Thank you for this summary Carey. CVUSD is a great school district. LCFF and LCAP takes the onus off of the State of California and puts it on districts and its community to decide how to best meet the needs of the students with the greatest need. It is is anopportunity for Castro Valley community members to provide input. The interesting part will be how much input the district actually incorporates into the plan.
CVUSD LCAP Committee Meets for the First Time
- By : Dot Theodore
- Category : Education, Headline Story
Education
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On April 9th, the CVUSD LCAP (Local Control Accountability Plan) Steering Committee met for the first time. This 30+ member committee is comprised of parents, teachers, administrators, classified staff, community members and students. The main focus of the LCAP Steering Committee is to review the 3-year LCAP, to be written by staff, to see if it “makes sense” and is easy to understand. The ultimate goal is student achievement so that all students become “college and career ready” upon graduation. But how will students get there? The LCAP will specify annual goals and actions and prioritize spending on Common Core related curriculum for students. The demographics of the roughly 9,300 students will determine supplemental funding beyond the base grant amount that CVUSD will receive annually.
Currently, about 26% of CVUSD students are either low-income, English language learners (ELL), or foster care youth (unduplicated counts in these categories). This is a low percentage compared with an average California school district and surrounding school districts. In the 2014-2015 school year it is estimated that CVUSD will receive approximately $61.5 million in state base funding for all students with an additional $1.8 million in supplemental funding (because of the 26% students identified above). This supplemental funding must be spent on targeted student populations including low-income, ELL, foster youth, as well as on achievement gap groups which include Special Education, Latino and African American students. The new way that the state funds all school districts now is through establishing an LCAP and then tying the goals and progress indicators to the budget through the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). While there used to be separate categorically funded programs in the past, this is no longer the case. The LCAP needs to be designed and adopted before the LCFF can be adopted and approved by the school board. Both the LCAP and LCFF will be developed in April and May with final approvals due to the state by the end of June.
There were many LCAP meetings held throughout the district at all of the school sites in the past month. It is not too late to engage the district and provide input on what you think about various categories of student achievement at school. So far almost 700 online surveys have been completed. If you haven’t taken the online survey and you’d like to provide your input and comments to the school district, please go to the website https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LCAPinput. The next meeting of the LCAP Steering Committee will be on April 28th.
