Governor, Stop Targeting Women, Children and Students!

Women, children and students are the primary recipients of services the governor proposes to cut or eliminate.  And, since the majority of workers providing these services are women, hundreds of thousands of women stand to lose their jobs under the governor’s budget proposals.

The governor has proposed:

• Dismantling our schools.  Since 2008, $17 billion has been cut from California public schools and colleges.  Student fees have increased by 30 percent at community colleges, 32 percent at state colleges, and 10 percent more at state universities.  Class sizes are increasing everywhere with over 16,000 education professionals losing their jobs just this year.  California already ranks 50th in student to teacher ratios, and 44th in spending per student.  The governor has proposed cuts that willfully rank our schools at the bottom, raise fees by 10-15 percent for higher education, and cost thousands more teachers their jobs.
• Eliminating child care services.  Over 200,000 children and 100,000 parents of low-income families would lose their child care under the governor's budget.  And, more than 130,000 child care providers, including licensed family child care homes and paid assistants; center staff (directors, teachers, and assistants); and license-exempt child care providers serving low-income families will be impacted.  50,000 child care businesses would be shut down.
• Taking health care from millions.  By eliminating Healthy Families, the governor would take health care away from over one million children.  His proposal to reduce Medi-Cal eligibility to the federal minimum would take health care from another 2 million people, especially women who comprise nearly two-thirds of adults enrolled in Medi-Cal and head 9 of 10 single-parent households enrolled in Medi-Cal.  Of the women served by Medi-Cal, 56 percent are of child-bearing age. He has already taken mammograms away from 100,000 women.  Without warning, the governor froze enrollment and raised the eligibility age from 40 to 50 for women seeking mammograms through the Every Woman Counts (EWC) program.  This puts a thousand lives at risk by delaying detection and treatment, especially among low-income women.
• Scaling back family planning services.  The governor proposes reducing the Medi-Cal reimbursement rate for family planning providers to 1985 levels, which rolls back a 2007 increase.  Before this increase, clinics were turning away 10,000 patients a month and the reimbursement rates for family planning were 50 percent of what Medicare paid for similar services.  This reduction would undermine one of the most cost-effective programs in California’s budget, Family PACT, which provides contraception to nearly one million women and provides California over $9 in federal funds for each dollar the state spends.
• Eliminating funding for the state’s domestic violence shelters.  California has helped pay for shelters for battered spouses and other domestic violence programs since 1977.  Domestic violence shelters are often the only thing standing between victims and physical harm or death.  In 2008 there were over 166,000 calls for domestic violence assistance made in California.
• Eliminating CalWORKs.  This proposal marks a significant change for California, which has had a child welfare program since 1911.  It would terminate cash assistance and a range of services for more than 1.4 million low-income people, including 250,000 women and 1.1 million children.  Of those served by CalWORKS, children comprise 77.9 percent of all caseload, women are 77.7 percent of all enrolled adults, and women are 92.5 percent of enrolled single parents.
• Eliminating in-home care for the elderly and disabled.  Scrapping the in-home supportive services (IHSS) program will eliminate the care on which 476,200 people rely to live, including about 300,500 women and girls who add up to 63 percent of all clients.  The proposal would also cause all IHSS workers to lose their jobs, including 291,900 women or 77 percent of IHSS workers.