As the West Contra Costa Unified School District prepares to finalize its 2025-26 budget, families and advocates are urging district leaders to be more intentional in how they fund programs serving the most vulnerable populations — foster youths, English learners, those with disabilities and low-income students.
Every year, school districts receive millions from the state based on the number and percentage of high-needs students. Districts must clearly outline how the money will be spent to increase or improve services for those students in an accountability plan that has had input from parents, educators, students and other community stakeholders. It’s known as a Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP).
Districts rewrite their LCAP every three years but adjust it annually. The upcoming school year is year two of WCCUSD’s three-year period.
On Wednesday, the school board will hold a public LCAP hearing to review its plans, outlined in a dense 252-page document. The hearing comes after several meetings with parents and a committee presentation last week by the District Local Control Accountability Plan (DLCAP) Committee, a parent and community advisory committee convened to advise the school board.
After today’s public hearing, the district will review new feedback, make final revisions and bring the plan back for final adoption by the board, said WCCUSD associate superintendent of teaching and learning Katherine Acosta-Verprauskus, in a statement emailed to Richmondside Tuesday.
“This timeline ensures that community input is meaningfully considered while keeping the plan aligned with district goals, state requirements, and local priorities,” Acosta-Verprausku said.
If you go
WHAT: The school board will discuss its accountability plan (LCAP), a plan that outlines how it serves its most vulnerable students, at its Wed., June 4 meeting.
WHEN: The public portion of the meeting begins at 6:30 p.m. An agenda can be found here.
WHERE: DeJean Middle School, 3400 Macdonald Ave., Richmond. If you can’t attend in person you can follow along online.
MORE INFO: Visit the WCCUSD website.
Presenters from the parent committee told the board and Richmondside that they were grateful that district officials stepped up their efforts to keep the community more informed during this year’s LCAP process and provided more comprehensive data and clearer explanations of where the money is going.
It’s a big change from last year, when some school board members and advocates felt strongly that the LCAP fell far short on details, frustrating parents. This delayed the board’s approval of last year’s LCAP, which in turn delayed the budget. (Districts must have their LCAPs approved before they can pass a budget.)
This year, the district has roughly $81 million for LCAP spending — $65.5 million of which must be spent on programs for foster youths, English learners, students with disabilities and low-income students, according to California law. The WCCUSD board must approve the LCAP by June 25, in order to adopt its roughly $458 million budget for the upcoming academic year.
“We made progress across some key areas,” parent and DLCAP committee president Lucas Menanix told the school board last week. “We really started earlier this year in the process of going deep on each of the programs so that we as parents and community members can really understand the details of those programs.”
Parents provided a list of 23 priority recommendations. The first of which was funding more intervention services, such as counselors, wellness centers and teacher intervention hours.
District interventions help reduce chronic absenteeism slightly but it’s still a problem
Joey Knapp, a parent of two elementary school children and a member of the LCAP parent committee, said investing in intervention services has proven to work for WCCUSD students. School-based social workers, access to food, clothing, health care and other such services helped the district reduce chronic absenteeism in its K-8 schools by roughly 6% from the 2022-23 school year to 2023-24 school year, according to the California School Dashboard. According to the LCAP, chronic absenteeism declined from 28.2% in 2023-24 to 27% in 2024-25 school year. But still, more than 1-in-4 students were absent 10% or more of the school year.
“Not only does that directly affect their outcomes for those students that are chronically absent, It affects the experience of the other students. Their friends are missing a significant chunk of their school year,” Knapp told Richmondside. “Also, there’s less money in the district because of absenteeism, not even chronic absenteeism, just absenteeism in general.”
California school districts are funded based on their daily enrollment, and absenteeism plus an overall decline in enrollment has hurt WCCUSD. The district is saddled with a structural budget deficit and needs to make $13 million in cuts over the next two years to balance the budget. Interim Superintendent Kim Moses said if the district was able to increase attendance by just 3%, it would eliminate the need for any cuts.
