Sacramento, CA—Late last week, the Newsom Administration released its “trailer” legislation for their 2023-24 budget proposal with details on the proposed Equity Multiplier, additional mandates related to the Local Control and Accountability Plan, and dozens of other substantive and technical changes. This article builds on our recent Governor’s Budget Webinar and provides a summary of the key proposals in the 114-page bill as they would affect charter schools.
Equity Multiplier
The governor proposes augmenting funding for the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) by $300 million to add a new Equity Multiplier feature to LCFF. The trailer bill contains the details of the proposal, including the following:
- Funding would be targeted to schoolsites serving very high proportions of very low-income students. Schoolsites offering Grade Eight or below would be eligible for funding if more than 90 percent of the students qualified for free meals per federal guidelines. Schoolsites offering any of Grades 9-12 would be eligible if 85 percent or more of the students qualify for free meals. Note that students qualifying for reduced-price meals would not factor into eligibility.
- Qualifying schools would receive a minimum of $50 thousand, or a per-pupil amount based on total enrollment. Eligibility and funding would be based on prior-year enrollment figures.
More LCAP Mandates and Accountability Tweaks
The draft trailer bill proposes several additional requirements related to the growing Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP) mandate. Local education agencies (LEA) would be required to do the following:
- Present a new, mid-year progress report to their governing boards. The report would need to provide details on all available mid-year outcome, expenditure, and implementation data related to the specific outcomes, actions, and expenditures proposed in their LCAPs,
- Change all LCAP actions that have not proven effective over a three-year period, explain the reasons therefor, and explain how the action will be addressed going forward with a new or strengthened approach,
- Include additional details in LCAPs regarding “charterwide” expenditures of LCFF Supplemental and Concentration grant funding, including at least one or more specific metrics to gauge progress regarding the related anticipated outcome(s), and
- Expand the existing explanation in the LCAP regarding stakeholder engagement to specifically address stakeholders from any schools receiving Equity Multiplier funding.
The trailer bill also calls for the State Board of Education (SBE) to expand the LCAP instructions to emphasize addressing disparities in achievement across student subgroups, mandate “focused” goals when one or more subgroup is scoring low on the California School Dashboard (Dashboard), and other additional details.
The trailer bill also calls for specific...
