Counties approve high number of LCAPs | EdSource

Counties approve high number of LCAPs | EdSource:

CREDIT: KARLA SCOON REID / EDSOURCE

Parents sort through Post-It notes with funding suggestions at an LCAP planning meeting at Correia Middle School in San Diego Unified in April 2014.

Counties approve high number of LCAPs

August 26, 2014 | By John Fensterwald | No Comments



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An EdSource survey of a sampling of county offices of education found that they approved nearly all school districts’ inaugural Local Control and Accountability Plans, laying out spending and academic priorities under the state’s new funding formula, by the Aug. 15 initial deadline for the review.

WHAT COUNTIES LOOKED FOR

The Legislature and the State Board of Education, which wrote the LCAP regulations, instructed the county offices to base LCAP approval on three criteria. Districts had to:

• Stick to the exact LCAP template that the state board created. That included describing the efforts to engage the school community and listing the goals, actions, programs and expenditures that the district would take to meet the eight state priorities for each of the next three years for all students and for the subgroups that get extra money. The Los Altos School District was among several districts that created their own template. Los Altos’ version was impressive, said Angelica Ramsey, chief academic officer for the Santa Clara County Office of Education, but also not permitted, so the district was asked to redo it.
• Demonstrate where the budget contains sufficient money to implement the commitments in the LCAP. Six of the nine Sonoma County districts not approved by Aug. 15 were held up for this reason.
• Show the calculations they used to determine how much to spend on high-needs students – low-income students, students learning English and foster youth – and how they would target the funds for them.

This last criterion is what led at least three county offices to withhold approval of an LCAP and to send it back for more information: Sonoma County for the Healdsburg School District, Contra Costa County for Antioch Unified and Los Angeles County for Los Angeles Unified. In the cases of Antioch and Los Angeles Unified, the ACLU of Southern California and the nonprofit law firm Public Advocates asserted that both districts significantly understated how much they were obligated to spend on high-needs students by vastly overstating how much they had spent on those students before the new funding law took effect (see letters to county superintendents hereand here; see previous story on Los Angeles Unified). If the county offices agree, the districts may have to significantly revise spending priorities and budgets.

According to the review of the county offices, which encompass about half of the state’s 1,000 school districts, 96 percent got the OK on their LCAPs. Only 21 out of 524 districts had LCAPS that were returned to them for changes or clarifications after the cutoff; one of those was Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest district (see previous story). However, hundreds of districts had already made minor and substantive changes at the request of their county offices of education, either in early drafts or in the weeks preceding the deadline.

Among those receiving LCAP approval were the seven districts that EdSource followed throughout the LCAP process: East Side Union High School District, Merced City, Natomas Unified, San Bernardino Unified, San Diego Unified, Santa Ana Unified and West Contra Costa County Unified.

County officials generally praised the LCAP creation and approval process under the new accountability system the Counties approve high number of LCAPs | EdSource: