Education Department Receives Millions for Broadband, Other IT Work

The California Department of Education received $111.7 billion in its budget this year, including millions for technology projects.

The department’s total budget is up about 12 percent from last year’s sum of $99.6 billion. This includes several IT projects, listed below:

• State preschool request application streamlining: The budget authorized CDE to streamline its application process for awarding new California State Preschool Program slots to existing providers (K-12 budget summary, page 6).
• Broadband: The department received $4.4 million to support the Broadband Infrastructure Grant program, which seeks to bring high-speed Internet to “the most poorly connected school sites” (education budget detail, page 4).
• IT refresh for State Special Schools: The three State Special Schools — two schools for the deaf and one for the blind — received $3.4 million for an IT infrastructure refresh and network maintenance support (education budget detail, page 4).
• K-12 network operations: The state gave CDE $3.2 million for high-speed network operations for K-12 schools (education budget detail, page 7).
• LGBTQ+ online training: Under Assembly Bill 5, passed in 2023, the state sought to train teachers and school employees on how to support the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning plus students. This year’s budget allocates $770,000 to implement an online training program in response to that legislation (education budget detail, page 4).
• Special education software: The budget provides $250,000 in maintenance and operations funding for Stepwell special education monitoring software (education budget detail, page 6).

Also of note were technology provisions in Senate Bill 153, the K-12 education budget trailer bill:

• Under the California College Guidance Initiative, community colleges will be required to submit student courses and grades to eTranscript CA.
• California School Information Services (CSIS) and CDE must create and maintain a list of CSIS vendors.
• The Superintendent of Public Instruction received $4 million to select a county office of education to “research high-quality, data-supported models of hybrid and remote learning at public schools across the state” and provide guidance to those schools to develop their own systems.

The CIO of CDE is Rodney Okamoto.