Senate Bill 277 of 2015 was the massively controversial vaccine bill that roiled California for months in the spring and early summer of 2015. Since Governor Brown signed this bill on June 30, 2015, Legislative Intent Service, Inc. had the opportunity to research this bill.
Much to the chagrin of our on-site researcher, Nick Weis, this was one of “biggest bills” documents-wise, ever. Nick spent hours scanning over 12,000 pages of committee file material on Senate Bill 277. There are several useful documents regarding Senate Bill 277 available through the legislature’s website, but this file material contains valuable notes, correspondence and background information that help provide a more complete picture on the legislative wrangling that resulted in Senate Bill 277. These thousands of pages are only available in hard copy files.
Senate Bill 277 was triple-referred in the Senate and double-referred in the Assembly. Online you may be able to find copies of the bill, the procedural history, and various analyses, but each of those committees generated 2000+ page files. For example, after the Senate Committee on Health approved the bill, it was referred to the Senate Committee on Education for consideration. On April 1, the Marin County Board of Supervisors wrote bill coauthors Senators Pan, Allen and Gonzalez, as well as the Committee on Education and other lawmakers, and informed them that after consideration of public testimony, the county would support the bill so long as it was “amended to clarify that it does not apply in a home school setting.”
Marin County was not the only entity with this concern. The Homeschool Association of California opposed the bill in part because it “would make it impossible for many families to choose to homeschool legally.”
On April 9, the bill was amended, and among other changes, Health and Safety Code Section 120335 was specifically amended to state it “does not apply to a home-based private school if all of the pupils are residents of the household or are members of a single family.”
Many, many other stakeholders submitted their concerns on this bill.
Understanding the sheer scope of the controversy surrounding Senate Bill 277 requires a more in-depth look at all the players involved. When it comes to legislative intent, the full story is not online. If you are interested in learning more about Senate Bill 277, you can give us a call, or arrange with the individual committees to look at their files at the Capitol.