For nearly a decade, the California Online Media Program for Access and Student Success (COMPASS) has provided CA students with free access to vetted online resources. On June 29, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the CA 2026-27 budget, no longer allocating an annual $5.5 million to research databases provided by COMPASS, set to go into effect on July 1, 2027. Despite FUSD’s alternative database, Elton B. Stephens Company (EBSCO), the elimination of COMPASS threatens to reduce the variety of platforms students can access for research.
In 2018, the state Department of Education estimated that nearly half of the school districts in CA did not provide students with library databases. As a result, COMPASS was launched to provide statewide access to supplemental resources to K-12 students at no cost to public schools. The program is funded by the Riverside County Office of Education in partnership with the CA State Library, the central research library for state government and legislature. COMPASS provides students and educators with materials that have been checked for accuracy by teachers and credentialed school librarians. These resources include articles, research papers, and multimedia content such as digital books and streaming videos from Britannica, ProQuest, and TeachingBooks. Since 2018, Californians have accessed COMPASS platforms more than 700 million times.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has not explicitly stated the reasons behind the budget cut towards the program. The $5.5 million among the $352 billion budget that would have been directed towards COMPASS is now allocated to CA’s new dyslexia screener and an online educator’s program called California Educators Together. In June, California Department of Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer said during an interview with CalMatters that Newsom did not propose this program elimination. According to the CA State Library, individual schools subscribing to COMPASS’s databases independently will cost schools more than $216 million annually, compared to the current $5.5 million state funding…