Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom  a $2.7 billion initiative to expand transitional kindergarten to all 4-year-olds. The state gave school districts only 13 months to prepare for the first wave of the expansion, which began this school year.

That’s not much time, especially during a pandemic and in the midst of a dire . School districts had to make plans for implementing the new grade, hire teachers and aides and find classrooms for the new students. 

By far,  has been the largest challenge for districts. Statewide, districts need thousands of teachers and aides to staff transitional kindergarten classes throughout the four-year rollout of the expansion.

This year, some districts were able to meet most of their needs by moving teachers who were doing other jobs, including subbing, running reading programs or teaching other grades. Now districts are worried about finding qualified teachers for the next few years of the expansion. The scramble to find staff is also creating a domino effect on child care programs and preschools whose teachers are ideal candidates for higher-paying transitional kindergarten classrooms.

“TK is a great opportunity for students and beneficial for families as well, but the rollout is so fast that I don’t know that we have all the staffing and workforce available to meet the needs,” said Noemy Salas, senior director of Early Childhood Education Programs for the Chula Vista Elementary School District, in San Diego County. “All of the districts are hiring. We are competing for the same teachers and that is a concern.”

The California Education Department did not release  for how to implement the expansion of transitional kindergarten until February of this year. Once they had the guidance, districts had to seek approval for their plans from local boards of education by June 2022 for a fall start date.

Education Deputy Superintendent Sarah Neville-Morgan said the districts had all of last year to plan for the expansion, and the multi-year rollout gives them several years to grow to meet full demand. In addition, she said her department  with school districts, provided plan templates and strategized with districts about how best to expand their transitional kindergarten classes even before the guidance was released in February.

“We can completely see and understand they are feeling the pressure. They are dealing with multiple factors and trying to find staff and prepping classrooms for preschool-age children,” said Neville-Morgan, who leads the , which oversees the early learning and care, multilingual support and special education divisions.

“It goes back to seizing the moment. This was California’s moment to transform education.”

She points to the Education Department’s efforts to help districts prepare and launch the program, such as informational webinars, and scheduling office hours so districts could ask questions and share concerns. The department also created workgroups and design teams to plan how to best carry out the expansion, and recently created a  to help districts outreach to community members and parents. The Education Department has also offered grants to districts for planning, implementation, renovation and new construction, and teacher training.

The expansion was bold but the execution has been arduous, said Bruce Fuller, professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley who also heads the Children’s Forum, which researches education issues in the state.

“Ideally, expansion will accelerate in year two as more families learn about the TK opportunity and Sacramento distributes facilities, dollars, and trains necessary teachers in steadier fashion, moving beyond a glacial pace,” Fuller said.

State education officials and legislators say the districts shouldn’t have been surprised by the expansion because it has been discussed for years.

“This is decades in the making. It’s a big deal for California, for our kids, for our education and success,” said Assemblymember Kevin McCarty, a Sacramento Democrat who is the chair of the Assembly’s education finance subcommittee. McCarty authored a  to expand transitional kindergarten that was later included in the governor’s . 

For years McCarty and early education advocates pushed for expanding transitional kindergarten — and failed. But this time, several factors made it possible: 

• The pandemic required state officials to think differently about how to educate children who were not attending online classes or struggling academically;
• Newsom made early education a priority and supported the expansion; 
• Plummeting school enrollment made room for 4-year-olds on campuses;
• Political groups and labor organizations aligned on the expansion.

“A lot of children during the pandemic stayed at home, and TK gives them a gentle onramp to our schools,” Neville-Morgan said. “Because more families kept younger children at home, we think having TK launched now creates some of those school readiness components.”

Most districts are moving more slowly with the rollout schedule.

Los Angeles Unified needed 500 teachers and aides to staff the expansion this year, said Dean Tagawa, executive director of the district’s . But with reassignments of current staff, Tagawa said his department only hired 20 people outside the district.

As the largest district in California, Los Angeles Unified had a roster of qualified teachers because it has several programs for kids under 5, including transitional kindergarten, state preschool classrooms, and early education centers for 2- to 4-year-olds. It also ran various programs over the years that targeted 4-year-olds for school readiness. 

“It was like we just kept moving,” Tagawa said. “It wasn’t as challenging and we had the teachers already.”

For other districts, it has been tougher and there is still anxiety about finding enough teachers.