“Every day a student is out, the school gets less money,” Knapp said.
Students with additional barriers, such as foster youths, homeless students and students with disabilities or from disadvantaged communities, have higher rates of chronic absenteeism.
Last year, the number of K-8 foster students chronically absent increased by 9.7%. However, English language learners, students with disabilities, homeless students, as well as Hispanic and Black students saw improvements, with a 6% decrease in chronic absenteeism rates, according to state data.
Parents call for more counselors, literacy coaches to help address academic weaknesses
The chronic absenteeism correlates with achievement gaps, Knapp said, though it’s not the sole reason. Across WCCUSD, students fall behind state standards, with high needs students falling even further behind their white or Asian counterparts.
As of the 2023-24 school year, students with disabilities, English language learners, homeless, and Black students were more than 100 points below meeting the state standard in English language arts, and fell further behind from the previous school year. Hispanic and students from low-income families were not much further behind, falling more than 85 points behind. The state measures student performance on standardized tests taken annually by students in grades three to eight and grade 11.
Math scores were even worse for high needs students, according to the California School Dashboard.
However, there are glimmers of hope, according to data measured by the district. From fall to winter 2024–2025, WCCUSD students showed “meaningful academic growth” in both reading and math, especially in elementary and middle school, according to iReady — a district-administered assessment tool used to track student progress throughout the year.
Reading scores went up 10% for K to eight students. African American students matched the district average while white, Asian and Filipino students performed above the district average. However, English language learners saw an increase of 6.7%, students with disabilities increased 5.6% and socioeconomically disadvantaged students saw an increase of 9.3% — not growing as quickly as their peers.
Math growth was similarly strong, with K to grade eight students improving nearly 10%, including notable gains among foster youths at 9.1%. English learners, Black students and students with disabilities saw a 6% improvement. However, white and Filipino students saw a 16% gain.
“We’re building on strong momentum observed in our fall-to-winter iReady results,” said Acosta-Verprauskus. “Looking ahead, we are prioritizing accelerated growth in middle school math and increased reading proficiency for English Learners and socioeconomically disadvantaged students. We’re also expanding professional development in early literacy screening and differentiated instruction to better support every student’s learning needs.”
At the high school level, math proficiency increased by 15.6%, led by foster youths with a 22% increase. Reading proficiency saw a more modest improvement of 3.5% foster youths and some ethnic groups showed the strongest reading improvements, though English learners and students with disabilities made smaller gains.
One of the main goals for WCCUSD is to increase reading and math performance by at least 5% at Stege, Lakewood and Lincoln Elementary Schools. These campuses were identified by the state as needing comprehensive support and improvement because of the low number of students meeting math and reading standards, outdated facilities and teacher staffing issues, among other issues.
The parent committee is recommending that the district hire more literacy coaches, provide stronger mentoring, expand tutoring services and increase parent engagement. Specific recommendations include funding a full-time counselor at each secondary school to support special education as well as provide an English language arts curriculum for English language learners.
In previous meetings, the district said it could provide counseling training for regular classroom teachers to fill that gap, but the parent committee pushed back, emphasizing the need for specialized and trained counselors to fill the gaps, Knapp said.
However, WCCUSD has already cut funding for dozens of educator positions in an effort to balance the budget so granting that recommendation appears to be unlikely. And 16 educators, some of whom were math or literacy coaches, were recently reassigned to be full-time teachers to address the more immediate teacher shortage issue across the district.
However, the district LCAP includes $7.5 million to help make classroom sizes smaller, which has been proven to lead to better test scores, higher engagement from students and parents as well as lower absenteeism rates.
Those funds are left over from the 2022 Learning Recovered Emergency Block Grant — a one-time state funding initiative created to help public schools address learning gaps and student needs stemming from the COVID pandemic.
