BILL ANALYSIS                                                                                                                                                                                                    




                   Senate Appropriations Committee Fiscal Summary
                           Senator Christine Kehoe, Chair

                                           1300 (Correa)
          
          Hearing Date:  05/27/2010           Amended: 05/17/2010
          Consultant:  Dan Troy           Policy Vote: ED 6-1
          _________________________________________________________________ 
          ____
          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. 
          _________________________________________________________________ 
          ____
                            Fiscal Impact (in thousands)

           Major Provisions         2010-11      2011-12       2012-13     Fund
                                                                  
          Curriculum Development          $450, whenever the health  
          curriculum      General
                                   is revised
          _________________________________________________________________ 
          ____

          STAFF COMMENTS: 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.  
          Page 2
          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.