Sacramento City Unified has 346 kids enrolled, said Aida Buelna, transitional kindergarten administrator for the district. It has 19 transitional kindergarten classrooms, up from 10 before the expansion. Buelna said the district plans to add another 15 to 19 classrooms next fall.

“There was no way we were going to be able to do this all at once,” Buelna said. “For next year, we want to start hiring early.”

At Chula Vista, finding teachers for the dual language immersion transitional kindergarten classrooms, where students are taught in two languages, has been even more challenging because they require an extra certification, Salas said.

In the process of building out transitional kindergarten, Salas lost at least 10 instructional aides working in the district’s preschool program. Now, she’ll have to fill those jobs, too.

To find qualified teachers and assistants, districts are looking directly at the legion of child care and preschool teachers already working with 4-year-olds at private and nonprofit preschools and child care centers. Some programs have lost teachers and aides to districts, which pay more and offer summers off and pension plans, and preschool and child care providers are worried about losing even more as districts need more teachers in the next few years. 

“They are the best ones to be teaching TK but it’s leading to stress on both sides,” said Rita Palet, executive director of early education programs and services for the San Diego County Office of Education. “You are going to see that every new year — staff leaving preschool to go to transitional kindergarten.”

Palet and other education officials say they support early education teachers who want to make the switch. But they say they feel as though the state didn’t take into account how difficult it would be for child care and preschool programs to fill the gaps left by departing staff and students.

“We have highly institutionalized state preschool and Head Start programs. You can’t just move those kids and move those teachers instantly without doing real damage,” Fuller said. “I don’t think anybody thought through how slowly those tectonic plates, that are interrelated, would be moving.”

Neville-Morgan and McCarty said recent increases in the reimbursement rates the state pays providers for child care and preschool for low-income children should help with hiring and retention. But advocates and providers say the increased rates are not enough to meet state staffing requirements for younger children, who require more adults per child than 4-year-olds.

In California, the typical center-based preschool teacher with a bachelor’s degree earns about $42,600 a year compared to  for a transitional kindergarten teacher, according to a June study by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at UC Berkeley.

The center found that nearly half of all  have a bachelor’s degree or higher and three-quarters have a child development permit. The center has been advocating for an expedited certification pathway for preschool teachers based on a similar process for private school teachers who are able to get a multiple-subject credential without attending a preparation program, said Elena Montoya, senior researcher at the UC Berkeley center.

“Teachers who might leave their work in a preschool to go work in TK may love their job and love what they are doing,” said Montoya. “But they may have to make this choice because their wages are not enough to subsist on.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom decisively beat back a recall effort Tuesday, as almost two-thirds of voters chose to keep him in office for the remainder of his first term.

While mail-in votes await to be counted, the race was called for the no votes. Republican Larry Elder, the frontrunner to replace Newsom if a majority of voters had cast ballots for removing him, received 47 percent.

In mid-summer, opposition to Newsom’s pandemic restrictions on schools and businesses appeared to be strong enough for the recall to succeed, but a push to fend off the effort intensified in recent weeks with support from Washington. On Monday, President Joe Biden campaigned for Newsom in Long Beach, calling Elder “the closest thing to a Trump clone that I’ve ever seen in your state.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has sometimes been on the opposing side of the state’s large charter community, signing legislation that added roadblocks to launching and expanding schools.

But that doesn’t mean charter leaders are ready to vote him out. Margaret Fortune, who leads a network of schools serving mostly Black students, called the Sept. 14 recall disruptive.

“This moment, when we are in the midst of a pandemic that just won’t quit and when parts of the state are on fire, is not the right time to create chaos in state government,” Fortune said.

Launched by a former sheriff’s office sergeant , the recall effort picked up steam after Newsom attended a large, not-socially distanced dinner with lobbyists at a fancy Napa Valley restaurant in November despite the states’ restrictions on . But since then, he has signed a state budget that includes of funding for schools and earned the teachers unions’ support for a statewide COVID-19 for school employees. Even so, over 40 challengers — a slate that includes a conservative radio talk show host, Olympian and reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner, and a wealthy businessman who lost to Newsom in 2018 — qualified as replacement candidates.

Their success could rest a lot on attitudes about education — on issues from reopening to mask mandates and new quarantine rules enacted in response to new outbreaks.

The ballot asks two questions: Should voters remove Newsom from office, and if so, who should take his place? Democrats on the list argue that the party needs a backup plan if the recall is successful. It wasn’t clear until July that Newsom could be vulnerable, but in recent days his chances of remaining in office have improved.

