California Department of Education

Again, I'm Trevor Norcross, and I am not a direct member of the community, but I am a parent of a trans child at Arroyo Grande High School that has been under intense scrutiny and intense attacks, not only within our community, but within our nation's capital.

My daughter is one of the unnamed examples in the DOJ lawsuit against California Department of Education and CIF because of the attacks that she has been under.

It's been a wild journey.

I've always considered myself an ally to the community, but realize now that you can never understand what that means until it's your kid.

We were asking for guidance to be developed to help schools and school systems understand how to increase and improve the quality of outdoor learning experiences.

And that guidance would be developed by us at no cost to the state and then curated and maintained by the california department of education and then our most ambitious ask that we thought okay we're going to put this in and see what happens was to to ask for actual funding real money to support a statewide pilot so that we could shine a light on some really good work that's already going on in schools around the state and collect data gathered by researchers that would actually provide evidence of the impact and the benefits to kids of these spectacular programs.

And we thought if we could get the language in Ed Code, the guidance, and a pilot, Gather the evidence.

Then we'll come back to the legislature the next time around and ask for the big money for statewide implementation.

The due process is once we get all this information, the district says, no.

Well, then we, we initiate a due process complaint, which is a court action and it's an administrative court in California Department of Ed contracts special as they have the office of administrative hearings that has a special ed division.

That's all they do is your specialized cases and we, you know, and then we have the opportunity to go to mediation with the mediator who's often an administrative law judge.

And like I said earlier, the case usually resolves at or after mediation.