What's new

To register for any of the events below visit CSBA's events calendar.

• August 12, 2008 10:00 a.m. - 12 noon, Hacienda La Puente USD (City of Industry)

Overview

Over the past two years, the California School Boards Association, Children Now, the League of Women Voters of California Education Fund and the California State Parent Teachers Association have received grant support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to identify policy and fiscal priorities for public education. 

We are about to embark on our next phase, and CSBA, in partnership with the Association of California School Administrators, is launching a community engagement effort around school funding and reform in California. We will be training you and the superintendents in your communities on how to successfully implement a community engagement strategy in your districts/counties. We have branded this activity Learn More California, reflecting both the desire to enhance student learning and to speak to the need for Californians to learn more about the education system and what it requires to ratchet up to even higher levels of student achievement. This training is offered at no charge to you.

The goal of Learn More California is to help the public understand the local school budget (transparency) and develop a vision for the future of their local schools in the context of flexible and/or additional resources for public education. 

Specifically, these trainings are for school board members and superintendents for the purpose of ensuring you:

• Are aware of statewide efforts and issues related to the adequacy campaign;
• Feel confident in proactively engaging your community about the existing school finance structure and how it does and does not align with your community’s education goals (e.g., how your schools receive funding, the priorities for existing resources, how resources are distributed between schools, what constraints currently exist in the system);
• Can effectively work with your community to envision what an ideal school would provide to students and lead a conversation about potential changes, locally and at the state level, that would be needed in the system to reach that goal;
• Can successfully define the issues through the media; and
• Can advocate locally and at the state level in ways that share your community’s vision.

Our goal is to have board members in every community engaging in these dialogues. With 2008 dubbed “The Year of Education Reform,” the need for an informed constituency to engage in either the legislative or initiative process has never been more urgent. Through this effort to provide greater transparency in school budgets, we hope that communities will develop greater trust in the education process as well as a deeper understanding of the constraints faced by local districts/counties in terms of inflexible and limited resources. Further, the opportunity to begin establishing local visions around flexible and sufficient resources, will allow communities to understand how potential education reforms will impact them.

For more information about our community engagement training activities, please contact Holly Jacobson at (800) 266-3382 or e-mail her at hjacobson@csba.org.