• On March 5, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a $6.6 billion package to accelerate the return to in-person instruction in California. According to Newsom’s office, the funding will support safety measures and “expanded learning opportunities such as summer school, tutoring, and mental health services.” The legislation also affirms the state’s commitment to reserving 10 percent of vaccine doses for education workers. The governor’s signature on the package comes after it passed in the Legislature with bipartisan support. “This package of funding and supports for our schools recognizes that in-person education is essential to meet not only the learning needs, but the mental health and social-emotional needs of our kids—especially the youngest and the most vulnerable,” Newsom said in a statement. “The state is committed to creating safe learning environments for students and safe workplaces for educators as we build on months of progress to accelerate the pace of school reopenings across California.”
• U.S. Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Santa Barbara) joined his House colleagues in passing HR 1, also known as the For the People Act, on March 3. The democracy reform bill package aims to protect and expand the right to vote, according to Carbajal’s office. “I proudly voted for HR 1 to enact the transformational change our government needs. This bill delivers on our promise to clean up corruption, end the dominance of big money in politics, and fortify our ethics laws so Americans can have faith in our democracy again,” Carbajal said in a statement. The act would reform historic barriers to voting, like voter registration systems and voting hours, as well as create automatic voter registration nationwide and expand absentee and early voting opportunities, according to Carbajal’s office, among other reforms.
• The Newsom administration announced on March 4 that the state will set aside 40 percent of vaccine doses for communities hit hardest by the pandemic. Gov. Gavin Newsom also announced a new vaccine equity metric to increase vaccinations in those communities, and a change to the Blueprint for a Safer Economy reopening system. “This approach recognizes that the pandemic did not affect California communities equally,” according to Newsom’s office. “Forty percent of COVID cases and deaths have occurred in the lowest quartile of the Healthy Places Index (HPI), which provides overall scores and data that predict life expectancy and compares community conditions that shape health across the state,” according to a statement from Newsom’s office. In reaction to these disparities, the state will “shift Blueprint tier thresholds to allow slightly higher case rates per 100,000 population once more inoculations have occurred in the communities suffering the most, allowing counties to move to less restrictive tiers,” according to the governor’s office. The state set a goal to deliver at least 2 million doses to these lowest quartile communities. It estimates that it has delivered 1.6 million so far as of March 8 and will achieve the 2 million mark in the next two weeks. “Once that threshold is reached, the Blueprint for a Safer Economy will be updated to allow for somewhat higher case rates in each tier, with an overall effect of allowing counties to loosen health restrictions at a somewhat accelerated, but still responsible, pace,” the statement said. “The Blueprint will be updated again when 4 million doses have been administered in the vaccine equity quartile.”
This article appears in Mar 11-18, 2021.