California Legislative Update – Fall 2019

Five of the bills that the California Campaign to Counter Childhood Adversity (4CA) was tracking this legislative session were signed or incorporated into law! They are: 

1. Assembly Bill 741 (Kalra), which requires the Department of Health Care Services to provide trainings for personnel who administer trauma screenings in a pediatric or primary care providing setting for children in Medi-Cal. The substance of this bill was included in the Governor’s May Revise budget, and funded at $50 million in the final 2019-20 state budget.
2. Assembly Bill 748 (Gipson), which makes a number of changes to the criteria that must be met in order for a nonminor who has not yet reached 21 years of age to be eligible for extended foster care benefits. The Governor signed this bill into law on October 9, 2019.
3. Assembly Bill 1004 (McCarthy), which requires developmental screening services provided under Medi-Cal to comply with the periodicity schedule and the standardized and validated developmental screening tools that are established by the Bright Futures Guidelines. The Governor signed this bill into law on September 30, 2019. 
4. Senate Bill 419 (Skinner), which extends the prohibition against suspending a pupil enrolled in kindergarten or any of grades 1 to 3 for disrupting school activities or otherwise willfully defying the valid authority of school personnel to include grades 4 and 5 permanently, and any of grades 6 to 8 until July 2025, and applies these prohibitions to charter schools.
5. Assembly Concurrent Resolution 63 (Cooley), which acknowledges April 2019 as Child Abuse Prevention Month and encourages Californians to work together to support youth-serving child abuse prevention activities in their communities and schools. Resolutions do not have the force of law. ACR 63 was enrolled on May 22, 2019.

California’s Legislature is now in recess (the full legislative calendar can be found here). During the Fall, the Newsom Administration and department staff are working on the details of the following year’s budget proposal, and Assemblymembers and state Senators are considering which bills they will introduce in the next session.