John Affeldt

John Affeldt
November 23, 2015

I have a thought for schoolhouse 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 abdomen-aching!

Districts and other local educational agencies have just been relieved of a slew of bureaucratic compliance mandates tied to dozens of old country chiselled programs. Those mandates required hours of accounting, tracking, reporting and general "bean-counting" of dollars spent. They limited district spending to the multiple, by and large narrow confines of the diverse categoricals and carried, as well, the threat of losing funds because someone edible bean-counted wrongly. Now districts tin can meld the one-time pots together to spend the funds much more flexibly, free from the strict and multiple prerogatives of Sacramento. Equally a fellow member of my local school board, I take seen immediate how this tin piece of work better.

The deal – that many folks now seem to exist conveniently forgetting – was that in commutation for dropping all of that piece of work and for having all this new flexibility districts would be fully transparent effectually their spending and appoint customs stakeholders in spending decisions.

Guess what? That is going to have some existent work, people.

From some who merely run across it as "compliance" piece of work, I sense a failure of imagination. The intent of the Local Command Funding Formula (LCFF) is that the LCAP serve equally a living, breathing, continuously improving "comprehensive planning tool" (see LCAP template, folio 1), developed and implemented with the school customs. Ongoing, strategic planning and effective customs engagement are two things districts accept not historically been asked to do. Faced with these new expectations, it is easier to treat the LCAP as an do in filling in boxes and checking off stakeholder contact compliance. Instead, we ought to be figuring out how to brand the deal work as intended.

For its function, if the country believes its new "local control" mantra, information technology will demand to seriously invest in expanding both district and local stakeholder chapters to engage in the new strategic planning dialogue. That means the land will need to amend the quality of the planning, the depth and attain of the engagement, the readability of the LCAP and the ability of local communities to understand what they detect there. The PTA is calling for a billion-dollar investment in parent date. That would be a showtime.

Length and accessibility of the LCAP to the lay person are bug, no doubt. Even so, readability tin can exist solved with executive summaries, better technical and graphic LCAP design, electronic templates and progressive layers of links to more particular for the more than interested and engaged reader. For example, the length of most LCAPs can be cut down by almost a 3rd if deportment, expenditures and measurable outcomes for years two and three were reported only where different from yr one; 90 percent of the fourth dimension, information technology seems, the latter two years are merely cut and paste jobs. Length could exist further reduced significantly if the Almanac Update department (i.e., whether you did what you lot said you lot were going to do this year) were integrated into the same section equally your plan for next yr. Interactive hyperlinks could yet further promote total transparency and avert the urge to dumb down information. (Along these lines, what a disappointment it was for many at the last state board meeting to see the new "electronic template" was but "electronic" for districts.  This volition make the process easier for districts to fill out, merely it will make it no easier for customs readers who volition run across exactly the same so-terminal-century pdf document that they do currently.)

An fifty-fifty greater threat to the full transparency promised by the LCFF, however, is the failure of nigh districts to properly clear all their LCFF spending and to identify and justify the uses of their supplemental and concentration spending on high-needs students as required. Our analysis of dozens of LCAPs at Public Advocates mirrors that of others by the ACLU and Californians Together in revealing these significant shortcomings.

By mode of just one example, Long Beach Unified'southward LCAP – which was approved by the 50.A. County Office of Education – discusses some $85 meg of districtwide and schoolwide supplemental and concentration spending on a single page.

Information technology is only able to do so because it refers very generally to spending deportment –due east.g, "college and career readiness efforts," "technology infrastructure and support," "foster youth services" – without ever explaining exactly what that spending is, how much it is or why it is principally and effectively directed to serve high-needs students. No matter how much an LCAP template might exist improved upon, it won't exist worth the newspaper in the printer if the country and our county offices fail to issue the management needed to bring to life the equitable spending plans LCFF promised.

Now, two years in, it is clear that the side by side steps for making LCFF real is a serious investment in district and stakeholder planning and engagement chapters, a functional and readable LCAP, and a state infrastructure that actually ensures the spending transparency promised is delivered. What we should not do is undermine the deal for full transparency and robust engagement with short blurbs, vague generalizations and more than hidden spending.

Recall that we ended upwardly with so many categoricals because districts abused their flexibility and too oftentimes neglected the neediest students. I think most districts genuinely desire to brand LCFF work, but if too many push for or lapse into the old ways without full transparency and robust date, so, I predict, this new experiment is likely to prove very short-lived indeed.

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John Affeldt is Managing Attorney at Public Advocates Inc., a nonprofit law business firm and advocacy organization in San Francisco.  He is also President of the Emery Unified Schoolhouse District Lath.

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