Districts Brace for More LCAP Paperwork
The State Board of Education is implementing a series of changes to the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), which were championed by Gov. Gavin Newsom as a way to improve outcomes for the state’s lowest-performing students.
As EdSource’s John Fensterwald explains, the board passed new regulations for districts last week aimed at boosting achievement. These include “setting specific goals, committing to actions and spending to achieve them, and a new requirement — determining how to measure if those strategies are effective by the end of three years and what to do if they aren’t.”
School administrators say the additional time and paperwork will be a huge burden once the new requirements for Local Control Accountability Plans (LCAPs) kick in 2024-25.
“In smaller school districts, where time and resources are already significantly limited, the current requirements of the LCAP add an undue burden,” Helio Brasil, superintendent of Keys Union School District, wrote in a letter to the board.
“In my experience, every addition of a new table or box or check box or prompt to the LCAP makes it less and less useful as the tool to promote equity-focused, locally informed strategic resource allocation,” said Joshua Schultz, deputy superintendent of the Napa County Office of Education, in testimony before the vote. “Already, practitioners in the field will tell you that the LCAP document is not useful for informing and engaging educational partners because of its length and complexity.”
Read about the changes and more reactions from school districts here.