Suspensions disproportionately impact Black students
The parent committee is calling for increased funding for programs that improve and expand resources for Black students. This includes hiring more Black teachers, providing career training services, and addressing the disproportionate number of suspensions and expulsions of Black students through anti-racist training for teachers and targeted intervention for students, particularly when they return to campus after a suspension.
WCCUSD saw a notable increase in suspensions in the 2022-23 school year, particularly for foster youths (up 14%), according to the LCAP. But historically and currently, Black students are overrepresented when it comes to suspensions.
In response, WCCUSD said it strengthened its early intervention systems, instituted re-engagement plans for suspended students and invested in trauma-informed practices and site based intervention systems. The board also approved an anti-racist policy last year to better support Black students and is currently working on a plan to implement it.
The parent committee stated in a presentation to the school board last week that until all staff receive compulsory anti-racism and explicit/implicit bias professional development, Black students will continue to be disproportionately suspended, calling current efforts “insufficient.”
Yolanda Vierra Allen, co-chair of the African American Site Advisory Team, said Black boys have been disproportionately suspended for the past five years, with girls not far behind. The African American Site Advisory Team also submitted recommendations to the board centered around prevention and restorative efforts.
“We need to lean into those restorative practices for our kids so that they understand how to make different choices when they’re upset, trying to manage their emotional behavior that leads to the outburst, ultimately trying to give them those tools,” Vierra Allen told Richmondside.
She said that should be the first step the district takes.
“What the district has been doing is really beginning with the administrators and trying to give them skills to support their teachers, and then the teachers work in the classroom,” Vierra Allen said. “And I think it absolutely has to go the other way around.”
Another recommendation is to track which teachers have a high rate of sending students to the principal’s office to determine if those particular teachers need training.
Of the Black students at WCCUSD, 12.2% were suspended at least one day in the 2023-24 school year, a 0.2% increase from the previous school year. Foster youths also were suspended more often, with 16.7% being suspended at least one day in 2023-24, up 2.5% from the previous year, according to state data. This is much higher than the districtwide average, where only 5% of students were suspended at least one day.
However, the district noted in the LCAP that suspensions overall declined to 2.5% of its general student population as of December 2024, a whole percentage point reduction when compared to the same time last year. It attributes this to new trauma-informed practices and intervention systems WCCUSD implemented. It did not provide a breakdown by student groups.
Last summer’s LCAP process delayed the budget
Last summer, some board members and parents, including Menanix, criticized how the LCAP was drafted and questioned its rigor and readability. It led to a stalemate that required the Contra Costa Office of Education to step in and support the district as it revised the plan, which was eventually passed by the school board. The board then passed the district budget at the end of August, instead of by the state’s July 1 deadline. A number of cuts were made to avoid the state taking over its budget.
Acosta-Verprauskus said she anticipates this year’s LCAP discussion will go smoother because the process has been much more collaborative. She noted that thanks to the district’s outreach efforts the parent committee DLCAP expanded from six to 13 members. The district also reviewed each LCAP goal twice for clarity, allowing for multiple rounds of feedback.
“Transparency and partnership have been key priorities of both district staff and community members,” Acosta-Verprauskus said. “The committee structure intentionally focused on shared goals and protocols — each meeting began with a timeline review, and all presentations were guided by data and stakeholder input.”
The district said it also held two public town halls, and regular updates regarding student test scores were presented to the board.
Knapp said the district’s redrafted accountability plan included more details and tools for parents to be able to better understand the document. But advocates say there is still more work that needs to be done to rebuild the trust between the community and the district.
“The biggest issue, I think at this point, is a lack of trust between different stakeholders,” Knapp said. “The district has not been completely transparent at certain times, and that has led parents to try to look for issues. They’re not waiting to hear what the issues are.”
He said in response to parent advocates, who he said “can be a little aggressive,” the district became even more closed off and less transparent.
But Knapp said the LCAP process this year leaves him more optimistic, and he is hopeful that the new superintendent (who is scheduled to be announced at Wednesday’s school board meeting) will increase trust and transparency.
