Navigating the legal threats posed by LCAPs
(Calif.) Two prominent attorneys who tend to face-off from opposite sides of most public school issues have found common ground on one thing – that districts face significant legal threat over the development and execution of local performance plans.
Already Los Angeles Unified was sued over its method for calculating the base cost of services to disadvantaged students, and with administrators getting started this spring on the third update of their Local Control Accountability Plans, even more scrutiny from outside groups is expected.
“This coming year is going to be critical,” said Sloan Simmons, partner at Lozano Smith. “Districts may for the first time start to have data upon which they can measure success of their LCAP initiatives and whether they are meeting their programmatic and spending goals. For districts that perhaps don’t meet intended goals, they can determine what needs to be adjusted in their LCAPs so that funds are benefitting the target groups as intended.”
Legislative leaders and Gov. Jerry Brown ushered in the Local Control Funding Formula almost three years ago giving schools billions in additional dollars to expand educational services to low-income students, English learners and foster youth. Although there’s a general understanding that local educational agencies are still adjusting and transitioning to the new rules, there’s also some pressure from parents, advocacy groups and lawmakers to show results.
Last week at a hearing of the Senate Education Committee, members of California’s State Board of Education and Department of Education were asked pointedly when taxpayers can expect to see a return on the LCFF “concentration” and “supplemental” grants invested in schools.
The answer, said board president Mike Kirst, is likely two years off – maybe longer as the state continues to struggle with reinventing how it will measure school and student performance under the newly-adopted Common Core State Standards and added complications from adoption of the nation’s new education law, the Every Child Succeeds Act.
It is unlikely that public interest law firms and advocacy groups will wait that long before raising questions about whether districts are meeting their LCAP goals.
“We continue to see districts that fail to even identify what their school-wide and district-wide actions and services are that they are spending supplemental and concentration grants on,” said John Affeldt, managing attorney at Public Advocates.
“You’ve got to separately identify each distinct action or service supported by supplemental and concentration spending,” he explained. “Instead we see a lot of summary explanations that simply say things like ‘we invested in programs to support our English learners’ – that’s not good enough.”
At issue in the L.A. Unified case is whether the district properly included special education spending Navigating the legal threats posed by LCAPs :: SI&A Cabinet Report :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet:
