CSNetwork

Meaningful Local Engagement Under ESSA

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By: Hayin Kim, Partners for Each and Every Child

Stakeholders – students, families, educators, community leaders and partners — represent the core beliefs and needs of the communities and students they serve, and must play a greater role in ensuring educational equity and excellence. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) offers local leaders an opportunity to work with stakeholders to shape their state’s educational equity policy agenda. Stakeholders – students, families, educators, community leaders and partners — represent the core beliefs and needs of the communities and students they serve, and must play a greater role in ensuring educational equity and excellence. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) offers local leaders an opportunity to work with stakeholders to shape their state’s educational equity policy agenda.

ESSA requires each state, district, and school to consult with stakeholders on issues ranging from how best to disburse federal funds, to how to support schools that serve struggling or high-need students. The specific consultation requirements vary across programs, but the focus on engagement is consistent — states and districts have ample opportunity to commit to engagement with all stakeholders in an ongoing and meaningful way.

To support these efforts, Partners for Each and Every Child (Partners for) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) developed Meaningful Local Engagement Under ESSA — a guide for local education agencies (LEAs) and school leaders as they engage with stakeholders on ESSA and other policy and decision-making opportunities.

What Do We Mean By ‘Stakeholder Engagement’?

Stakeholders refers to the diverse array of community members who are involved and invested in districts, schools, programs, and outcomes for students.
Engagement is the process of communicating to, learning from, and partnering with stakeholders that acknowledges the unique needs and strengths of the stakeholders involved. We believe that stakeholder engagement requires collaboration and should be meaningful: it should be inclusive, clear, effective, and ongoing in order to support educational equity and excellence, especially for our most vulnerable students and schools.

What is in the Handbook?

Part 1: LEA & School Planning: Why Local Engagement?
Part 1 connects engagement around local planning to the new state system under ESSA, aligning engagement with local decision-making.

Part 2: Making Engagement More Effective
Recognizing the differing information, participation, and engagement needs and assets of various stakeholder groups, Part 2 offers a compiled set of engagement resources, tailored to meet the needs of specific constituent groups, including:

– Students and Youth
– Parent, Families, and Guardians
– Educators (Teachers and Leaders)
– Rural Communities
– Tribal Leadership and Native Communities
– Policymakers
– Leveraging Community Partnerships

Part 3:  Tools for Building an Engagement Strategy
Part 3 includes four resources to begin understanding and strategizing around engagement at the local level.

Part 4: Reference Material

Thank you to California Community Schools Network members who helped review the handbook.

For more on how state engagement efforts under ESSA have been meaningful thus far, and how we can continue to share the responsibility for educational equity and excellence, see our review of ESSA state plans submitted in April/May 2017 – Process and Protest.

Deanna Niebuhr

Meaningful Local Engagement Under ESSA: A Handbook for LEA and School Leaders

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This handbook by Partners for Each and Every Child and the Council of Chief State School Officers provides helpful guidance to local education agencies (LEAs) and school leaders as they engage with stakeholders to think about how the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) can be best leveraged locally.

School and district leaders can use this handbook as a source of strategies to employ as they build their comprehensive stakeholder engagement strategy. Advocates can use this to inform their efforts to engage with their local political and education leaders.

View on Partners for Each and Every Child’s website.

Deanna Niebuhr

Community Schools: An Evidence-Based Strategy for Equitable School Improvement

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This brief by the Learning Policy Institute examines the research on community schools, with two primary emphases. First, it explores whether the 2015 federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) opens the possibility of investing in well-designed community schools to meet the educational needs of low-achieving students in high-poverty schools. And second, it provides support to school, district, and state leaders as they consider, propose or implement a community school intervention in schools targeted for comprehensive support.

