• AB 501 (Campos) clarifies the Educational Employment Relations Act (EERA) to allow all public school employees to be organized, thereby correcting Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) decisions that did not recognize lunch time aides and Joint Power Authority employees as public employees.  They may now organize and be represented in collective bargaining.
• AB 815 (Brownley) places an official state seal on the diploma of high school students who demonstrate a high level of fluency in an additional language other than English.
• AB 131 (Cedillo), the second half of the California Dream Act, provides access to financial aid for higher education to undocumented students.
• Unfortunately, Governor Brown also signed SB 161 (Huff).  We asked for a veto of this bill, which will have school staff inappropriately perform emergency medical procedures on students experiencing seizures.  Since the bill requires training, yet provides no funding for it, we can hope it will not be implemented in many schools, if at all.
• Finally, although we didn’t ask you to contact the governor on SB 202 (Steinberg), we are pleased the Governor signed it.  SB 202 strengthens direct democracy in the manner intended a century ago when California instituted the ballot initiative process.  SB 202 puts statewide ballot initiatives on the November ballot in even-numbered years (instead of the next statewide election, including primaries, which sometimes occur in other months), ensuring the greatest participation by voters.

Click here for the entire scorecard from the California Labor Federation.