The show the campaign to keep Newsom leading over the campaign to remove him by a margin of 8 percentage points. Among the candidates running to replace him, conservative talk show host Larry Elder is out in front with 24 percent of the vote, followed by Democrat , a 29-year-old real estate developer and YouTuber, with 10 percent.

Under the rules, a candidate with as little as 20 percent of the vote could become governor if more than half of voters choose yes on the recall.

Some experts believe aspects of Newsom’s education agenda hold wide appeal for voters.

Bruce Fuller, a sociology and education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, cites new preschool slots and an increase in that puts the state above the national average among the “huge wins for California’s children and families” under Newsom.

“None of the governor’s 46 challengers have put forward clear plans for buoying middle-class families or lifting our schools,” he said. “Dashing Newsom’s policy progress would only hurt the state’s families and future prospects for their children.”

‘Fighting for our kids’

Supporters of the recall, however, argue that the state’s slow pace toward reopening schools in the spring and a rocky back-to-school season this fall will be on many voters’ minds — “especially parents who are frustrated by how district and union leaders have responded to the pandemic,” said Aaron Garth Smith, the director of education policy at the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank.

Emily Diaz, a San Diego parent, is among those who say the pace of reopening has influenced her opinions as a voter.

“It has shifted how I view the world and where I thought the good guys were,” she said. “I do have a hunch that there are a lot of parents that really had our eyes opened when we were fighting for our kids to go back to school.”

Reopen California Schools, a statewide organization, is backing state Assemblyman and education committee Vice-Chair , a former high school English teacher in Los Angeles whose mother was a special education teacher. In March, he voted against Newsom’s , saying it didn’t go far enough.

“We’ve seen Kiley fight for us,” said Jonathan Zachreson, who founded the reopening group. “When I realized the teachers unions were influencing the governor, that’s when I said, ‘We need to support the recall.’”

The California Teachers Association endorsed Newsom when he ran in 2018, contributing over $1 million toward his campaign, and they’re strongly opposed to the recall. While the governor could have local union contracts to force schools to reopen, he didn’t, leaving districts to negotiate with their unions when students could return.

Kiley said he thinks the fact that many students missed a year of in-person learning is a huge factor in the election, as well as what he called “onerous” reopening policies, such as universal masking and “excessive quarantining of healthy kids.” In the , 6,500 students missed one or more days during the first week of school because they either tested positive for COVID-19 or came in contact with someone who did. Several other districts across the state are sending students home because of as well.

“We need to get our schools functioning in a normal way again,” Kiley said. “We need to bring some sanity to it all.”

Another chaotic return to classrooms could draw more attention to private school choice — a policy that has never gained traction in California. There are currently two efforts to put an education savings account initiative on the November 2022 ballot. Kiley proposed a for families’ to fund at-home learning costs with private donations, but it didn’t go anywhere.

shows a loss of 160,000 students in public schools last year, with many leaving for charters and homeschooling. “Policymakers haven’t given families any options,” Smith said, “while states such as West Virginia, Arizona, and Florida have worked to make education dollars more flexible.”

and — who voiced admiration for former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos during a recent rally — are also among those who say they would expand school choice if elected.

During two debates so far, which Elder skipped, the other Republican front runners pledged to reverse Newsom’s statewide mask mandate in schools, saying they would allow local districts to decide.

‘Following the process’

The chance that Elder or any other candidate with less than a quarter of the vote could become the next governor of a state with the fifth largest economy in the world prompted in federal court last month. The plaintiffs argue the recall election is unconstitutional because even if 49 percent of voters choose to keep Newsom in office, the victory would go to a candidate with a much smaller number of supporters. They want Newsom’s name added to the list of possible replacements or a new recall procedure.

But voters have already received ballots in the mail, and those in favor of the recall are “just following the process,” said Fortune.

It’s one she’s been through before.

Fortune served as education adviser to former Gov. Gray Davis when voters recalled him in 2003 and chose actor Arnold Schwarzenegger instead. The difference between then and now, she said, is that Schwarzenegger assembled a high-profile that included both Democrats and Republicans with past government experience.

She doesn’t have confidence that any of Newsom’s challengers could “stand up a government.”

Another contrast to 2003 is that a higher percentage of voters chose Schwarzenegger than chose to keep Davis in office — 49 to 45 percent.

“There’s virtually no chance of that happening this time,” said Ted Lempert, president of Children Now, an advocacy organization, and a former Democratic state assemblymember. He added that the recall hasn’t been like a normal gubernatorial election where there would be a “robust discussion about education.”

