SACRAMENTO — The California Asian American and Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus (AAPILC) remains committed to ensuring Asian American and Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander history is taught in California schools. The AAPILC looks forward to partnering with community organizations and education resources who are already implementing AAPI curriculum programs and who have expertise in K-12 curriculum to develop a better understanding of what will be needed to ensure AAPI history is taught in our children’s classrooms.
“The AAPILC has been working on many initiatives to include AAPI history in school curricula, and we look forward to working with AAPI educational stakeholders in developing legislation requiring the inclusion of AAPI history,” said Dr. Richard Pan (D-Sacramento), Chair of the AAPI Legislative Caucus. “We appreciate the Asian Pacific Islander Public Affairs Association (APAPA) withdrawing SB1363 and choosing instead to join other AAPI stakeholders in working with the caucus on substantive efforts to make our community’s history visible.”
The AAPILC has succeeded in achieving substantive improvements for the AAPI community.
In public education, the AAPILC championed AB 101 (Medina) establishing California as the first state to require ethnic studies for high school graduation. This year, the AAPILC is proud to have fought for $10 Million for the UCLA Asian American and Pacific Islander Center’s Multimedia Textbook, $15 Million for the Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Department at UC Berkeley, and $5 Million for the Asian Language Bi-lingual Teacher Education Program. These all ensure robust materials and educators are available to teach AAPI history. The AAPILC has reached out to school districts and worked with educators to further ensure AAPI stories were included in AB 101. The Caucus has also supported SB 895 (Nguyen) to require social studies lessons about Vietnamese refugees, the Cambodian genocide and Hmong history.
As hate incidents against the Asian American community surged during the COVID pandemic due to hateful rhetoric from President Trump and his supporters, the AAPILC partnered with AAPI civil rights organizations and community groups to pass a record $165.5 million API Equity Budget, the largest such fund for the AAPI community passed by any state last year or since. This budget included funding for AAPI community organizations to support survivors of hate incidents, school programs to prevent bullying of AAPI youth, ethnic media to engage our community in-language and research to understand the needs of diverse AAPI communities.
We are also proud to have championed increased representation of AAPI in government including the appointment of Rob Bonta as California’s Attorney General, the first Filipino and only second AAPI to serve in this position.