SECTION 1.
The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:(a) The National Research Council asserts that “academic success, as defined by high school graduation, can be predicted with reasonable accuracy by knowing a student’s reading skill at the end of third grade. A person who is not at least a modestly skilled reader by that time is unlikely to graduate from high school.”
(b) California has the lowest literacy rate of any state in the nation.
(c) According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, two-thirds
of students who cannot read proficiently by the end of the fourth grade will end up in jail or in need of public assistance.
(d) According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 85 percent of all juveniles who interface with the juvenile court system are functionally low literate.
(e) According to United States Department of Justice, 68 percent of state prison inmates did not receive a high school diploma.
(f) According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, formerly incarcerated people are nearly 10 times more likely to be homeless than the general public.
(g) Children who cannot read proficiently by the end of third grade are four times more likely to
drop out of high school or fail to graduate, which can lead to a lifetime of social and economic disadvantages.
(h) Pupils with relatively low literacy achievement tend to have more behavioral and social problems in subsequent grades and higher rates of retention, furthering their educational achievement gap and increasing their risk of dropout.
(i) Seventy-five percent of pupils who are poor readers in third grade will remain poor readers in high school, according to research at Yale University.
(j) According to a national study by New York University, children from low-income families are less likely to have books in their homes.
(k) In 2017,
California was the first state in the nation to be sued on the grounds that it had denied children’s civil rights to literacy under the state constitution. After initially fighting the lawsuit, the state settled the case in February 2020.
(l) The mission of public libraries in California is to provide free and easy access to information, ideas, books, and technology that can help to enrich, educate, and empower the lives of all individuals.
(m) Former President Barack Obama’s 2013 ConnectED initiative strives to enrich the education and opportunities of every pupil in kindergarten and grades 1 to 12, inclusive, through partnerships and cooperation.
(n) According to the Pew Research Center, 84 percent of the parents
who say that libraries are important say a major reason they want their children to have access to libraries is that libraries help inculcate their children’s love of reading and books. Eighty-one percent say that a major reason libraries are important is because libraries provide their children with information and resources not available at home, such as a book club or program, an education class hosted by the library, the use of free and reliable internet, or the ability to do school work more easily.
(o) Issuing library cards to pupils through the ConnectED initiative has fostered stronger family bonds, equipped parents to support their children’s reading progress, encouraged family engagement in school activities, and helped build an at-home culture of reading.
(p) The
Oakland Public Library has a partnership with the Oakland Unified School District to provide the Oakland Promise Card.
(q) The Napa County Library has a partnership with the Napa Valley Unified School District to provide the Student OneCard.
(r) The San Francisco Public Library has a partnership with the San Francisco Unified School District to provide the Scholar Card.
(s) The Sacramento Public Library provides Student Success Cards to provide internet-only library access to over 121,000 pupils in six school districts.
(t) In 2016, the Los Angeles Unified School District entered into a memorandum of agreement with the City of Los Angeles’ Board of Library
Commissioners to provide every pupil with a Student Success Card.
(u) The Los Angeles Unified School District is composed of more than 800,000 pupils, is the second largest school district in the nation, and has distributed over 50,000 library cards to pupils of all ages in the school district.
(v) Through the above-mentioned collaborations, many successful models for various types of library cards have been created and pupils have been provided library access using variations of all of the following:
(1) Full-access library cards.
(2) Limited-use library cards.
(3) Internet-only library
cards.
(4) Online or in-person library access using a school-issued student identification card.
(w) Communities and school districts vary widely in terms of resources and capacity. In order to be successful, libraries and school partnerships must have options suitable for both small rural districts and larger cooperatives.
(x) Every California public school pupil should have a library card.