Parents say school district hasn’t explained how it’s fixing accountability plan

More than two weeks after the West Contra Costa Unified School District board failed to approve its local accountability plan, which means it couldn’t pass its 2024-25 budget on time, parents say they haven’t yet been told how the issues they raised will be resolved.

The first effort to pass the Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP) on June 26 failed after parents said they had not been adequately engaged in the process and that the plan is short on metrics and lacks expenditure details. 

The school board now has until Aug. 15 to approve the plan, Superintendent Kenneth Hurst wrote in a July 5 letter to the school community. While the board has a regular meeting scheduled on Wednesday, an LCAP vote isn’t on the agenda. After that, the next regularly scheduled meeting is Aug. 7.

“This is an unprecedented event in the state of California,” Hurst wrote in his letter.

“It seems like this may be the first time this has happened in California,” said Karissa Provenza, a lawyer with Public Advocates who advises parents on the District Local Control Accountability Plan (DLCAP) Committee.

“It is incumbent on the West Contra Costa Unified School District and the West Contra Costa Unified School District Governing Board to make any necessary adjustments to the LCAP so that the School Board feels confident in approving it on or before Aug. 15,” wrote Hurst. He said that the district is incorporating feedback from the Contra Costa County Board of Education, an elected body responsible for overseeing local school districts.

District hasn’t engaged parent group since LCAP failed

Lucas Menanix, president of the district’s parent accountability plan committee (DLCAP), the parent group responsible for providing feedback on the LCAP, said the committee has not heard much from the district since the school board rejected the LCAP.

In California, a school district is required to have a parent advisory committee and solicit LCAP feedback from it. And districts with at least 15% English learners — such as WCCUSD — are also required to have an English learner parent advisory committee, which WCCUSD does. (You can view last year’s accountability plan here.)

“We would like to meet with the district immediately,” the parent committee wrote in an email sent Sunday to the superintendent, the business services office, the family and community engagement office, and school board members.

“If authentic community engagement doesn’t occur, and changes aren’t implemented before the next adoption vote we will continue to advocate for the rejection of the LCAP,” the committee wrote. 

Menanix said that the district acknowledged receiving the email but hadn’t provided any further details as of Thursday. “We’ve been given no information on timeline or when they plan to present (a revised LCAP),” he told Richmondside. 

So how did the district get here in the first place, and what is being done to fix the plan before the board votes on it a second time?

What parents want from district accountability plan

The district is required to produce an accountability plan and get buy-in from parents, students and other district and community stakeholders such as the Multilingual District Advisory Committee. And the school board must approve it before it can access state funding. The LCAP outlines how the district plans to use $64.8 million to provide services to high-needs students, for example, those who are low-income, foster youths, or English learners.

Because it wasn’t approved, the board was unable to vote on its 2024-25 budget. Initially the district said it would revert to using last year’s budget, but apparently that now isn’t the case. According to a story published Thursday by EdSource, the district is using its $484 million 2024-25 proposed budget in the interim to pay salaries and general operating costs, said Marcus Walton, director of communication at the county Office of Education. 

Some board members and parents, including Menanix, criticized how the plan was drafted and shared and questioned its rigor and readability. 

“They didn’t present an LCAP to either of those committees for feedback,” Provenza said, referring to the multilingual group and the parent committee. “Normally, they get feedback and recommendations from the committees, and then they’re legally required to provide a written response to the parent advisory committees.”

The parent committee in its letter told the district they are “ready to work together to get a corrected LCAP and budget passed this month, with full community and parent advisory committee engagement requirements met.” 

The email outlined three priorities:

1. Comprehensive, data-driven evaluations of each program from the 2023-24 plan, including notes about any changes made.
2. Detailed budgeted expenditures of each program for the 2024-25 plan — including contract details and spend for staff and supplies.
3. Transfer of funds that weren’t spent into school site budgets.

Moving forward the parent committee also requested that the district host several annual reviews to discuss program progress. And they asked the district to publish next year’s LCAP in the late spring to provide time for parent feedback before the plan is presented to the board. 

“Year over year, all we do is just talk about the process and how the process isn’t working,” Menanix said. “We want to get to that point where we’re actually having meaningful discussions at the program level.”

The district business services office, family and community engagement office, and superintendent’s office did not respond to calls and emails from Richmondside.

Provenza, Menanix, and Zelon Harrison, a parent on the parent advisory committee and head of the African American Site Advisory Team, said key details are missing from the proposed accountability plan. 

“Very crucial numbers were just not included in the template,” said Provenza, “which was a bright sign that it was incomplete.”

For example, students in some demographic categories are suspended at much higher rates than other students. According to the most recent data, 5% of all students but 12% of African American students were suspended for at least one day. 

To address this disparity, the state requires the district to outline a specific action to address disproportionate suspensions of African American students. Instead, according to Provenza and Harrison, the district presented one goal to decrease suspension rates across multiple student groups.

Parents and board members said the plan was not comprehensive. 

“If you read the document, there’s these big overarching goals, and each of those goals has metrics around it,” Menanix said. But he said, individual programs lack clear metrics. 

“It’s very long, and it doesn’t even actually go into that much detail at the same time,” he said. 

School board member Leslie Reckler said the district has the data, “They just need to present it differently.”

Despite the unprecedented decision to reject the plan, Reckler said she wasn’t surprised. 

“I’ve served on this committee for years,” she said of the parent committee. “There’s been a track record of not providing good data about how programs are doing.” 

She said anyone should be able to pick up the LCAP and understand where the money went and if the programs worked: “This is not rocket science,” she said. 

In the next iteration of the LCAP, Harrison is hoping to see “more accountability, more transparency of expenditures” and explanations for any budget carryover.

“We’re thankful the board finally listened,” she said. 

But not everyone was happy with that outcome.

“I believe the board failed last night,” wrote school board member Demetrio Gonzalez-Hoy in a Facebook post on June 27. He was absent from the meeting, citing “personal family reasons.” Reckler and Mister Phillips voted “no,” and Otheree Christian abstained. 

Board president Jamela Smith-Folds was the only “yes” vote. She wrote on her Facebook page after the meeting, “I voted to turn up the volume on issues in the district and the majority of the school board voted to MUTE you by giving away local control.”

“I voted to turn up the volume on issues in the district and the majority of the school board voted to MUTE you by giving away local control.”

WCCUSD School Board President Jamela Smith-Folds, in a Facebook post
Credit: David Buechner

Smith-Folds was alluding to the fact that if the district does not fulfill its fiscal responsibilities, it’s possible that the County Office of Education could step in. However, the county office has said it has no plans to take over control of the district.

Provenza said even if the board had passed the LCAP, she doesn’t think the county Office of Education would have approved it. 

“There were complete tables that were left blank,” Provenza said. Because of this, she said, the amount listed as “unused funds” from last year is inaccurate. “It was just very clearly incorrect.”  

The $64.8 million in LCAP programs represent 13% of the district’s local control funds — state funds that are allocated based on enrollment and the percentage of high-needs students. 

“They need to pull up their sleeves, do their job and work with the community and the parents and get this right,” said Harrison, “Because for too long, it’s been done wrong, and nobody has stopped it.”