Whether Newsom can prevail largely depends on turnout, Fortune said.

“There’s an enthusiasm gap, where Republicans are more energized than Democrats,” she said, but agreed with Lempert that those who want to challenge Newsom’s record on education can wait until next year when he’s up for reelection. “That’s what November ‘22 is for. It’s right around the corner.”

Almost all schools with fourth and eighth grades were offering some in-person learning as the end of the school year approached, but more than half of students at those levels remained in hybrid or fully remote programs, according to the final round of school reopening data from the Institute of Education Sciences.

The latest update of the 2021 School Survey, released Thursday, shows the rate of Black and Hispanic students attending full, in-person learning continuing to inch upward, but still falling at least 20 percentage points below that of white students. Asian students were the least likely to attend in-person learning, with 55 percent remaining in remote-only classes.

“Reopening schools and welcoming back students was the first step, but the hardest work is still to come,” Institute for Education Sciences Director Mark Schneider said in a statement. “We must do all we can as a nation to ensure that all students, especially the most high-need students who have already borne the brunt of the coronavirus and its effects, recover from any learning losses.”

The Department of Education launched the in March to comply with an President Joe Biden issued on his first full day in office. At the state and national level, the data confirmed that white students were returning to in-person learning at higher rates than Black, Hispanic and Asian students. It also revealed that some students in remote learning were receiving no more than two hours or less of live instruction each day. With many districts continuing to offer remote options this fall, elementary-age students still not eligible for vaccines and rising concerns over whether the Delta variant of COVID-19 could lead to increased transmission rates, a mixture of schooling arrangements will continue this fall.

, for example, Gov. Gavin Newsom is requiring districts to offer families with a medically fragile child a remote, independent study option for the 2021-22 school year. And the from the National Parents Union shows that a third of parents plan to hold their children out until they are vaccinated.

“While the positive overall trends continue, and more Black and Hispanic fourth and eighth graders were being offered and enrolled in in-person instruction, disparities remain,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement. “As a nation, we cannot rest until all students — including students of color and other historically and presently underserved students — have an equal opportunity to receive in-person instruction in school buildings that are fully reopened and safe.”

While Black and Hispanic students were more likely than Asian students to attend in-person learning in the spring, recent surveys, including one from the RAND Corp., show that preference for online learning is higher among Black and Hispanic parents. A University of Southern California survey shows 15 percent of Black parents plan to keep their children in remote learning, and in Los Angeles shows that bullying, racism and low academic standards, in addition to COVID-19, are among the reasons Black parents kept their children home in the spring.

“It’s great that more districts are adding virtual options, but they really need to be of consistently high quality,” said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. “I’m skeptical that will be the case given the struggles we saw last year. It’s critical that districts up their game in remote learning by pursuing creative partnerships and by providing intensive teacher training.”

The institute will monitor school options and families’ choices with a new survey launching in August. Designed to build on existing data and capture the pandemic’s ongoing impact on students, the School Pulse Panel will track enrollment in 1,200 elementary, middle and high schools and cover issues such as health and safety, special education and mental health.

Anna Saavedra, a behavioral scientist at the University of Southern California, said spending federal relief funds to make improvements to ventilation systems, air-conditioning and bathrooms are one way to make families feel more positive about the return to school this fall. Communicating COVID-19 prevention strategies could be especially important for Asian families, she added.

“Asian-American families were more cautious in their behaviors about COVID-19 than other racial groups,” she said. “Asian-American families also experienced more discrimination. So particularly for this group, and especially with the dominance of the Delta strain, communication about COVID-19 mitigation practices and weekly case rates will be important.

Using the rest of the summer as a way to rebuild connections with parents and students is also important, she said.

“Districts and schools need to learn what local parents want and clearly communicate a whole-child focus and benefits for students and their families,” she said. “Parents will need more communication than they’ve ever received in the past and for districts to act upon their input.”

Other findings from the latest release include:

• The Midwest saw the highest rate of students attending full-time, in-person learning, with 64 percent of fourth-graders and 59 percent of eighth-graders.
• The percentage of students enrolled in full-time, in-person learning increased for white, Black and Hispanic students between April and May, but not for Asian students.
• The survey aimed to capture data from 3,500 schools each at fourth and eighth grade, but participation lagged. The latest results reflect results from 2,100 schools with fourth grades and 2,000 schools with eighth grades.