Leadership magazine Sept/Oct 2014 V 44 No 1 | Page 30

• Help students access the new Common
Core standards.

Ideas into action: One example
Once community input themes emerged,
the development team surveyed existing
successful programs looking for ways to expand services. In some cases, the team developed action plans that created new service
models to meet student needs. Following is

an example of the process we used to expand
an existing program under the LCAP.
Connecting Our Students To School
(COSTS) was established in 2012 and had
an impressive success rate. This program
was funded through the district’s Migrant,
American Indian, and Title lll budgets and
consisted of a student support team that
included district liaisons, counselors and a
parent education component, in addition

to partnerships with outside agencies for
social and emotional services. The focus of
the team was student attendance, parent involvement and academic intervention.
In order to increase student attendance,
the team had established procedures for
reviewing student attendance, establishing
incentives, and creating relationships with
parents. The key to team success was to approach each case as a family unit and establish support for the student and family. Students in this program increased attendance
and improved in academics.
The COSTS program was expanded
under LCAP to serve students across the district. COSTS addressed three out of the five
community input themes and was a perfect
action step to achieve the newly established
district LCAP goals.
The action step was to establish a Student
Advocacy and Family Engagement Team
at each elementary school. This included a
new position – a student advocate technician – at each school to work with the district attendance officer. A similar structure
was developed for middle and high school.
Each student advocate technician maintains
a caseload of more than 50 students, with
a coordinated focus on student attendance
and parent/community involvement.
At the secondary level, a School Climate
Team was also established to help decrease
the incidents that lead to suspension or expulsion. This team supports students by
connecting them with existing school services – academic and social intervention and
after-school programs – and working closely
with families to help them access outside
services as needed. The team will include
trained behavior technicians.
The power of this process was to identify
themes from the community, sift through
district data, establish goals to meet the
needs of students, and then to find programs
either in place or that needed to be developed. Many of the actions of our LCAP were
not wholly new; like the COSTS program
they were already effective, but needed more
resources to expand.
The next phase of our stakeholders’ process was to hold a second round of meetings
with the groups that gave input earlier in the
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Leadership