Transcript: Engaging Educational Partners in Local Control and Accountability Plans

Laura Buckner:

I am pleased to welcome you to our session on engaging educational partners in local control and accountability plans. This session is part of the California Center for School Climate’s Data Use series. Today’s session is being hosted by the California Center for School Climate, a California Department of Education initiative that’s led by WestEd and provides free support and trainings on school climate and data use to local education agencies in California.

The webinar was planned in partnership with the CDE, WestEd, the Region 15 Comprehensive Center Network, and we’re joined by leaders from San Jacinto Unified School District. We’re thrilled to have you all here.

So, our plan today, CDE will share about the requirements and their guidance for engaging educational partners in LCAP. And then, the bulk of our time, we’ll be hearing from two leaders in San Jacinto Unified School District who are doing this work successfully and really transforming systems through the relationship building and engagement work they’ve done and are continuing to do. And we do plan to have time for questions and answers with the presenters. So again, please do add any questions into the Q&A section on Zoom and we’ll do our best to respond towards the end of the webinar.

And so, a bit about each of our presenters today. Joshua Strong has served as the administrator of local agency systems support office or LASSO at the California Department of Education for nearly eight years. He and his team support LEAs with programmatic implementation of the Local Control Funding Formula, including LCAP and the local indicators on the California School Dashboard. So, we’re happy to have Josh here.

Dr. Vanessa Gomez is the director of equity and access for San Jacinto Unified School District, where she’s responsible for LCAP development. She’s got over 25 years of experience as an educator and has worked in a variety of roles, including setting up school counseling and student assistance programs, crisis response, and trauma-informed practices.

And Dr. Karen Kirschinger is the assistant superintendent of personnel services for San Jacinto Unified School District. She has also held several roles, including work to ensure students and families have access to support systems outside of the district and really working across sectors. And so, again, thank you all for being here today, and I will turn things over to Josh.

Joshua Strong:

Great. Thank you, Laura. So, I’m going to provide an overview of the engagement requirements for the local control and accountability plan, and the local control and accountability plan or the LCAP is really built on this foundation of engaging with educational partners and consulting with them, because it’s those local partners that possess the information and perspectives and insights that are really key to being able to provide the district leadership with insight around how it is to serve those constituents within their district. The LCAP development process should result in a meaningful LCAP that reflects the decisions that are made throughout that process in conjunction with the educational partners.

So, as we go to the next slide, let’s talk a little bit about who we’re referring to when we’re talking about educational partners. For county offices of education and school districts, there’s specific legal requirements in terms of which educational partner groups have to be consulted with as part of the LCAP development process. For county offices and school districts, those are teachers, principals, administrators, school personnel, local bargaining units, parents and students. And it’s important to note that when we’re talking about parents, we’re specifically talking about those educational rights holders. So, whether that’s a biological parent, whether that’s a guardian, whether that’s a grandparent or an aunt or uncle that has educational rights holding, they’re the ones that have to be consulted with as part of that LCAP development process.

If we could go to the next slide, we’ll see charter school requirements are largely the same. Again, teachers, principals, administrators, school personnel, parents and students. Charter schools are not required to consult with local bargaining units as part of the development of the LCAP.

And so, these are the groups that we’re engaging with before we get into the development or during the process of developing the LCAP. They’re the ones that we’re sharing our metrics with, sharing the outcomes with, that we’re looking at dashboard data with, the ones that we’re discussing what are the needs that needs to be addressed. And especially as LEAs are preparing for the 2024/25 LCAP coming up, which is the beginning of the first year of the next three-year cycle, it’s really going to be key to ensure that that voice of those educational partners is heard within the plan.

Now, once we’ve engaged in that consultation, it’s also important to note that there’s an additional requirement related to some new funding that’s available throughout the state at this point in time. In this last budget act, there was an inclusion of $300 million for what are known as equity multiplier grants, and those are allocated to individual LEAs based on schools. And those schools have to have a certain percentage of the population being socioeconomically disadvantaged as well as having a high, what’s known as non-stability rate.

For LEAs that qualify, those LEAs are going to receive additional funds which will then be used at those specific school sites in order to upgrade the educational program of those school sites in order to address the needs of those students. But as part of that requirement and as part of developing those goals within the LCAP for these equity multiplier schools, there’s a specific requirement that LEAs engage the educational partners at those schools in the development of the goal. So, this is the district working with the educational partners at particular schools in order to ensure that their voice is heard in developing out the specific goals that are required to be part of the LCAP. You can find additional information on equity multiplier on the department’s website if you just search equity multiplier.

Now, moving into some additional requirements. Both districts and county offices have a number of additional requirements for things that have to be done once the LCAP has been drafted, not once it’s been adopted by the local governing board, but while it’s still in the development phase, once it’s been drafted, but before it’s been adopted, the following things have to occur. The LEA has to present that draft LCAP to the parent advisory committee, to the English Learner parent advisory committee, if that’s applicable. And beginning in July of 2024, LEAs will also be required to provide that either to some students at a student advisory committee, or to have students on the parent advisory committee. So, students will be involved in that process as well.

In addition, the LEA has to notify members of the public of the opportunity to submit written comments regarding these specific actions and expenditures that will be included in the plan. They can provide those to the LEA. LEA also has to review school plans that are submitted, the school plan for student achievement that is submitted to the local governing board, and really seeking to align those school plans to the district’s LCAP and look at how those things align.

Continuing on onto the next slide, there’s a requirement that the county offices of education consult with the SELPA administrators to determine that there are actions for students with disabilities in the LCAP that align to the work that the SELPA is doing.

In addition, there’s a requirement for the LEA to provide a mid-year update on or before February 28th to the local governing board of the school district or county office of education. And that mid-year update has to include all available mid-year outcome data related to the LCAP, as well as the mid-year expenditure and implementation data of the actions included within the LCAP.

County offices and districts have to hold at least one public hearing to solicit recommendations and comments from members of the public related to the actions and expenditures in the plan. And then, they have to ensure that that plan is adopted by the governing board of the LEA on or before July 1st of each year.

Moving to the next slide, charter schools have some additional requirements as well, though not as many as the school districts and the county offices of education. So, following the development of the plan, charter schools need to present a report of the annual update, that mid-year update to the governing body of the charter school.

Again, it needs to include all of the available mid-year outcome data related to the metrics in the LCAP, and it also needs to include that available mid-year expenditure and implementation data on the actions that are identified in the current year’s LCAP.

In addition, the charter schools have to hold a public hearing to solicit recommendations specifically related to the actions and expenditures to be included within the plan. And for charter schools, that public hearing can occur at the same meeting at which the LCAP is adopted, or it can occur at a different meeting that precedes that LCAP adoption.

And then, similar to the county offices and the districts, charter schools have to ensure that the governing body of the charter school adopts the LCAP on or before July 1st of each year.

So, having covered those requirements, I’m going to then turn it over to Dr. Kirschinger in order for her to begin San Jacinto’s presentation.

Dr. Karen Kirschinger:

Yes, thank you so much. We do want to thank everybody for inviting us to be here today. We’re actually really excited to share our information with you and share with you how we engage our educational partners.

So, I will start off by saying my name is Karen Kirschinger. I’m the Assistant Superintendent for Personnel Services for San Jacinto Unified. This is my second year in this role, although I’ve been with San Jacinto for 23 years now.

And with me today I’ve got Dr. Vanessa Gomez, who’s our director of equity and access. We’ve worked together for several years, so she’s a great partner, especially in this work, because it can be difficult sometimes.

You can go to the next slide. And one more. Thank you. But being the true educators that we are, we wanted to make sure that we did have a learning objective for you today. And our objective for today is our participants will learn how San Jacinto Unified authentically engages our educational partners. So, we’re hoping that we can do that for you today. That’s our true objective for you today.

But we did want to start off today by sharing with you our demographics here in San Jacinto. First of all, our enrollment is just over 10,000 students, so we are small compared to some other districts, but we are here in Southern California, in Riverside County, just right outside the city of Riverside. But I just want to point out some of our demographics here. We’re at 19% for our English learners. Our socioeconomically disadvantaged, we’re at 87%. Our African American students, we’re at 9%. And our Hispanic students, we’re at 75%. So, you can see the rest of our demographics there, but we just wanted to point out some there for you, just so you understand our demographics and some of the families that we have and that we’re very fortunate to work with.

Next slide. All right, Dr. Gomez.

Dr. Vanessa Gomez:

Thank you, Dr. K. We wanted to share with you the framework that we use in our district, and we can’t share that with you without sharing our mission.

And this is our equity roadmap, and we always share this visual when we do presentations to, one, help people to recognize that the educational system was not designed for all students. Because it wasn’t designed for all students, there are a lot of barriers and inequities that exist within our educational process. And so, what we want to be able to do, and I think this is typical of many districts, is we want to ensure that our students reach our vision. And in San Jacinto, our vision is that our students graduate college and career ready. We know we get to our vision through our mission, which is listed here, that we provide equity and access to ensure each and every student achieves high levels of learning while developing cultural responsiveness and social responsibility.