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Think Outside the Survey Box: Creative Ways to Solicit Youth Feedback

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Break out of the survey box! There’s more than one way to learn what youth think, care about, want to do, or have learned in your program… so let’s use them! Check out our hands-on guide for youth practitioners to learn about verbal, kinesthetic and visual ways to solicit young people’s input. This guide will teach you to identify creative strategies for data collection in your programs, and understand the pros and cons of these strategies.

p_profit

Rocking Your Community Needs Assessment – Fact Sheet

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Does the term “needs assessment” send chills down your spine? Wondering how you’ll complete the community needs assessment for your next grant proposal? We’ve got you! See our fact sheet about web sites with easy-to-use data about communities. Download this list of the sites we like the most.

sam.mac.adams

Rocking Your Next Needs Assessment – Webinar

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To get started on a community needs assessment for your next grant proposal, watch this recording of Public Profit’s 1-hour webinar about easy-to-access data sources. This webinar was hosted by Public Profit on February 24, 2017 specifically for the California Community Schools Network, looking toward the upcoming release of the Request for Proposals for the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Fund: Learning Communities for School Success (Prop 47) grants. Learn about how to access and use publicly available data to help support your next needs assessment!

Stephanie

Making Data Work in California

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This brief is designed to help district decision-makers in California think about how they might collect and use chronic absence data, with an emphasis on leveraging their Student Information Systems (SIS) to support this work. It lays out approaches to maximize the opportunities presented by recent changes at the state and federal level, including CALPADS new attendance data collection for 2016-17 school year, and new chronic absence reporting requirements in the Every Student Succeeds Act. The brief also provides suggestions for how to best leverage SIS providers for tracking, analyzing, disseminating, and using chronic absence data to develop strategies to reduce chronic absenteeism among students.

CSNetwork

Grant Opportunity: Get out your data and start planning now!

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Back in September, the Governor signed into law Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Fund: Learning Communities for School Success. This program takes savings from Proposition 47 and creates a grant program for school districts to implement research-based strategies to improve school climate and mitigate the school-to-prison pipeline.

The focus of these grants is to support “evidence-based, non-punitive programs and practices to keep the state’s most vulnerable students in school.” Using a community schools approach – integrating comprehensive services into schools through community partnerships – is explicitly named as an eligible strategy. Districts interested in launching a community school initiative should consider applying.

For districts that are ready for deeper dives into more targeted strategies, the list of eligible activities also includes, but is not limited to, the following:

  • Strategies to improve attendance and reduce chronic absenteeism
  • Restorative practices, restorative justice models, or other programs to improve retention rates, reduce suspensions, and reduce student contact with law enforcement agencies
  • Social-emotional learning, positive behavior interventions and supports, culturally responsive practices, and trauma-informed strategies

The California Department of Education (CDE) will be administering the grant program. The request for proposals is expected to be released in early 2017. Local education agencies (school districts, county offices of education, or charter schools) may apply for a grant. Funding levels are still being determined, but we know that grants will be for three years of funding. Grant recipients must make a matching expenditure of cash or in-kind contributions that equal at least 20 percent of the total grant awarded.

There are some good reasons to get started early in planning for your application. The RFP is expected to come out in early 2017 – January or February at the latest. And because funds must be expended in the current fiscal year, we are anticipating a quick turnaround time. In addition, planning timelines will be compressed as grant recipients will be required to align their funded strategies with their goals in their local control accountability plan (LCAP).

Who will receive these grants?

In selecting grant recipients, CDE will give priority to LEAs based on the following criteria:

  • High rates of chronic absenteeism, out-of-school suspension, and school dropout
  • Located in a community with a high crime rate
  • Have a significant representation of foster youth among its pupil enrollment

Get started now:

Based on these priorities, we encourage you to start your proposal planning process now so that you’re ready to go when the RFP comes out in the new year.

  • Gather your relevant student and neighborhood data.
  • Think about which strategies will make the biggest impact for your vulnerable student populations.
  • Think about which of your community partners can help to implement your strategy.
  • If you need additional assistance in thinking through how this grant can be most useful to your students, please contact us and we’ll help you or connect you to an organization that can.

For more information, contact Deanna Niebuhr at Partnership for Children & Youth: Deanna@partnerforchildren.org or 510-830-4200 x1605.

The above information was provided by Children Now. Click here for their summary.

CSNetwork

New Grant Opportunity for Schools and Communities to Improve School Climate

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On September 23, 2016, Governor Jerry Brown signed the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Fund: Learning Communities for School Success program into law. This new program will provide grants to local school districts to implement research-based strategies to improve school climate and to mitigate the school-to-prison pipeline.

Get Ready to Apply:

We encourage school districts and community organizations to start preparing now for this competitive grant opportunity.

A Request for Proposal process is expected to begin in early 2017.