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By Tom Chorneau
Tuesday, September 03, 2013
This week school administrators anxious over the lack of regulations governing use of more than $2 billion in new state formula funding should get some new insight over how much interim guidance the state board intends to provide.
Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders adopted a sweeping restructuring of the state’s K-12 education funding formula giving local school boards far more control over spending decisions. But the Local Control Funding Formula also mandates new accountability measures that include requirements for districts to get input from parents and the community before money is spent, and for school managers to use new indicators for tracking student performance.
Although the budget act called out the legislative priorities and goals, the difficult work of putting the intent into functional regulations has been left to the California State Board of Education. The first batch of the LCFF money has already been distributed to schools, but the state board is still months away from promulgating the new regulations.
In a report to the board from the California Department of Education, staff noted that members will be asked this week to give direction on a variety of issues aimed at getting spending regulations completed by Jan. 31, 2014.
There is some expectation that the board’s collective response at this month’s meeting as well as those through the