I share this because when we think about our core values in San Jacinto, one of our core values is that equity is a moral imperative. But another core value that we have is the importance of engaging with our educational partners, our families, our communities. It’s so important for us and our work that we do.

If you go to the next slide, this gives the definition of how we define equity in San Jacinto, which is each and every student receives the individualized supports needed to be successful. And personal social circumstances, such as ethnicity, gender, ability, origin, or family background are assets to be cultivated in high levels of learning. So, we think of that when we’re engaging our students, our staff, our community, our families.

As we’re engaging our families, we also want to make sure… You can go to the next slide, Laura. We also want to make sure that we’re recognizing that each of our educational partners has a unique identity that’s comprised of more than just race and ethnicity. We’re looking at age, we’re looking at gender, we’re looking at language. And we know within our own communities we have our own culture. So, Santo Jacinto as a community has its own culture, and we really take those factors into consideration when we’re reaching out to our educational partners.

And to be able to successfully and authentically engage our educational partners, we must have that level of cultural proficiency. And so, I wanted to throw the definition on here, and that’s basically that mindset or a worldview, a way that a person or an organization makes assumptions for effectively describing, responding to, and planning for issues that arise in diverse environments.

And so, for some folks, cultural proficiency involves this paradigm shift where maybe instead of seeing cultural differences as problematic, we really see them as something that is to be valued, something that is to be embraced, so that we can learn how to effectively interact with other cultures.

And that is critical work, especially when we are developing the LCAP, because the LCAP is our equity plan, so to speak, for our district. And as a district, Karen’s going to talk to you about how we really have designed this LCAP process and our team.

Dr. Karen Kirschinger:

So, when you look at this slide, I’m going to actually start at the bottom when we talk about our lead LCAP writer role, and our lead writer is actually Dr. Gomez, and we’re very fortunate to have her, and she doesn’t like me to say this, but she’s really become an expert in this area. We’re very fortunate. She organizes all the information, she puts it into one voice. But even though she’s the lead writer, we don’t leave her alone in this. We don’t leave her just to do all this and handle all the information by herself, and our goal, and when we’re writing this together, and I’ll get to the entire team in one second, but our goal is to make sure that we have a through line with all of our plans and our areas of focus. So, this includes our school site plans. We want our plans to align so that they support each other. So, she’s a key component of that. But we use the team approach.

And so, now I’m going to the top with our LCAP team. It’s not just me and Vanessa, me as the assistant superintendent of personnel, it’s all of our assistant superintendents working on this together. So, it’s ed services, personnel, business services. And then, we’ve included several of our directors, our director of business, of equity and access, and coordinators of assessment and accountability. So, it’s a lot of people in the room and everybody participates, and we’ve worked together so that we can have a very comprehensive plan.

Next slide.

Dr. Vanessa Gomez:

Thank you for that. And so, I’m going to get ready to talk about how do we engage our families. And so, I always look to what does the research show because when we think about engaging families, there’s so many components that we must take into consideration. Dr. Karen Mapp came up with this dual capacity building framework for family school partnerships. And really, what this is a compass to really kind of chart our path as districts when we are trying to effectively engage our families.

And so, what she found is that there are challenges that educators face in engaging parents and families. And often, those challenges involve that maybe we haven’t been exposed to examples of what that family engagement looks like. Maybe some of our staff members haven’t received too much training on how to engage families. And then, from the family side, sometimes there’s that challenge of engaging with the education system, because maybe they haven’t seen strong examples of what that looks like. Maybe they’ve had negative experiences in the past with schools and with educators, maybe they don’t feel invited to be contributing members of their educational environments.

And so, what she found is it’s essential that there are these essential conditions, and the key condition is building this relational trust with families. And when you think about any educational partners, if we’re truly going to want to authentically engage our educational partners, we have to develop that trust. So, that’s no different than with our families, and we want to make sure that we are being asset-based. We’re not pointing the fingers and doing the blame game, that we’re being culturally responsive. That’s where that culture piece comes in. That we’re really understanding where our parents are coming from and that it’s this reciprocal exchange between staff and between families. And we want to create these organizational conditions so that we are able to have a foundation to ensure that our staff members participate, that infrastructure.

Once you’re able to do that, then you want to work towards building what they call these four Cs, which is building capability in both our staff and our families. So, we’re building that skills and knowledge. We’re building connections and networking. And then, we’re really paying attention to our shifts and beliefs, our mindsets, our values, and building that self-efficacy between the both groups, so that eventually there are these capacity outcomes where our families feel like they’re co-contributors and co-creators in our goals and in our process, and where educators feel empowered to connect with families and engage as co-creators as well. When you pull all of that together, then we have these effective partnerships that support student achievement.

