My name is Adriana Paniagua. I am a current undergraduate attending UC Berkeley, as well as an Equity fellow for Children Now. I was able to achieve these opportunities following my K-12 education in the San Fernando Valley. During my time in the Los Angeles school district, I was able to witness firsthand the lost opportunities that close friends and peers experienced because of their struggles in language attainment. These colleagues lost access to the college-bound academic track that impacted their future options at an early stage. These experiences shaped my understanding regarding the need for effective, equity-centered policy action. I wish that my school district had received external supports to improve their programs for LTELs and help my fellow students reach reclassification. 

For this reason, I recommend the board pursue Option 4 to maintain the current Differentiated Assistance approach for 2025 and study the issue in the 2026 work plan. 

My name is Kavya Suresh and I’m from Santa Barbara County. I’m a student at UC San Diego, and an Equity Fellow for Children Now. I entered California’s public school system as an English Learner, and with the help of community support, including English Learner reporting, I was able to reclassify in four years. However, those supports were not made accessible to many of my friends and peers, who continued to face barriers to reclassification as they advanced to junior high.  

Two years ago, I served as the student board member of Santa Barbara Unified school district, and I learned that students who were performing exceptionally on ELPAC were unable to reclassify because of their performance on the CAASP/Smarter Balanced English Language Assessment. As a result, they were also unable to access important college-prep courses. While Children Now supports the Board’s proposed compromise to use the ELPI Red and Orange for the 2025 Dashboard, we recommend adding this issue to the 2026 Accountability work plan to develop other options to account for the ELA and math assessment for our LTELs.  

Good morning, my name is Hattie Rose and I am a Children Now equity fellow for the Children’s Movement of California and a recent graduate of UCLA. I would like to urge the board to hold schools accountable for science and commit to incorporating it into the accountability system in 2026. Having attended public schools in San Francisco, I know firsthand that many schools undervalue and underfund their science programs and that as a result, students miss out on opportunities for academic growth. In my experience, my school’s science program lacked proper lab equipment and very little support for hands-on learning. Consequently, when I got to college and was exposed to a broader STEM curriculum, I felt completely underprepared and like I had missed out on this essential subject in my education. That is why we must hold schools accountable for science so that we can identify these gaps in our system early on and ensure that students have the tools they need to succeed. Thank you for your time. 

Good morning, my name is Jillian Smythe, and I am a Children Now Equity Fellow and an incoming senior at UCLA.. 

I grew up in the public school system in a very rural section of the Central Valley, where access to fully accredited and adequately trained teachers is scarce. The consequences of this scarcity and the ignorance about it severely impacted my academic achievement. For example, I consistently scored in the bottom 10% on state tests over multiple years. If I had not been able to access outside aids during the latter half of middle school and high school, I would have surely never made it to UCLA. Even with the additional support I received outside of school, I remain largely behind in subjects such as science, having taken courses taught by instructors who were not properly credentialed.    

By increasing transparency to teacher data at the school level, families in similar situations would have been able to access the information needed to determine whether the school their child attends has the proper staffing to meet their educational needs. This is why I support greater transparency about staffing between schools within a district and set criteria for performance in the equitable distribution of teachers. 

Thank you.  

Good morning. I’m Vivi Spitz, a UC Berkeley student and Equity Fellow at Children Now, and want to make recommendations about accountability for DASS schools. 

DASS schools serve our most vulnerable student populations and often inherit students with educational deficiencies in 11th or 12th grade. Our accountability measures don’t work well for this student population. We currently use four-year graduation rates or 11th-grade tests, metrics that reflect the student’s past, not the school’s impact. That’s like blaming the janitor for the mess in the classroom.  

As the federal government backs away from K-12 education, it provides California with the opportunity to move in policy directions previously not allowed.  

We need a new model, one that measures what DASS schools are built to do: support one-year graduates, reduce chronic absence, and help students transition into successful outcomes. The California Alternative Education Task Force already laid out smart, specific indicators. I encourage the Board to put them to use.