Angelica Jongco (she/her/hers) is Deputy Managing Attorney with the Education Equity Team. Through policy advocacy, litigation and community partnership, Angelica works towards a racially just public education system with schools of belonging, where every child feels supported to succeed. Angelica enjoys partnering with grassroots organizations to ensure students and families impact education decisions. With her team, she has trained thousands of California organizers, students and families on how to engage in shared learning and decision making in schools. She also co-leads the Anchor Team of the statewide alliance California Partnership for the Future of Learning, which released an equity platform for COVID-19 and beyond that drove a $4 billion state investment in transformative, racially just, relationship-centered community schools. The CA Partnership is supporting implementation of this historic program at the state and local levels. 

Over the past decade, Angelica has built expertise in equitable school finance–including the major school funding reform known as the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), authored a report in 2016 on Keeping the Promise of LCFF, and has advised the California Department of Education on district plans called LCAPs.  Angelica also has led culture building work at Public Advocates and specifically nurtures healthy team culture with the education equity team.

After clerking for the Honorable Denny Chin in the Southern District of New York, Angelica began her legal career at Public Advocates in 2006. She supported youth and parent leaders to file and seek action on complaints filed under the landmark Williams v. California settlement. She also represented plaintiffs in the transportation justice case, Darensburg v. MTC, a complex civil rights class action trial challenging the discriminatory impact of underfunding of Bay Area bus service on transit riders of color. She has also represented employees in civil rights and disability class actions with the firm Lewis, Feinberg, Lee, Renaker & Jackson.

In her time outside of Public Advocates, Angelica builds community and shared decision making spaces with students, families and staff at her children’s Oakland public school. As the proud daughter of Filipino immigrants, she also helps lead a Filipino American social justice and parenting cooperative and summer camp, called Sama Sama, where her family reconnects to ancestral wisdom, culture and language. She lives on Ohlone land, in Oakland, where she plays, laughs, cooks and marches with her kids Kaya (10) and Mahalia (6) and her partner Daniel, who is also a civil rights attorney.

Education

Angelica earned her law degree in 2005 from NYU Law School, where she was a Root-Tilden-Kern Public Interest Scholar, an editor for the NYU Review of Law & Social Change, and Chair of the Coalition for Legal Recruiting, an organization promoting issues of student and faculty diversity. As an advocate in the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, she argued successfully before the United States Third Circuit Court of Appeals. She also worked as a law clerk for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. She completed a double major in History and Ethnicity, Race & Migration Studies at Yale University in 2000.

Awards

Non-Profit Leadership, Executive Fellows Program, OneJustice

Received the California Lawyer Attorneys of the Year Award in 2018 from the Daily Journal

Recognized as a Northern California Rising Star in 2013 & 2014 by Superlawyers magazine.

Root-Tilden-Kern Public Interest Scholarship

NYU President’s Prize for Community Service

John Sexton Prize for Service to Law School Community

NYU Law School Dean’s Merit Scholarship

Civic Activities and Professional Associations

Asian American Bar Association of the Bay Area, Filipino Bar Association of Northern California

School Site Council Chair, Cleveland Elementary, Oakland Unified School District

Membership Chair/Coordinating Committee, Sama Sama Cooperative

Former Board Member, Bay Area Parent Leadership Action Network (PLAN) – empowering low-income parents to be effective advocates for education equity

Former Board Member, American Constitution Society – Bay Area