Leadership magazine Sept/Oct 2014 V 44 No 1 | Page 28

ONE DISTRICT’S STORY
Community engagement
takes work, but the outcome
is a plan for student success
that is rich, thoughtful, and
truly based on local needs.

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Leadership

T

his time last year, we were all trying to make sense of the newly
adopted Local Control Funding
Formula, and the Local Control Accountability Plan was only a vague
concept at best. What a difference a year
can make! We now have a three-year LCAP
adopted and in place. After several years of
budget cuts, new funding is flowing into the
district. We are able to restore and even add
additional services for the traditionally underserved students in our district.
More importantly, the LCAP community
engagement process has established an ongoing expectation for systematic community input in district goal-setting and budget
development.
If you have ever played an accordion, or
perhaps just listened, you know that there
is a considerable amount of movement in
and out required to produce the sounds that
reach our ears. The accordion opens wide to
scoop in air, and then – with a constant push
– the reward is the sound of the accordion.
It also requires the talent of the musician to

play the right key to turn otherwise unconnected sounds into pleasing musical notes.
This process is repeated over and over to
play a song. The accordion doesn’t play itself,
and the musician can’t simply look at the accordion to play it. It takes that opening up to
draw air in, and the push to compress the air
into musical notes.
The LCAP process is similar to playing
an accordion. It requires us – as educational
musicians – to open the LCAP accordion
and draw in the thoughts and ideas of the
community. Then, those thoughts and ideas
are pressed through the keys of the state
goals and local district data by the educational professionals to create an LCAP song
that addresses the needs of our students.
We are very excited about the LCAP song
composed by the Visalia Unified School
District and community, and we would like
to share what we have learned during this
process.

By Craig Wheaton and Jim Sullivan