Special ed, foster and homeless remain without specifc allocation

BY MIKAYLA STEARNS
[email protected]

This article is the second of a two-part series about the district’s allocation of 2015-16 LCAP funds. See eyeofthetigernews.com for the first installment, published Feb. 22 (‘LCAP: The first year,’)

For the 2015-16 school year, Roseville Joint Union High School District spent a total of $597,765 of its $4.49 million in Local Control Accountability Plan funds on full-time counselors at Woodcreek and Oakmont, math teacher release periods, and AVID coordinator salaries, among other things. Meanwhile, foster and homeless youth and the Special Education department have not received any direct allocations from LCAP, though often their students fall into one or more of the categories specified for the fund.

RJUHSD executive director of curriculum and instruction Suzanne Laughrea strives for the district to target the students “under the radar” of typical support methods with LCAP money. The “under the radar” students include English Language Learners, students who qualify as economically disadvantaged and foster and homeless youth.

According to Laughrea, the parameters of the LCAP fund exclude justifying an expenditure solely for Special Ed, though have been widened to include intervention students.

“The discretionary funds, the money that they have, still has to fall under LCAP guidelines,” Laughrea said. “So it really has to be focused on EL, kids with families who are struggling financially, foster and homeless. And we’ve widened it a little bit so that kids who have multiple D’s and F’s who are at risk of not graduating are being monitored too. That would be a good use of LCAP money. But just to buy curriculum or books, we can’t ask for that out of LCAP discretionary.”

According to Laughrea, the district is trying to open up a dialogue with the community, asking for input and trying to make good use of the funds this year.

“As a district, we are a really high-achieving district,” Laughrea said. “What we’ve realized, and what we think the whole purpose of LCAP is, is there are kids who are kind of under the radar, who aren’t succeeding, and there the kids who drop out. So the whole purpose of LCAP is how can you support those kids.”

Special Education teacher Christine Balsano, English Language Development teacher Curtis Hobbs and Laughrea acknowledge that while no money goes directly to Special Education, there are big overlaps in the all the specified categories of at-risk students – including Special Ed students who also fit into the categories.

“Special Ed and EL, there’s a lot of overlap on all of our campuses,” Laughrea said. “Our job is to serve all of them.”

Balsano runs her classroom without the help of LCAP funds and finds trouble in creating material.

“I haven’t heard anything about the LCAP funds, I haven’t seen any of the money,” Balsano said. “That’s for sure. And any improvement in the Life Skills class as far as materials, I have bought or made. I have scrapped together the ‘Unique’ curriculum and I will laminate them and reuse them.”

The program receives around six limited lessons a month from the curriculum supplier Unique. Balsano’s students’ individual capabilities vary more than the current curriculum allows for, since most of her students are nonverbal and would not be able to give the required oral presentations that Unique requires.

“At one lesson, I was supposed to teach them how to call people, and there are some that could do it and some that aren’t going to be able to call,” Balsano said. “So that’s where having the supplemental social skills lessons will be very nice.”

Still, Roseville High School principal David Byrd notes that the district does have other ways to support students with special needs. For example the district will pay for the construction of an Independent Living Skills lab in the 400s from a separate district fund than LCAP.

Also, according to Laughrea, while no portions of LCAP were funneled directly to foster and homeless students, each expenditure under the Intervention is effective in supporting all students.

“We are really trying to make sure those kids get served,” Laughrea said. “We have an intervention counselor, we have a learning support specialist and their job is to make sure that those kids get the services that they need. Now, we haven’t done that historically.”

However, Hobbs has not had much experience with anyone in the RHS community utilizing the counselors.

“As a school site you know we’ve paid for things like intervention and marriage and family counselors, and I don’t even think our students and teachers know how to use access that,” Hobbs said. “Does that mean that some of this money can be used for educating our population on what we offer? I don’t know.”

According to Laughrea, another expense under the Intervention category, after school tutoring and late buses, caters to every student.

“A huge amount of money is going towards intervention, and I think the cool thing about it is, it’s absolutely benefitting our kids who are in ELD, it’s benefitting our kids who have struggled with grades,” Laughrea said. “But the nice thing is that even the kids who are C students, who could really be B students, or even kids who are B students who are struggling in AP classes, the interventions are there for them too. Those are things we’ve never had before.”

RJUHSD admin dedicated Parent’s Club meetings and surveys at each site in the district to receive feedback from the community on the allocation of LCAP funds.

According to Laughrea, the feedback was mostly positive towards RJUHSD’s current expenditures.

“I think that as a district, we’ve done a really good job with our LCAP, and we worked really, really hard at trying to get input, so much that’s it’s almost to a fault,” Laughrea said. “We have so much different input we are looking at for so many different groups. We went out so much more this year and multiple times because we wanted to get a wide variety of people, and really hear from people about what working and what’s not.”

According to Laughrea, parents responded the most towards the allocation of money towards college visits.

“I think probably the most positive report for those college visits has been from the parents, of EL students and from El students themselves,” Laughrea said.

Laughrea cites the $31,598 towards AVID as mostly covering the payment of AVID coordinators, separate from the $25,000 for college visits in LCAP.

“I believe AVID has there own field trips, and it’s just been something that’s a part of the program forever,” Laughrea said. “They really believe, and I do to, that getting kids on college campuses is extremely important so they can see themselves as college-going kids.”

For Hobbs, the new funds for college visits offer an opportunity for his students that they rarely experienced in past school years.

“It’s creating this culture,” Hobbs said. “So the college visits are important. It’s also a rewards system.”

The ELD department at RHS approached Byrd to take out some of professional development sessions during the school year and move them to the summer, in order to keep the rhythm in the class with frequent teacher absences.

“Regarding the bootcamp it’s more or less we want to get our house in order we have the second highest EL population in the district thus we have extra amount of money that is based primarily on that EL population that comes in,” Hobbs said. “There’s this cash flow that we didn’t really know about and now it’s about how we best use that.”

According to Hobbs, there are about 28 students who qualify as Special Ed as well as ELL students. He hopes to be able to collaborate with the Special Ed program as the ELD department develops their plans for LCAP money.

“We are looking into, through this ‘bootcamp,’ collaborating with special ed population and educators,” Hobbs said. “And at Roseville High School we have that EL population but within that population we have students who are in the special ED program. And we are going to be talking about as a department, how do we serve our duals, those kids that are both special ed and EL? We are looking into how together we can collaborate with them and share strategies and work together.”

Hobbs wants to focus on getting the curriculum for EL classes during the ELD department’s meetings regarding LCAP.

“We are currently looking at what to do for our instructional supplies, we’re looking into getting more academic toolkits,” Hobbs said.

According to Hobbs. the most important thing about receiving LCAP funds is cultivating the drive for success in every student.

“It’s tricky, because you have people who say ‘Oh look at all of the money they get,’ and it’s not really that,” Hobbs said. “This is where the government is telling us the money is going. It’s really about how we can spend and spread it out so we can impact the most. For some of these kids they just need the belief that they can do something.”