And when we think about the way we support our families, we have a wide range of things that we do to connect and increase our parent/family voice. The basic thing that we do is we have a family survey, we use Panorama. We do that family survey. We have parents take it and families take it two times a year. We have several family advisory councils. We have a foster youth, McKinney-Vento Family Council, we have a African American Advisory Council, a Latino Advisory Council, a SPED Advisory Council. And then, of course we have DELAC. We have a special LCAP parent/family advisory council that’s comprised of parents, parent representatives from each of our schools, as well as two representatives from each of our advisory councils. And that’s where we do a lot of our work.

But the truth is we really take feedback all year long, because we’re participating in these events, we’re developing these partnerships with our families, so we hear what their needs are and really take that into consideration as we are developing our LCAP.

We also have town halls that are virtual and that our families are invited to, and we have an LCAP feedback email that we created so that as we’re capturing ideas, that’s something we can give to families to give us input throughout the year.

So, I know that at the beginning we had Laura ask, “What are some ways that you’ve reached out to families? What are some effective ways?” I think in chat, what I’d like to see is are there specific best practices that you’ve utilized where every time you do this, you’re bringing on that parent engagement, it’s working really well. I’d like to hear from our participants to see if there is anything specific that is more of a best practice that’s really effective in reaching out and engaging our families.

I like how earlier, folks were saying that they call them. I could tell you, with all of our advisory councils, what we have found is in order to get the best turnouts, we have to utilize multiple modalities of reaching out. So, we have ParentSquare, which parents can receive texts, they can receive emails. So, we communicate that way. We do the old-fashioned phone calls too, and we kind of have it sequenced out based on when the event’s going to occur. So, closer to the event, we like to have phone calls made, and this is where it’s important to have family leaders in some of these advisory councils, flyers made, advertising on social media, advertising through the websites. I think just doing multiple outreach for us is one of the practices that seems to work best.

Oh, I like this. Arnold is saying that they have their LCAP survey on a QR code, and at sporting events they have that available. That’s great, because parents often are going to show up to the events. So, it’s this idea that we go to where our families are, and having those tools, the cards, I love that. And then, really going to existing events that are in place and just getting the feedback there. Back to school night, open houses I’m seeing in chat. Connecting to events, kiosks with surveys, that’s a great idea. That’s awesome. So, many of you have wonderful ideas and we hope that we can share information that’s new to you and we’re excited to share what we’re doing.

So, I’d like to start off with talking about our Native Advisory Council. I had the pleasure of, before I was an equity director, I was a coordinator in student support, and one of the charges that I got to lead was developing a Native American advisory council. So, in San Jacinto, we live on the land of Cahuilla and Soboba peoples. They are the first inhabitants of this beautiful land that we live on.

And so, we wanted to engage our native families. And what we were seeing in our data was that there was definitely gaps in terms of graduation rates, chronic absenteeism and behavior. And so, when we started this council, it started out with inviting folks, really trying to get some of the leaders. And as we started to communicate and talk about what would be the essence and the focus of the advisory council, what came to the very front is the fact that when you think about our native families, often, there’s a lack of trust.

And I remember one of the elders talking to us about how when you think about historical trauma and you think about the history of our native families, where they were forced to go to boarding schools, when you think about that history and that relationship with educators, it’s not strong. And so, being aware of that was, I think, super critical for us when we were developing this advisory council, and recognizing that some of our students have grandparents that are still living, that were in boarding schools.

So, how do we bridge that gap and develop that partnership? Part of that was really building those relationships, connecting with our families and letting them know that we truly care. And part of that was really learning about their culture and incorporating their culture in the advisory council meetings. And sometimes when we are incorporating different cultures in our settings, sometimes it goes outside some of our policies and our typical practices.

And I’ll share that one of the standard practices for the Native Advisory Council is that every meeting starts off with a prayer that’s led by one of the tribal leaders. And that’s something that’s super important that we have to value. If we as an educational institution said, “Oh, no, we got to keep prayer and state separate in this setting,” we wouldn’t have been able to get that partnership.

And then, really listening to our families. I remember when we first, initially started and we were sharing data, the data didn’t mean much because trust wasn’t developed. But once trust was developed and they knew that we would actually follow through with what they were saying, then that trust started to grow and strengthen. We were able to actually pull some of our family leaders from that group and they helped us develop a mission and vision for this advisory council. And together, we prioritized what were the key needs that the families felt they needed the district to be able to support. And that came down to really taking a look at what resources do we have available.

And so, our families actually told us as educators that there’s this Title VI grant that’s available, where there are districts that have a native parent liaison. We would really like to have a native parent liaison to work with our families, especially when we’re talking about chronic absenteeism. There’s a point person that can work with our families, that’s how we’re going to bridge the gap and close that gap related to attendance.

So, I ended up applying, me and another person wrote the grant for the Title VI, and I got permission from our tribal leaders to go out to the reservation. And they said, “Vanessa, we want you to come out…” Because you have to get applications filled out by tribal members to actually apply for this grant. And so, they gave me permission to go to their tribal office when payday was going to happen. They said, “If you want to hit the parents, Vanessa, we got to have you come out, have a table, and start telling the parents about this grant, what it’s going to offer, what we’re trying to do with it, and encourage them to fill out the form. I was able to get, I think in the first year, 100 forms, which is what we needed to be able to apply for this grant.

As a result, now we have a full-time parent family liaison. It started out as halftime, and now that position is full-time. And our native parent family liaison is amazing and has really helped bridge the gap and the needs for our students. As a result, we actually have seen our chronic absenteeism decrease with our native students. And some of the things that they really wanted to see through our LCAP and through our actions as a district is they wanted more cultural activities that were reflected of native families. And so, we incorporated activities within our schools, and that wasn’t something that cost us money, that was just organization. Every year, we have an annual poetry and art contest related to our native families and our students.

Can you go to the next slide? Some of the actions that we’ve been able to have as a result of this strong partnership is the families really wanted to, one, have a student club for native students. So, we helped the students create a club and they have a club called Four Directions. They have it at middle school and high school. And the club has grown over the last few years, where at the last two years, they have sponsored and put together in collaboration with our district, an event in November called Gathering of the People, where they pulled together their own culture, where we have bird singers from Soboba coming out and perform. We have food vendors, and then they invite different cultural groups to perform.

So, they develop a partnership with our Black student union, they develop partnerships with our Asian Pacific Islanders, with our mariachi group, and we have performances where people come together and we celebrate our native community, but also all of our cultures within our district. And that’s been a beautiful thing. Additionally, Soboba has been an amazing partner with our district, where every year they provide Turkey meals for our families, and it’s not just native families, it’s any family.

This year, they provided 800 meals, and we’re talking about the Turkey, the big hands of corn, the rolls, the whole meal, and you see an image of the firefighters from Soboba putting the bags of food in the trunks of cars. So, we have an assembly line that people go through. It’s so powerful. And then, every year they also sponsor an Unstuff the Bus event, where they provide thousands of toys for our families and we’re able to connect families in need to some toys, so that their children have something open for the holidays. We’re super proud of our native advisory council. Our student leaders have been invited up to Sacramento, and have presented with Representative Ramos on different bills, whether that is for ensuring that their culture is taught throughout education, and it’s just been a great partnership. I’m just so happy to see the growth that we’ve had in these few years.

Dr. Karen Kirschinger:

And I kind of want to echo what Vanessa said, that we were both in student support together, and to watch the native advisory and the clubs both just grow over the years, it’s just been so impressive to watch.

And so, going over to our Foster and McKinney-Vento parent advisory, again, we were both in student support, and it was a little bit smaller, I guess, when we first got there. It was still running, the parent advisory was running, but in the last few years, it has grown exponentially, and it’s so nice to see how much it’s grown. Most of our parent advisories have three meetings per year, and our Foster/McKinney-Vento meetings, they’re actually five per year. And the reason for that is we actually have an extra meeting at the very beginning of the year and at the very end of the year. And some of the pictures that you can see here at the very bottom, and it looks like a big gymnasium, and then, in the middle there, kids getting a haircut, they do an extra meeting at the beginning of the year. And so, there are some meeting components to it, but at the beginning of the year, what they’re doing is they’re handing out backpacks and supplies for our kids to make sure they’re starting the year off.

This year in particular, the student there in the middle, you can see he’s getting a haircut. We wanted the kids to have a sense of pride when they’re starting off the school year. So, not only did they make sure they had all the supplies they needed and stuff, they got their haircuts and everything else. Plus, we made sure that there were lots of vendors in the room to make sure the parents had lots of different information so they could start their year right as well.

So then, the other three meetings that are in the middle of the year… So let me back up a little bit. At the end of the previous year, we actually do a survey to our families and ask them what is the information that they would like. So based on the information that we receive, that’s how we formulate the meetings for the upcoming year. So, whatever they’re asking for, that’s how we start our meetings.

So just as an example, there was a time they wanted to know about trauma-informed practices. They wanted to know about that. They wanted to know about drug prevention. So, based on that information, those are what the meetings are like. And when we have these meetings, we feed them, we make sure that they get a full meal when there, but we also ask them to bring their kids with them as well. And we have the kids go to a different room, but it’s not just throw on a movie and keep the kids busy. Our school counselors are there and they will take them to another room, and they’re also working with the kids. We’ve had our counselors do things like college and career readiness, anything at all so that they’re all… Everyone’s getting their own presentation and their own information.

But again, we’ve got different resources, providing school supplies, haircuts, hygiene materials. We have our holiday event, where we make sure that the kids get any kind of prize or toys or anything else. We’ve also hired our district foster youth counselor who’s been providing case management, progress monitoring, and she developed a student success plan with each of our students. For our kids as well, we provide field trips. We’re also trying something different this year, we’re having an upcoming wellness conference.

Our end of the year event, like I said, there are five. Our end of the year is where we have an awards event for our students, and we also make sure that our kids, they don’t have to cover expenses like prom or grad night or anything like that.

And one of the things with this parent advisory that we’ve made sure we’ve really been watching too, is our chronic absenteeism. Last year, our chronic absenteeism was at 45.8%. And this year, so at our mid-year point, it’s at 27.1. So, we know we have work to do, but it’s also something that’s improving, and we’re looking at and we’re happy with the improvement we’ve seen. Again, work to do, but at least it’s going in the right direction.

And right now, for this particular group too, we are working on parent leadership, like our SJAAAC team and our native, they’re really strong with their leadership, so we’re working on that with our Foster/McKinney-Vento because we like to see that with this group as well. But they’re a phenomenal group and we love working with them and we’re looking forward to next year as well.

All right, Vanessa?

Dr. Vanessa Gomez:

Yeah, I can’t emphasize enough the importance of having and really leaning into our parent partners to lead this work. And I would say our oldest advisory council is our San Jacinto African American Advisory Council. And on this bottom picture here, would be my bottom left corner, is a picture of our parent leaders, and they are amazing. They help us facilitate the events, they organize the agenda for the advisory councils. When we’re talking about getting LCAP feedback, we can really rely on that group of parents to give us feedback, but to solicit feedback from other families. And so, what they have done is they also have their own mission and they have specific areas of focus that they’re working on. They’re working to increase ELA and math CASPP scores, decrease chronic absenteeism, increase graduation rates, A through G rates, decrease D and F rates and suspension rates. So, their meetings are really targeted towards those outcomes.

And based on their efforts, I could tell you that there is no longer a gap for A through G rates with our African American students compared to our overall population. Well, this last year, they’re right at the same mark. The year before that, their A through G rate was higher than the overall population. And I truly believe it’s because of the parent engagement efforts.

Some of the things that our parents do is every year at the end of the year, they have a Black Excellence Award event. And this is a collaborative venture. So, my department along with the SJAAAC leaders, it’s a district partnership with the families, where we put together this event called Black Excellence. It’s formal. They come to a nice dinner, we recognize our top seniors that are African American. And then, we also recognize our middle school eighth graders who earned a 3.5 or above grade point average throughout middle school.

They put on different events, like this last Saturday we had a Black history celebration, where we had a packed house in our gymnasium, a beautiful celebration. As part of our LCAP action items, we fund events like The History of Kings and Queens. One of the pieces of information that our families really wanted to see us incorporate in the LCAP is how do we add more culture and teach our African American students more about their culture versus what they get in the school system. They wanted a little bit more. So, we have a series of Saturday events called The Legacy of Kings and Queens, and that’s for our elementary students. And they actually end with an event where, in this picture in the middle, you could kind of see a father putting a crown on his daughter, and it’s considered a coming of age ceremony, where basically the fifth graders going on to sixth grade get to participate in this ceremony, and the parents get to put a crown on their child and they make a commitment to excellence in the future.

So, these are just some of the events. And I think that, again, when we think about what was the recipe, I think the recipe for success in engaging is that there’s trust. They know that if we say we’re going to do something, we’re going to follow through, and the parents are engaged in this process. It’s super helpful.

With all of our advisory councils, we also make sure that there’s dinner provided, and we normally have very nice dinners for all of our advisory councils. We make sure that there’s childcare. And we even have vans where we’ve offered transportation, especially to our McKinney-Vento families. And if they needed transportation, we’ve been known to pick them up if they need transportation.

And then, we always try to have some type of a giveaway because that’s another strategy to be able to engage people. When you give things away, it motivates people to come. And we really want to make the events also fun, so that parents are engaged because you know what it’s like coming at the end of the day, you’re tired. And it’s like, “How do we make it fun and engaging for the students and the families?” So, that is information about three of our advisory councils.

Karen is going to talk to you a little bit about how do we engage our staff in the LCAP.

Dr. Karen Kirschinger:

All right, so some of the things that we do here in San Jacinto, we actually have two LCAP town hall meetings. We actually just had one I think two weeks ago. And the town halls, they’re virtual. And again, we have them two times a year. And at the town halls, everyone’s invited. That includes parents, staff, community members, anyone can participate in these. And during these, we go through all of our LCAP goals, and then we solicit feedback. We want to hear from them, their ideas that they’d like to see in the LCAP. And we explain to them that everything can go into the LCAP. But some people are not comfortable just raising their hand and speaking out and everything else, and we completely understand that. There are those that are comfortable and that’s great and everything else, and we want to hear from them, we’ll talk to them.

The ones that are not comfortable, they put their questions into chat, or what they’d like to offer into the chat, but we also have an email, and they can email us at any time. So, we even tell them, “Hey, if you think of something in the middle of the night, it’s a week later, anything else,” they could email us their information. Anything they want us to be aware of or suggestions that they might have, they can email us at any time and we’ll take their information.

We also have a board study session. Vanessa and I go in and we go over all the information with the board, so we can also solicit their feedback. We have an LCAP staff survey that goes out. It’s just another way to gather feedback. We’re trying to get as much feedback as we can that’s authentic and that we can gather. We want to hear from people as much as possible.

We have an Equity Steering Committee. This includes students, community, staff, and parents. New this year is a union leaders, our LCAP advisory. Again, with our LCAP town halls, that includes the union as well. But they asked us if they could have their own separate, and again, Vanessa and I were more than willing to do this and have something separate for them. They wanted it just a little bit more targeted so they could have more individualized conversation.

And then, we have our administrator feedback session. We kind of go a little old school with those. We have our leaders in the room, butcher paper around the room, with the goals around, and then they kind of give their input on each of the goals.

And then, we have school site meetings. New this year is the equity multiplier this year. So, we’ll be going out to the schools that are actually getting the equity multiplier and getting feedback from them.

Vanessa’s even gone so far as we’ve got parents who’ve got several questions, we have one parent in particular who’s literally read every page of the LCAP, and she’s had several questions. And she said, she goes, “I don’t want to take up all the time on the town hall. Can I come and meet with you?” And Vanessa’s had her come in and she sits down with her and answers all of her questions as much as she can. So, we’ve done the one-on-one meetings, or at least Vanessa has. Thank you, Vanessa, for doing that. So, just another way that we can reach and try to be available for parents and families as much as possible.

And if you go to the next slide for our student engagement, we have different surveys that we have a couple of times per year. Our Panorama survey, and Panorama is our student perception surveys. One of them is for SEL and the other is for school climate. We’re very fortunate because we… And I just want to point out, we truly, truly believe in student voice. We have a student board representative that helps facilitate the student focus groups at our secondary and elementary level. And our student groups, I just want to point out, they’re very diverse. We have student leaders. We have students that might have behavior concerns, attendance issues. There might be students that are EL students, foster students. We pull together to share dashboard data, and we have them identify what they believe are barriers to learning, what’s working.

But we also want them to come with solutions. We don’t want them to sit there and complain about things that might be happening, but they have to come with solutions. Some actions that we added to our LCAP as a result, including a drug prevention, field trips, and student trainings. And this year we are implementing a student LCAP advisory. This is a requirement going into next year, but we wanted to get a jump on it. So, we’re actually going to do that this year.

So, those are just some of the ways that we engage our students. And because Vanessa is our director of equity, she’s been really good working with the focus groups and the students, and she works with the kids at middle school and the high school to get those focus groups going. So, those are just some of the ways we engage our students. And again, I just want to point out that we really believe in student voice. So, it’s not something that we just say that we’re doing, this is genuine feedback that we gather from our students. And I think that was it. We did it. All right.

Laura Buckner:

Wow. Well, thank you so much for sharing all of that with you. I saw a lot of love coming into the chat. People were just really impressed about how powerfully you’ve engaged with folks, and somebody mentioned the follow through piece, and really, really excellent.

So, we have just a little bit of time for questions and answers. And I will say, we’ve gotten several that are kind of on the technical side of things, and perhaps we may be able to respond to those via email or in other ways.

But I think the first one, there’s a couple questions about stipends and budgets and how you support these efforts. So, we were wondering if you could share a little bit about stipends or funding or how you’re able to leverage different resources to do some of this work.

Dr. Vanessa Gomez:

So, specific with our advisory councils, the parents that are involved, they’re doing it, they’re volunteering. They’re volunteering their time. And the district leaders, it’s part of their responsibility, so there’s not a cost related to facilitating the meetings in that way.

