BILL ANALYSIS
Senate Appropriations Committee Fiscal Summary
Senator Christine Kehoe, Chair
1300 (Correa)
Hearing Date: 05/10/2010 Amended: As Introduced
Consultant: Dan Troy Policy Vote: ED 6-1
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BILL SUMMARY: SB 1300 would authorize school districts to
provide teen dating violence prevention education as part of the
sexual health and health education program offered to pupils in
grades 7-12. Parents would be allowed to excuse their children
from this education and related assessments, as specified. The
bill would also require the State Board of Education to
incorporate teen dating and sexual violence into the next
revision of the health education curriculum framework.
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Fiscal Impact (in thousands)
Major Provisions 2010-11 2011-12 2012-13 Fund
Curriculum Development $450
General
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STAFF COMMENTS: This bill meets the criteria for referral to the
Suspense File.
Current law authorizes local education agencies to offer health
education and comprehensive sexual health education. Current
law authorizes school districts to use the School Site Safety
Block Grant funding for age-appropriate instruction in dating
violence prevention.
Current establishes a process for the review of curriculum
frameworks, which are the blueprints for implementing the
state's academic content standards. The framework development
process typically takes 24 months from initiation to approval by
the State Board of Education (SBE).
While the health curriculum framework would have been reviewed
in 2011, the process for reviewing frameworks and adopting
instructional materials has been suspended since July 2009,
pursuant to AB 2 of the Fourth Extraordinary Session (Chapter 2,
July 2009), which among other things, prohibited the SBE from
reviewing frameworks and adopting instructional materials until
the 2013-14 school year.
This bill would specifically authorize the provision of dating
violence prevention education as part of a health education
program offered to pupils in grades 7 through 12. Districts
that choose to offer this education would be required to notify
parents at the beginning of the year of their right to exclude
their children from the instruction. Additionally, if dating
violence prevention is scheduled after the start of the school
years, parents would have to be notified at least 14 days prior
to the session. Finally, this bill would require the State
Board of Education to incorporate teen dating violence
prevention into the health education curriculum at the time of
the next scheduled revision.
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SB 1300 (Correa)
The California Partnership to End Domestic Violence estimates
that there are approximately 70 agencies providing an average of
85 teen dating violence prevention sessions per year to
California pupils in grades 7 through 12. As over 70 percent of
these sessions are scheduled after the start of the school year,
some concern has been expressed that the cost of the 14-day
notification period would discourage districts from offering the
sessions and that the sessions would lose immediacy (frequently,
these sessions are scheduled quickly after an incident has
occurred).
The Department of Education, citing the costs of the recent
revision of the physical education curriculum framework,
estimates costs of approximately $450,000 to incorporate teen
dating violence prevention into the health education curriculum.
Given the suspension of framework updates, it's not clear in
what year these costs would be incurred. The notification
requirements in the bill would be local costs, as there is no
requirement that schools provide this instruction.