During each 2-year California state legislature cycle, elected officials introduce bills, examine their merits in committees, and either send them to the governor for signing into law or they expire for that session.

The 2022-24 legislative session introduced over 2000 bills impacting California student education, ultimately sending 1200 to the governor to review. Governor Newsom vetoed around 195, or 16%, leaving 1000 new laws that will impact students, some beginning January 2025.

Here are a few of the new laws identified by “AB” (assembly bill) or “SB” (senate bill), the number which indicates the order in which it was filed, and the main sponsor or author in parenthesis.

A few new laws affecting Fullerton elementary and high school students focus on safety.

• AB 2429 (Alvarez) modifies the California Healthy Kids Act mandating all health courses include the danger of fentanyl use instruction.
• SB 997 (Portantino) allows students in grades 7-12 to carry naloxone (Narcan) and fentanyl test strips on their person during the school day.
• AB 2053 (Mathis) requires all health instruction (grades 7-12) to include a unit identifying signs of and resources to remove from abusive and/or violent adolescent relationships as a component in sex education. All health courses must define stalking and include local and national intimate partner violence prevention resources where students can get support.
• AB 1858 (Ward) prohibits high-intensity active shooter drills and bans all simulated shooting, staged gore, or pretend victims.
  The California Department of Education (CDE) must provide guidelines by July 2025 that will use trauma-informed research to monitor and control the current unregulated school active school shooting drills. Some of these staged events incited documented depression, trauma, and anxiety in both students and staff. Students, parents, and staff must be informed the week before the drill, and parents will be notified the day of the drill once it is completed.
• SB 1063 (Grove) requires suicide prevention resources to be printed on all student ID cards. SB 1504 allows victims of cyberbullying and school administrators to civilly sue social media platforms for violations and allows for greater penalties to be awarded.
• SB 976 (Skinner) prohibits social media platforms from sending notifications to minors during school hours or late at night.
  SB 483 (Cortese) bans all use of prone restraints towards any minor at every school by any law enforcement or school administrator.

On the instructional side:

• AB 2927 (McCarty) and AB 1871 (Alanis) add the personal financial literacy class that parents have requested for the last decade. Required for the graduating class of 2031, by 2027/28, all public schools and charters that utilize public school funds will provide a one-semester, standalone class in grades 9-12 covering basic understanding of credit cards, budgeting, and loan liability. This will be a graduation requirement and count toward a student’s required social science units.
• AB 1805 (Ta), AB 1821 (Ramos), and SB 1277 (Stern) expand high school social studies requirements to include instruction of Mendez vs. the School District of Westminster, California, indigenous people perspectives during the Spanish conquest, and genocides and the Holocaust as required topics by 2028 for all high school graduates.
• AB 2074 (Muratsuchi) requires all public school districts and charter schools receiving state money to report to the CDE annual progress following an updated CDE English Literacy Roadmap Policy mandated in 2017 to provide all students a research-based, consistent policy to attain their English literacy requirements. It is currently not regulated, spotty, and inconsistent under the Local Control Policy.
• AB 2999 (Schiavo) requires the CDE to create a healthy homework framework for all students grades TK-12 for districts to use as a guideline by the school year 2027/28.

Laws that will influence the school environment include:

• AB 1865 (Muratsuchi), which prohibits book bans in public and school libraries of any age-appropriate books.
• AB 3216 (Hoover) requires schools to carry out phone-free school environments by July 1, 2026. Both Fullerton elementary and high school districts currently prohibit smartphone use during class time; however, only the elementary school district board and administration currently consistently enforce the policy at site locations.
• SB 1137 (Weber) prohibits any public or charter school that receives state funds from enacting any prohibitive dress code policy that includes hair texture or banning culturally protective hairstyles.
• SB 1445 (Cortese) expands the role of student board members, allowing them, with the permission of the student and parents or guardians, to be able to review a student’s expulsion case and recommend restorative justice actions. The student board members and student restorative justice boards would not attend closed board sessions or have any vote on the matter of the expulsion itself but would be privy to limited case information to provide recommendations.
• SB 760 (Newman) requires all schools to have a working, unobstructed, and fully stocked, un-gendered bathroom available for all grades by July 1, 2026. If a school is unable to accommodate this requirement due to funding, they can access state funds under the Greene Act, which provides facilities funding for school districts with high populations of low-income and housing-challenged students.