Schools are the unit of change.
How does the principle connect to our mission?
We orient our staff to serve our schools. We focus on the lived experience at the school level of District policy and initiatives and advocate for change based on our experiences. We make coherence over compliance a cornerstone of our work and practice reciprocal (school/system) accountability for student outcomes.
What does this look like in practice?
• School-level goals drive planning and coordination of service and supports. Our schools’ strategic plans guide the work throughout the year and serve as a basis for ongoing check-ins, reflection, and planning between school site and home office staff.
• We act as implementation advocates to monitor policy and initiatives at the school level in order to elevate key issues at the system level. For example, we collaborated with LA Unified to inform the implementation of its new equity-based funding formula and continue to monitor it each year.
• We hold ourselves accountable to schools and take our role as a central support system for our school leaders seriously. We respond quickly when they contact us, we survey our schools annually, and home office staff receive 360 degree feedback from school and teacher leaders that informs yearly performance evaluations.
• We staff ourselves around schools in ways that are equity- and service-minded. For example, our math and literacy coordinators divide their time based on the differentiated needs of their schools.
• We allocate philanthropic dollars to schools based on need (in some cases, we may allocate double or triple the amount to a school that is one of the highest need) and make investments to fill specific gaps at schools, such as supporting the costs of technology purchases and training, or the hiring of a social worker.