2025 Pro-Kid Policy Agenda for California - A comprehensive state-level roadmap to support all children

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by James

2025 Pro-Kid Policy Agenda for California presents a statewide roadmap to ensure children receive necessary services and supports to reach their full potential. It highlights urgent, disproportionate impacts from disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic, persistent inequities affecting children of color, children in poverty, immigrant families, and youth in foster care. The agenda urges policymakers to advance equitable, well-funded, high-quality, accountable systems and outlines priorities across education, health, family supports, and child welfare.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages12

Reading Time30 min

AccessFree to download

Education

Child Care

Preschool & Transitional Kindergarten

Early Care & Education Workforce

childrennow 2025 Pro-Kid Policy Agenda for California A comprehensive state-level roadmap to ensure that all children have the necessary services and supports to reach their full potential. Education ‧ Health ‧ Family Supports ‧ Child Welfare Adolescents & Transition Age Youth The 2025 Pro-Kid Policy Agenda for California is the comprehensive statelevel roadmap to ensure that all children have the necessary services and supports to reach their full potential. California has an obligation to end systemic injustices that create barriers to kids of color, as well as kids living in poverty, kids living in immigrant families, and kids in the foster care system, from growing up healthy and ready for college, career, and civic life. This work has only become more urgent as the impacts of the LA fires, other environmental hazards, and lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to have a disproportionate impact on the lives of California’s kids, especially children of color. Kids are increasingly experiencing stress, social isolation, and disconnectedness, and youth mental health issues have reached crisis proportions. We urge policymakers to use the Pro-Kid Agenda as a guide to take long overdue action now to ensure California’s systems for children are equitable, well-funded, high-quality, and accountable to kids’ success. Doing right by all kids is not only the right thing to do, but it is also essential to our state’s future and ability to thrive. California’s continued economic growth and strong democracy is dependent on a healthy and well-educated workforce. State policymakers need to make smart, strategic, high-quality investmentsin California’s children to address poverty and close the widening income divide. Working together, we can build a California where all kids have the chance to live out their dreams. The Pro-Kid Agenda can help us get there. The Pro-Kid Agenda was developed by Children Now, California’s wholechild research, policy development, communications, network building, and advocacy organization that covers the full range of children’s issues prenatal to age 26, including early learning and development, TK-12 and higher education, health, family and economic supports, and child welfare. Children Now plays a lead role in more than 80 coalitions across the state and coordinates The Children’s Movement of California, a network of more than 5,600 diverse organizations statewide, ranging from direct service, business, labor, youth, and parent organizations to civil rights-and community-based groups. For questions or comments about the Pro-Kid Agenda, please email [agenda@childrennow.org](agenda@childrennow.org) Education Child Care California policymakers must ensure all families with young children have access to a variety of child care options that are stable, affordable, and support foster children’s healthy development. It is especially important to ensure that foster families, families experiencing poverty, and other families in circumstances of enhanced need or risk have comprehensive, supportive child care settings. In the near-term, the State should adopt a cost-based model and begin a multi-year commitment to investing in living wages and benefits for providers, workforce development, and child care facilities expansion. And over the next few years, California should at least triple the number of infants and toddlers that receive state-funded childcare subsidies as a step toward universal access. Preschool & Transitional Kindergarten The State should develop a comprehensive mixed delivery system for our 3-and 4-year-olds that incentivizes high quality and supports family choice including traditional kindergarten, state preschool, child care, Head Start, and expanded learning. The system must make the investments necessary to reach full Transitional Kindergarten implementation by the 2025-26 school year and ensure that all school districts receive additional funding for th

FAQs

What is the purpose of the 2025 Pro-Kid Policy Agenda for California?

It is a comprehensive statewide roadmap to ensure all children have the services and supports needed to reach their full potential, emphasizing equitable, well-funded, high-quality, and accountable systems.

How does the agenda address child care for young children?

It calls for access to stable, affordable child care, a cost-based funding model, multi-year investment in providers’ living wages and benefits, workforce development, facility expansion, and expanding state-funded infant and toddler subsidies toward universal access.

What are the key priorities for preschool and Transitional Kindergarten?

It proposes a mixed delivery system for 3- and 4-year-olds that supports family choice, targets full Transitional Kindergarten implementation by 2025-26 with added funding for served students, prioritizes equity in instructional models, and improves recruitment and retention of highly skilled educators.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by James