How do we pay for the food and advisory councils? We have budget set aside for all of our advisory councils to cover those costs.

We also make sure that when we are getting feedback, that we are sharing what we’re going to actually take. Because I think the worst thing that you can do, it will damage the relationship, is if you ask for feedback and you don’t take any of it. And so, it’s super important to make sure that we’re communicating the feedback that was given and the feedback that is being implemented.

And what’s interesting is over the last few years, with our families, a lot of the feedback isn’t so much about funding. It’s really about systems and organization, which is great, because we want to improve the overall system. That’s why we have the LCAP fund in the first place.

And I saw a question in the chat, said, “For the student LCAP advisory, did you just select one group, i.e. high school leadership team?” No. We are doing it at a high school level, but there’s about 30, 35 students that were invited to attend. There are a couple of ASB leaders. There’s some students that get great grades, some students that have mediocre grades, students that are deficient in credit, students that are leaders of some of our clubs, students that are foster, homeless, EL students. So, we really tried to pick at least a representation across our whole demographic group, so that voices are heard. That’s for the LCAP advisory for students.

For the student focus groups, we actually do student focus groups at elementary level. We normally focus on fifth graders. We tried youngers before, but it worked out better to have the fifth grade. And again, it’s a diverse group of students. And we do middle school focus groups and then high school focus groups.

We’ll typically do Foster/McKinney-Vento groups separately because we notice that sometimes if you put them all together, we’re not going to point out that a student’s in foster care or that they’re homeless. So, we normally do those groups more cohesive, where it’s just them. But all the other groups are a combination of students, so they can share their concerns. And then, we take that information, me and the board rep, we theme it, and then I create a slide deck and we present it. Typically, we’ve presented it to cabinet, but then I also share that information with our principals. And then, the next year when we meet with the students, I share with the students, “This is what the students last year said, this is what we did.” So, that there’s that through line that way.

“Students, are they selected by staff?” Yeah, basically, I have an organizational meeting with the counselor, with the lead counselors, and then an administrator. And I basically go through what is the purpose of the meeting, what students do I want them to reach out to. And then, they identify the students. And we create a little invitation. We make it look like, “Oh, you’ve been nominated to participate on this LCAP advisory.” And we give them community service hours and we give them snacks and we advertise that. So, that’s how we pay our students, community service hours and snacks.

And with these events that I talked about, like the weekend events, like Kings and Queens, we really lean on getting student volunteers and we pay them with community service hours and free lunch.

Laura Buckner:

Wow. Awesome. Thank you. I like that, make it a distinguished opportunity. There was also a question about training or preparing the students to facilitate or even participate in some of these opportunities. What does that look like?

Dr. Vanessa Gomez:

There’s not a whole lot of training for the participants, but actually in your little tool, we have the link where I have the outline for the focus groups that you can follow if you wanted to. But we start off with norms and then just given the objective of the group and we share data. I sit down and I meet with our student board rep in advance to walk through that process, because I really try to have him ask the questions, and I’m more of the facilitator if it starts to get maybe a little messy. I’m more like the note taker. But I found that students are going to respond better to students. And so, I coach him and give him tips on things like, “We don’t want to lead.” We don’t want to lead the witnesses, what’s that statement? We don’t want to lead the students to answer a question in a certain way. So really making sure that he is asking open-ended questions that I provide for him, and just training him a little bit on some attended listening skills and paraphrasing so that students feel heard.

Laura Buckner:

Excellent. We’re coming to the end of our time. Josh, several LCAP questions came in, but Lydia was responding behind the scenes, and maybe we can follow up with other folks. But I do want to invite you, Josh, is there any brief takeaway from the state perspective on all of this?

Joshua Strong:

Well, just highlighting some of the things that Dr. Gomez and Dr. Kirschinger touched on in terms of the importance of building trust and just making sure that those things that you are listening to, the feedback, that you’re taking that, and that you’re sticking to your word, you’re doing what you say you’re going to do, because really, that building of trust is what helps that relationship to develop and is really the key to building that partnership between the community and between those families and students and the LEA. And having that trust really allows everybody to work together in a much more meaningful way. So, I think that to me is really the big takeaway. And all of these things that they have done in order to build out that trust and to show the meaningfulness of the feedback that they’ve received is to be commended and something that the folks should be aspiring to.

Laura Buckner:

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. As we wrap up, I just want to say thank you so much, Karen, Vanessa from San Jacinto, and our partners from the California Department of Education. We really appreciate having you here today to inspire us and to give all of us some really wonderful things to reach for. So, appreciate your time, lots and lots of gratitude, and thank you everyone for joining us today. Have a wonderful afternoon.