With over $4 billion in recent funding, the California Community Schools Partnership Program (CCSPP) has the potential to transform California’s K12 education landscape. The CCSPP represents an opportunity for schools to deepen their commitment to the Science of Learning and Development through practices such as connecting students to mental health support, engaging with families, or providing expanded learning opportunities. This moment has been met with optimism by stakeholders throughout education, including students, families, teachers, and advocates.

Yet, funding alone will not guarantee that California’s vision for a whole child education system will come to fruition. Resources will be critical, but how they are used will also play a major role in determining the efficacy of the program. This is the second blog in a “Follow the Money” series that takes a close look at the CCSPP grants, examining both who receives funding and how grantees plan to spend those resources. The first round of CCSPP grants have been awarded and Local Education Agencies (LEAs) will begin spending the funds this school year. The goal of this series is to learn in as close to real time as possible how CCSPP funds are being distributed and spent to inform policymakers and support their efforts in improving equity, efficacy, and high quality implementation of the CCSPP.

This second blog takes a deep dive into planning grants, detailing who received grants, what grantees have proposed to spend their budgets on, and to what extent district or community matches were included in proposed budgets.

Who received a CCSPP planning grant?

The first blog in the series, Follow the Money: Where are the California Community Schools Partnership Program Grants Going?, looked at which LEAs applied for and received CCSPP planning and implementation grants. The piece outlined how the California Department of Education (CDE) received 203 Planning Grant applications and funded 192 of them (95%). Planning grants have a $200,000 maximum award and are restricted to LEAs that identify as not already operating community schools. They are intended to help grantees develop a strategy through a dedicated planning process over the course of two years. And in future years, these grantees are expected to apply for five year implementation grants as well. Of the 192 planning grants that were awarded, 16 went to County Offices of Education, 89 went to districts, and 87 went to charter schools.

As noted in the first post, LEAs—regardless of student enrollment and number of schools—were limited to a single planning grant. So, charter schools and small LEAs are positioned to receive more planning dollars per school site than larger LEAs. This is because individual charter schools are designated as LEAs and Charter Management Organizations (CMOs) were eligible to apply on behalf of multiple charters. For example, Magnolia Science Academy, a CMO, supported the applications for each of its nine Southern California campuses. In total, the nine schools will be able to draw upon $1.8 million in planning resources. On the other hand, large LEAs were limited to a single $200,000 award to plan for all schools.

Overall, the planning grants are flowing to schools that serve a high concentration of unduplicated pupils, including low income students, English learners, foster youth, and homeless youth. While the statewide average for unduplicated pupils is 63%, planning grant applicants had an average of 78% unduplicated pupils. Planning grants are also disproportionately benefitting African American, Latinx, and Asian students. This is in line with the CCSPP’s goal of prioritizing schools that serve students with the greatest level of need.

What will the planning grants be spent on?

In total, the CDE reported planning grant awards of $38,200,122. Not surprisingly, every individual grant was at or near the $200,000 ceiling. Each CCSPP grantee was required to submit a detailed budget for how they proposed to spend their planning grant and the budgets can be sorted into three broad categories: staff, services, and stuff. Staff includes budget items going to personnel to carry out or support the planning effort. Services typically include contracts with third parties for training or planning assistance. And stuff covers expenditures on various types of materials.

According to the budgets, 75% of the grant resources from this round of grants are proposed to pay for staff, including certificated staff, classified staff, and employee benefits. This funding is going both towards existing staff, for teacher, principal, or superintendent time, and new staff, to hire personnel like a community school coordinator or family engagement specialist. About 20% of the budget is proposed to be spent on services, including budget items like teacher attendance at community schools conferences or specialized training sessions. And roughly 5% of the budget is proposed to go to stuff, including books, supplies, food for meetings, and capital outlays.

In reviewing the brief descriptions that accompanied the application line items, there were certain categories that came up repeatedly. For example, one of the most common budget items among grantees was a Community School Coordinator, or other individual designated to perform a coordinating role. Community School Coordinators work collaboratively with school and district staff to manage community schools programs, initiatives, and funding. Two other often mentioned expenditure items were staff or services related to family and community engagement and professional development. Family engagement allows families and other community members to provide valuable input in the planning stage of a community school, and budget items often appeared as either family liaisons or trainings on family engagement. Professional development costs included conferences, trainings, or participation in community schools collaborative meetings. Finally, a number of applications noted plans to perform a needs assessment, often either through Community School Coordinator staff time or contracted services with third parties. These efforts are designed to help a grantee identify the existing gaps in current programs and the most outstanding school and community needs, providing insight for areas of focus during the implementation stage.

How many grantees are braiding and blending funding?
Though the CCSPP dedicated over $4 billion to community schools, a strong community school strategy is built on braiding and blending multiple revenue streams to support a coherent whole child strategy with shared accountability across child-serving organizations and sectors. For example, community schools often seek to connect families and students to supports that exist beyond the building’s walls (e.g. supports for medical, mental health, or food insecurity needs). However, other existing federal and state programs aim to do the same thing and a community school strategy should aim to leverage the multiple revenue streams available for integrated supports and services. Out of the 192 grantees, 55 included community matches in their proposed budget and 171 included district matches. Only 30 districts included both district and community matches.

The budget item descriptions for matches were often brief, but we can observe that the 55 community matches represented a wide variety of activities. For example, community resources were identified as contributing to childcare for parents at planning meetings, basic supplies, professional development, outside speakers, translation services, and participation by county health administrators or external social workers. The degree of specificity regarding the nature of the funds also varied. While some made generic references to financial or in-kind contributions by a community partner, others identified a specific external grant or individual who would be supporting the planning work.

Similarly, district matches covered a range of expenditures. Several LEA’s referenced district support for a portion of certificated or classified staff salaries. We also saw applicants propose to use district matches to cover the associated benefits for salaries funded through grants. Other budget items funded through district matches included travel costs to attend professional development conferences, training materials, and substitutes to cover release time. Though often not specified, we assume that matches related to personnel costs will draw upon the district’s general fund. In a few cases, the district matches referred to another grant or categorical program.

Looking ahead

Planning grants are an important component of the CCSPP, providing an opportunity for LEAs that are new to community schools to spend necessary time and resources on learning and developing thoughtful plans. The robust response to the first round of planning grant awards is encouraging and, through this research, we hope to provide insight into how grantees plan to spend their budgets.

It is important to note, however, the limitations of our review. First, this research is on a collection of plans to plan. We would expect some grantees to depart from these proposals as they get further along in the planning process. Second, the format did not require significant detail, nor were applicants required to reconcile funding amounts with their descriptions or sources (grant, district, or community). There is, therefore, a limit to the precision of the analysis and number of conclusions we can draw. Third, though a review of the budgets tells us how districts plan to spend their funding, it does not give us insight into the quality of that spending. For example, two LEAs could choose to spend their funding on a Community School Coordinator, yet one of those coordinators might have a much deeper understanding of what it takes to run a successful community school than the other. Characteristics of high quality community schools, like cultures of trust, shared purpose, and collaboration, are typically not reflected in grant proposals.

Despite these limitations, this research surfaces questions for current and future rounds of CCSPP planning grants, such as:

Can future grant rounds be restructured to better balance the planning resources relative to single charter schools, small LEAs, and large LEAs?
What should determine whether an LEA already operates a community school, thus barring them from applying for a planning grant? And should LEAs that already have one or more community schools up and running still be eligible to apply for planning grants before committing to expansion?
Does the current mix of budget items, with an emphasis on staff and Community School Coordinators, look about right? Or should applicants be encouraged to consider committing to other components of planning such as needs assessments or family and community engagement?
Should applicants be asked to seek out more, and more specific, community matches? Could the application process serve as the impetus to pursue and obtain strong commitments from the district and community more broadly?
How can the technical assistance centers support planning grant recipients? Given that it would appear that California schools are about to designate a large number of new Community School Coordinators, how can technical assistance be provided to this cohort specifically?
At the end of these nearly 200 planning efforts, will an attempt be made to extract lessons learned to inform future schools and districts considering building out a community school?

We hope this research provides some top-line descriptors as to how planning grant funding will be spent and provides CDE staff, lawmakers, researchers, and advocates an opportunity to assess progress towards the goals of the CCSPP. In the next blog, the Opportunity Institute will look at implementation grants, similarly digging into how they were distributed, how grantees plan to spend their funds, and to what extent district or community matches were included in the proposed budgets.

We would like to extend a special thank you to Sivan Orr, who made significant contributions to the data collection for this project, and the Community School Learning Exchange (CSLX), for their valuable input as part of our writing process.