With marching orders from the Legislature to create a parent-friendly document, the California Department of Education is in the final throes of designing another version — its fourth in 6 years — of the form that districts must use to explain how they’ll use funding from the Local Control Funding Formula (LCAP). The formula covers about 80 percent of money they get from the state.
Lawmakers ordered the department to make the LCAP shorter, clearer and easier to read after receiving constant complaints. Parents and members of the public complained that the annual plans had grown in many cases to hundreds of pages in length with dense prose and off-putting acronyms. The state board will adopt the new LCAP template in January for use in 2020-21.
