November 2024

Ceres Unified met with Educational Partners (students, classified and certificated staff, and community members) in November to begin the process of updating its Local Control Accountability Plan, or LCAP. Educational Partners have a voice in this three-year plan that outlines the district's goals, actions, and expenditures to support positive student outcomes. We hope to spark more discussion by sharing some of the conversation on this podcast.

Transcript

Dr. Paul Rutishauser (00:00:08) - Hello, I'm Paul Rutishauser, the Assistant Superintendent of Educational Services for Ceres Unified, and I'm here with Dr. Amy Peterman, our Superintendent, to provide a recap of topics we've discussed during our November Educational Partner Meetings.

Dr. Amy Peterman (00:00:22) - Hi, Paul. It's great to be here. Yes, it was at our November Educational Partner Meetings when we began the process of updating our Local Control Accountability Plan, or LCAP, which is our three-year plan that outlines our goals, actions, and expenditures to support positive student outcomes.

Dr. Paul Rutishauser (00:00:40) - Yeah, that's right, Amy, it's that time. Our educational partners have a voice in this plan, and we have started meeting to discuss how to use these resources. We hope to spark more discussion and be more transparent by sharing some of that conversation on this podcast.

Dr. Amy Peterman (00:00:56) - Okay, so we know that there have been meetings happening with educational partner groups about the LCAP. Paul, can you tell us why the LCAP is important?

Dr. Paul Rutishauser (00:01:05) - Great question. Well, first you have to have a very basic understanding of school funding in California.

Dr. Paul Rutishauser (00:01:11) - You see schools get most of their money in their base funds. And this is just money that's meant to pay for the essentials in running schools like teachers, staff, textbooks, keeping the lights on, no frills. After the base funding, you get LCAP money. This is the second biggest pot of money that we get in California, and districts use that money to support students and student learning beyond the base. This LCAP funding is based on districts' enrollment of low-income, foster, and English-learner students. Now there are other funds, some state funds, some federal title funds, even maybe some local funds. But the LCAP is by far the biggest pot of money we have that we can use directly and strategically to support students. Because it's such a big pot of money, California says we have to write and share a plan of how we're going to spend that money, that LCAP money, to improve student experiences. So we're currently at the stage in our plan where we share our info with our partners every year.

Dr. Paul Rutishauser (00:02:10) - Eventually, we're going to ask for some input from our educational partners on how to improve our plan.

Dr. Amy Peterman (00:02:16) - So based on all of that information, this is clearly an important plan for our district. What kinds of information do we use to develop our LCAP?

Dr. Paul Rutishauser (00:02:25) - Well, we focus on data. We have so many different students, but our data shows us that we have a few student groups who just aren't keeping pace with the rest of our Ceres students. So we focus on our English learners, which are about 32% of our students. That also includes our long-term English learners. We really want to look at our students with disabilities, which are about 11% of our students, our homeless youth, which are 3%, and our African American students, which are a little bit more than 1%. And there's many metrics we use to determine how good of a job we're doing as a school district. The five that are most important are our ELA scores, math scores, English learner progress, graduation rate, and chronic absenteeism.

Dr. Paul Rutishauser (00:03:07) - Our English scores last year were a slight improvement from the year before, but we still have about 35% of our students who are meeting or exceeding standards. In math, we have about 20% of students who are meeting or exceeding standards. Again, that's a slight improvement from the year before, but not where we want to be. Our English learners are progressing, but they're progressing at a slightly slower rate than they did on last year's assessments. And we do have about 11% of our students who reclassified, which is good, but we need to keep making progress. Our graduation rate went up just a little bit for the class of 2024, but it's at 92.3%. We want to see that higher. And chronic absenteeism – that's when students miss at least 10% of the school year – those numbers are going down. But still, in 23-24, 15% of Ceres students were chronically absent.

Dr. Amy Peterman (00:03:57) - Wow. That's a lot of information about how our students are currently performing. So what's our plan to act on this data? What's in the LCAP plan for spending funds in a way that makes a difference to support our students and improves student learning?

Dr. Paul Rutishauser (00:04:12) - That's another great question.

Dr. Paul Rutishauser (00:04:14) - So let's dive into it. First thing you need to know is that we get a lot of money from the state to help our students. This year's LCAP funding allocation is $53,061,330. With that money and with this plan, we've created three goals that we're going to spend that money on. The first goal is that Ceres Unified will ensure that all students demonstrate high levels of academic achievement and college/career readiness by providing a high quality educational system. We're going to spend $20.6 million, roughly, on doing that. A lot of that work comes from having high-quality staff – instructional coaches, some of our site administrators, district librarians, preschool staff, paraprofessionals, and much, much more. We also provide high-quality instruction with this money centered around professional learning and teacher induction programs. This is how we pay for student Chromebooks and many of our supplemental educational resources. We provide college and career readiness programs which include CTE pathways and some of our extra learning directors. And it's how we try to raise our graduation rate – this is credit recovery options and tutoring, things like that.

Dr. Paul Rutishauser (00:05:26) - All those pieces are part of Goal 1 and part of that money we spend. Goal 2 is that Ceres Unified will ensure all student groups demonstrate high levels of academic achievement and college career readiness by providing a high-quality educational system within a multi-tiered system of support. Now, the cost of that multi-tiered system of support, and that high level of academic achievement for our student groups is also about $21.2 million. So with that, we're buying, again, a lot of staff to support our MTSS system. This includes some of our academic intervention teachers, social-emotional-behavior support staff. It's some of our additional funding for school sites to spend money as they see fit to support their students. It's paraprofessionals to support English learners. It's community liaisons to support homeless students. And it's different supports also for students with disabilities, including curriculum and some of our speech and language supports. Finally, our third goal is that Ceres Unified will provide a safe, inclusive, healthy environment for all students, focusing on school connectedness and family engagement. For that, we spend about $5.9 million and this goes into school connectedness, which is attendance supports, providing a broad course of study –

Dr. Paul Rutishauser (00:06:44) - so students come to school studying things they want to learn about and feel connected to. This is family engagement, which includes our communications like this podcast, ParentSquare, and community liaisons. And it's also school health and safety. So this is where we get our award-winning school resource officer program, Alternatives to Suspension, some of our health services staff and more. All that together is how we plan to spend our money to move the needle on our student data. Now, I should also point out we have an LCAP reserve, which I won't go into too much, but it's roughly $38 million right now. But that's how we've done some big one-time projects, usually related to school safety or school connectedness, so that our students can feel proud and connected to the schools they come to.

Dr. Amy Peterman (00:07:31) - Thank you, Paul, for all of that information. A lot of work clearly happens with this LCAP plan. Would you like to share any final thoughts about the process, or what we need from our school community to move forward?

Dr. Paul Rutishauser (00:07:43) - As always, Ceres Unified wants to be very transparent and clear about this process and how we make decisions.

Dr. Paul Rutishauser (00:07:51) - As part of that, we certainly need to hear from all of our educational partners. We can't do everything, but we can do almost anything that works to support our students in our community. So what I want to ask from anybody listening to this is that you please think deeply about what you've heard about how we use our LCAP resources to benefit our students, and that you share ideas, especially with our educational partners who attend the meetings where we discuss what we can do with LCAP. Our next meeting and our next podcast will focus even more on how we can take some of those ideas and move them forward so that our students can learn and perform at an even higher level. Well, that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening and being part of this process with us here in Ceres Unified. We'll be back with more information in January.