In exchange for local flexibility, accountability plans will require work
I have a thought for school district staff, board members and others characterizing the process for developing Local Control Accountability Plans (LCAPs) as too time-consuming, tedious and cumbersome.
Quit your belly-aching!
Districts and other local educational agencies have just been relieved of a slew of bureaucratic compliance mandates tied to dozens of old state categorical programs. Those mandates required hours of accounting, tracking, reporting and general “bean-counting” of dollars spent. They limited district spending to the multiple, mostly narrow confines of the various categoricals and carried, as well, the threat of losing funds because someone bean-counted wrongly. Now districts can meld the old pots together to spend the funds much more flexibly, free from the strict and multiple prerogatives of Sacramento. As a member of my local school board, I have seen firsthand how this can work better.
The deal – that many folks now seem to be conveniently forgetting – was that in exchange for dropping all of that work and for having all this new flexibility districts would be fully transparent around their spending and engage community stakeholders in spending decisions.
Guess what? That is going to take some real work, people.
From some who merely see it as “compliance” work, I sense a failure of imagination. The intent of the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) is that the LCAP serve as a living, breathing, continuously improving “comprehensive planning tool” (see LCAP template, page 1), developed and implemented with the school community. Ongoing, strategic planning and effective community engagement are two things districts have not historically been asked to do. Faced with these new expectations, it is easier to treat the LCAP as an exercise in filling in boxes and checking off stakeholder contact compliance. Instead, we ought to be figuring out how to make the deal work as intended.
For its part, if the state believes its new “local control” mantra, it will need to seriously invest in expanding both district and local stakeholder capacity to engage in the new strategic planning dialogue. That means the state will need to improve the quality of the planning, the depth and reach of the engagement, the readability of the LCAP and the ability of local communities to understand what they find there. The PTA is calling for a billion-dollar investment in parent engagement. That would be a start.
Accessibility of the LCAP to the lay person is an issue, no doubt. However, readability can be solved with executive summaries, better technical and graphic LCAP design, electronic templates and progressive layers of links to more detail for the more interested and engaged reader. (Along In exchange for local flexibility, accountability plans will require work | EdSource: