on the importance of teacher retention and programming. This article argues for an enormous need for change in the state– California has consistently performed poorly in public education quality rankings, and, unfortunately, the effects of this are distributed unequally, depending upon child socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and postcode.