Our First Sacramento Lobby Day

On August 5, a group of Fremont students, parents, and educators drove to Sacramento and spent the day at the State Capitol. We met with ten legislators or their staff. We had one ask – adequate school funding for all school districts.

Here is the situation we brought with us. Fremont Unified receives about $16,100 per student. The California average is about $21,200. That gap — roughly $5,100 per student — works out to around $161 million a year for a district our size. Our board is facing a deficit over $12 million this year to stay solvent.

California is genuinely good at distributing school money fairly between districts, and we are not asking to move a single dollar away from districts that need it. What the state has never done is ask whether the total is enough to run a school in the first place. That is the gap we went to Sacramento to talk about, and the fix is not complicated: raise the LCFF base grant, the flat per-student amount every district receives.

We were not there alone. Fremont is one of 60 districts in the Raise the Base coalition, educating about 368,000 students between them.

The best part of the day was watching our students present. They walked into offices, introduced themselves, and made the case — sometimes to a legislator, more often to a legislative aide, which is where a great deal of the real work happens. They leaned in, and their personal stories about how budget cuts impacted them really landed.

One of our student interns filmed the day. It is worth a view:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DbuVsNGhTIW/

In it, Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, who has authored legislation to raise the base grant, welcomes “Fremont Unified School District students and educators… on your fight to increase the base grant and to fight for adequate school funding for everyone.”

It was a huge success for our first lobby day! We got was ten offices that now know Fremont’s situation by name, a much clearer picture of how these conversations actually work, and a group of young people who now know they can do this. That is momentum, and momentum is what this takes.

We are looking for volunteers. You do not need a background in school finance. If you can make phone calls, show up to a board meeting, or come with us the next time we go to Sacramento, we would like to hear from you.

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