Credit: Karla Scoon Reid / EdSource

Parents participate in setting priorities in an LCAP planning meeting at Correia Centre School in San Diego Unified in Apr 2014.

Credit: Karla Scoon Reid / EdSource

Parents participate in setting priorities in an LCAP planning meeting at Correia Middle School in San Diego Unified in April 2014.

The Legislature has granted county offices of instruction an extra month, until Sept. 15, to approve school districts' almanac budgets. The effect will be to ease some of the pressure on the counties to review districts' local accountability plans, a new responsibility coinciding with the budget approval process, that many were difficult-pressed to do finer.

County pedagogy officials requested the additional time, which was tucked into thetrailer bill, a catch-all neb accompanying the state budget, which lawmakers passed last month.

The state'southward 58 canton education offices are charged with approving both the districts' annual budgets to ensure they're financially audio and their Local Control and Accountability Plans, which lay out how districts will spend money and take other actions to encounter school and educatee achievement goals required under the state's new funding formula.

Districts must approve budgets and LCAPs together by July 1, the kickoff of the fiscal year. That makes sense since they are related. However, the Legislature unwittingly had put county offices of pedagogy in an "untenable" position two years ago when, in passing the new funding formula, information technology failed to integrate the timeline for the two approving processes, said Terena Mares, deputy superintendent of business services for the Marin County Office of Education. She as well serves on the committee of county didactics administrators who provide guidance on LCAP and funding bug.

County offices have until Oct. 8 to sign off on districts' LCAPs afterward a series of prescribed comment periods. But last twelvemonth, the first twelvemonth districts were required to create LCAPs, counties had an Aug. 15 borderline for approval districts' budgets. It became the de facto deadline for also passing an LCAP, and many counties rushed to go the LCAPs completed, Mares said. "It was crazy concluding year – blessing budgets while seeking written clarification of LCAPs at the same time," she said.

The alternative was for county offices to grant districts a conditional upkeep on Aug. 15, to buy tuime to resolve questions about an LCAP. The Los Angeles Canton Office of Education did that final year with L.A. Unified, until passing both the budget and the LCAP three weeks later. But both canton offices and districts agreed that conditional budget approvals are appropriate simply for financial issues, non for LCAP-related matters, Mares said.

The Sept. 15 budget deadline will give county offices time to practise a more than comprehensive LCAP review.  Large counties with dozens of districts and rural counties with pocket-size school districts, where one administrator on holiday in July tin can concord upwards approval, will benefit the most, Mares said. LCAPs are already more complex this year, she said, because they include an update in which districts are required to cite progress toward meeting terminal yr's goals.

The Legislature had another souvenir for county offices in the budget: a two-year, $40 1000000 allocation to counties to hire more people to monitor and review LCAPs. It technically is a one-time appropriation that Mares hopes volition become an ongoing expenditure. The office of county offices volition expand as the LCAPs become a fundamental chemical element of the land'south K-12 accountability system, which the State Lath of Teaching is expected to adopt in stages in the next 2 or 3 years.

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