Leadership magazine Sept/Oct 2014 V 44 No 1 | Page 33

my commitment and support, as well as
the support of hundreds of partner organizations throughout the state. It held up the
notion that local communities should have
the flexibility to innovate and respond to
student needs, coupled with a commitment
to investing in our most vulnerable children
in order to lift them up and provide them
the knowledge and skills to successfully participate in our economy, society and democracy. These notions of flexibility and equity
were bounded by the need for greater transparency, authentic community engagement
and accountability for student outcomes –
the tools to foster public trust.

What being responsive to local needs means
Over this last year, we have all been learning. After four decades of laboring under a
compliance-oriented structure, educators
and governing boards are testing out what it
means to be more responsive to their local
needs and then investing strategically to
meet those needs. Parents, community partners, and even students are learning more
about how to participate, organize and advocate at the district level and in the process
are ideally building relationships and seeing
in tangible ways why their engagement in
decision making matters.
One of the cornerstone elements of the
law that I’ve been most hopeful about is the
creation of local plans that are more directly
connected to a school district’s budget.
We’ve all been involved in the local planning process, especially if you’ve been in and
around schools, where the plan is developed,
approved and then quickly tucked between
other bound documents only to be dusted
off the next year for review. So why should
this new Local Control Accountability Plan
be any different? It will only be different if
we collectively breathe life into it.
My district jumped right in. It provided
leadership even though we didn’t have all
the rules in place while the State Board of
Education was finalizing the LCAP template
and the guidelines for how to demonstrate
“improved or increased services” for the
low-income students, English learners and
foster youth generating supplemental and
concentration funding.
My district demonstrated through its

LCAP development: Reflecting on what has worked so far

A

t this point in the year school districts have submitted their
very first LCAPs and are well underway in implementing
their plans. We all know the development of these plans didn’t
necessarily happen under ideal conditions, given the “building
the plane as we were flying it” phenomenon that we collectively
experienced. As potentially painful as that was, it does afford us an opportunity to
reflect on what did and didn’t work. For example:

n Was there sufficient time to analyze and discuss how students are doing?
• Did stakeholders receive accessible and understandable data on student outcomes?
• Was that information provided on a broad array of outcomes? 
• Did you hear from stakeholders on what the most pressing needs and priority
areas are?
• Did unique assets in the district, schools and broader community surface that
could be leveraged to support improving student outcomes?

n Does the plan have clear, challenging, achievable goals for student outcomes?
• Which student success goals have moved front and center? Are they sufficiently
comprehensive to demonstrate the district’s vision, while at the same time being actionable?
• Do they reflect the unique needs of individual school sites and varying student
populations, including low-income, English learners and foster youth?
• How will these goals be tracked each year? What data will be used and is that data
readily available to all stakeholders in an ongoing way to monitor progress?

n Were the most strategic investments made?
• Did the goals for student success drive determination of local funding priorities?
• Was there a commitment to an equitable investment of that funding in ways that
will improve outcomes for our high-need kids?
• Does the community have a clear understanding of how those investments will
be made?

n How should local collaboration continue?
• How should students, parents and community members continue to be engaged
in an ongoing way during the planning, budgeting and local implementation review
process that happens this year, and each year after?
• How would parents and community members like to be involved in the process
locally?
• What can a district do to spark and support parent and community interest in
getting involved?

words and actions that there was a strong
intent to engage the community. By seeing it firsthand and through our work with
partner organizations throughout the state,
I know that the intent to engage stakeholders
and come up with a solid plan for the benefit
of kids is present in districts, county offices
and charter schools throughout the state.
But, in a context with scarce resources to

invest and where the muscles around local
engagement and true decision making have
potentially atrophied after decades of constrained use, how do we foster this intent
and actually live up to the spirit of the law?
Obviously there are many nuances to this
question, but I believe we need to rethink
planning and budgeting, in concert with
our communities, so that they are ori-

September/October 2014

33