A non-profit organization that advocates for equal rights blasted a California Senate committee for voting down a bill last month that would have granted parents access to classroom lesson plans.
State Sen. Connie Leyva (D-20) argued against Senate Bill (SB) 1045 at a Senate Education Committee hearing on April 27.
“I don’t’ know the last time you attended a school board meeting and I think parent involvement is essential but someone needs to give some of these parents a lesson on how to be professional,” Leyva said in a video segment posted online. “Yelling at people, screaming at people, running up and down the aisles, heckling people and students who are speaking…I think those are some of the concerns that people have.”
However, SB 1045 had nothing to do with parental involvement at school board meetings, according to Wenyuan Wu, executive director of Californians for Equal Rights Foundation (CFER).
“Connie Leyva said that in the context of discussing the bill and the bill was about parental access to instructional materials,” Wu said. “It's not about parent participation in school board meetings. Yet, she seized the moment since she’s chair of the Senate Education Committee to really rain down on parents. She was trying to whip the votes against the bill.”
Although two Republican members of the Senate Education Committee voted in favor of approving SB 1045, it wasn’t enough to carry it..
“The bill has been killed in the Senate Ed Committee on a partisan vote,” Wu told the Southern California Record. “Every Democratic senator voted no and there is no chance of introducing any similar bill for this legislative session but I do believe that academic transparency and parental involvement are two huge issues for public education. Legislation that promotes these concepts should be introduced and re-introduced in the future.”
Wu blames Leyva for SB 1045's failure to pass out of committee.
“She basically just smeared parents that they are not civil, they're not professional, and they don't know what they're doing in reality,” Wu added. “I believe that parents should be the primary stakeholder in their children's education.”
SB 1045 would have established a state-mandated local program that would require a classroom instructor to provide a parent or a guardian with a copy of the classroom instructor’s lesson plan in addition to “all primary supplemental instructional materials and assessments."
"The bill would have required a sufficient amount of time," Wu said. "When a school or a school district decides to change or use new curriculum, SB 1045 required them to post the changes no later than seven calendar days after the change has been made."