Tomorrow’s State Board of Education (SBE) meeting in Sacramento will focus on California’s new funding formula for K-12 schools — the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). The SBE will review proposed changes to the regulations they adopted this past January that govern LCFF spending and stipulate the information school districts must report in their Local Control and Accountability Plans, or LCAPs. All California school districts were required to adopt an LCAP by July 1 using a template that was developed and approved by the SBE earlier this year. Tomorrow’s meeting will review changes that the SBE is proposing to both the spending regulations and the LCAP template in response to more than 2,000 written comments the State Board received this spring. The SBE plans to adopt permanent regulations later this year and those rules, as well as the LCAP template, will determine how school districts are required to report LCFF spending for years to come.
It is critical that the SBE adopt regulations that require school districts to clearly report two pieces of information, so that stakeholders can gauge whether districts are increasing or improving services to support disadvantaged students: 1) a baseline level of spending used to support disadvantaged students in 2013-14; and 2) for each year after 2013-14, the amount spent in the prior year to support disadvantaged students. While the regulations adopted by the SBE in January do require school districts to use prior-year spending on disadvantaged students as a starting point for estimating the level of support going forward, they do not require transparent reporting of this spending level.
On Monday’s KQED Forum program, I had the chance to join SBE President Michael Kirst and others in discussing implementation of the new funding formula. President Kirst suggested during this conversation that the State Board may be willing to require school districts to transparently report how much they spent to support disadvantaged students in a prior year. By establishing a clear, easy-to-understand baseline, such a change would be a welcome step toward improving transparency and enabling stakeholders to understand whether LCFF dollars are being used to support disadvantaged students.
After tomorrow’s SBE meeting, the public will have through July 28 to submit comments on proposed changes to the regulations and the LCAP template. All Californians concerned about making LCFF spending more transparent should use that period to engage in the process and let their voices be heard.
— Jonathan Kaplan
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