Leadership magazine Sept/Oct 2014 V 44 No 1 | 页面 35

2.

Link community engagement opportunities to your board budget cycle.

One tangible way to pace your community
engagement cycle is to link the content and
timing of meetings and surveys to your
annual board budget calendar. For example,
share changes to the current year’s student
enrollment totals. As educators know, these
numbers impact the resources that will be
available.
Share what you are learning once Gov.
Brown’s budget proposal comes out in January 2015 about the potential revenue available for next year and any new expenditure
requirements. Begin explaining the impact
these changes might have on your local plans
and budgets in accessible ways.
In the spring, once you receive additional
information from the state with updated
revenue projections, make sure your community understands what is at stake. Using
this information and the results you are seeing after several months of LCAP implementation activities, you can begin discussing
potential changes to the plan, including revising goals, updating student outcome metrics, and prioritizing investments. All of this
work will create a steady foundation – and,
hopefully, the relationships – to effectively
update and adopt the LCAP for 2015-16.

3.

in the process. It is through these efforts that
public trust is built and sustained.

heightened responsibility for the benefit of
students.

4.

As with most things in public education
– and life for that matter – there is no silver
bullet. It is not going to be just one person,
one program, or one process that ensures
the success of children in our public schools,
but each of these interconnected pieces
matter. As a parent, policy wonk and partner to many organizations and individuals
throughout this state, I am committed, and
so is Children Now, to making LCFF a success, but we can’t do it without you. n

Always err on the side of transparency. Few parents will regularly ana-

lyze budget documents or review ongoing
standardized account data, but all parents
and taxpayers want to know they have access
to that information in easily digestible ways.
Public agencies do themselves a disservice by not doing everything possible to be
transparent, especially in education, where
we know the resources are so scarce. I know
in a very visceral way there is not enough
money invested in our kids, but if we don’t
gain the confidence of our local communities by being open about how money is being
invested and what impact it is having, I am
certain there never will be.

5.

Commit to making adjustments as
necessary. Invest in what works and

either refine or remove what does not. Gone
are the days when we can blame the state
for maintaining programs and services that
aren’t effective. With local control comes

For information on the policy work to implement LCFF at the state level, as well as some
tools and resources to support local implementation, please visit lcff.childrennow.or g.

Samantha Tran is senior director of Education
Policy for Children Now, a nonpartisan umbrella
research, policy development, and advocacy organization dedicated to promoting children’s health
and education in California and creating national
media policies that support child development.

Explore new engagement approaches.

The creativity around student, parent and community engagement this year
in many districts has been laudable. I have
heard examples of high school civics classes
where the history and goals of LCFF are
being taught. Those students in turn are
being tasked with setting up focus groups
with fellow students so their voices are supported and included in the LCAP development process.
I have seen districts develop high-tech,
high-touch outreach strategies that train
community members to reach out to their
networks of district stakeholders on key
LCAP-related topics and then connect that
feedback to a database that can analyze
trends by demographic and regional breakdowns. I have seen community groups step
up to partner with their local districts to
train and support parents so they have sufficient information to authentically engage

November/December 2013
September/October 2014

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