Clovis Unified has worked continuously over this last year to implement the 2021-2024 LCAP utilizing the prior year’s approved LCAP. The district has a well-established strategic plan, aligned to the LCAP. District townhall meetings and site meetings were held to communicate with our community and to gather feedback from all educational partners. Surveys were conducted in the spring. Due to COVID-19, state law suspended the reporting of state and local indicators on the 2020 California School Dashboard. Looking historically at our data, we have been making progress overall and with our identified students as exemplified by the scores for FY, LI, and EL students on academic metrics. A review of the local data and the California School Dashboard reveal much success within Clovis Unified.

Clovis Unified plans to maintain and build upon our success. We are moving forward with many actions that have proven to bear fruit through our efforts. We will build upon our successes by adding increased instructional time during the school day for students as well as expanding learning opportunities outside of the school day. We are reducing class sizes in K-3rd grade levels at all Title I schools in our district. Clovis Unified is keenly aware of the effect of the pandemic on our students and that some students have experienced learning loss. We know that to continue our success, more time must be dedicated to student learning. We are continuing the expansion of actions that provide intervention time in the areas of math and literacy. We will also continue providing more opportunities for credit recovery to keep students in alignment with the trajectory to graduation, which will support increased graduation rates. We have had success with increasing diagnostic assessments and targeted instruction in mathematics and expanded that program to include ELA last year. Professional learning has been a factor in our success over the last few years and we will continue to offer our staff the most relevant training to meet the unique learning needs of our students with a focus on increased support for our unduplicated students and for students most affected by the pandemic. 

With California’s accountability system through the Data Dashboard, school districts throughout the state identified for Differentiated Assistance, requiring additional support in identified areas. Clovis Unified partners with Fresno County Office of Education to support our student groups identified for Differentiated Assistance. Clovis Unified used to be in Differentiated Assistance for students with disabilities because of the Red designation in graduation rate and suspensions. With growth from the 2018 to 2019 school year, our district exited Differentiated Assistance for these students. We consider our work with students with disabilities to be a success over the last few years. Using the 2019 Dashboard, two groups have been identified to be in need of Differentiated Assistance: foster youth and homeless. We are making progress with both groups as measured by the Dashboard and other indicators.

We have accelerated efforts in our work with Differentiated Assistance, specifically with work in our Student Services and School Attendance (SSSA) office. The SSSA office is our point of contact for all things homeless and foster youth. The SSSA intervention team handles case management, needs assessments, and school placements. They provide educational supplies to students and coordinate transportation to be sure that students have access to the school and resources needed to be successful. Attendance officers assigned to these students make individual contacts, implement attendance interventions, and communicate with all relevant stakeholders. We offer our foster and homeless students tutoring opportunities and 1:1 social-emotional check-ins. To continue our success, we are expanding services offered to these students in the coming year. We provide 24/7 online tutoring and in person support 1:1. We also plan to continue connecting our students to community mentors.  

The 2021-2022 school year has proven to have its challenges. Our staff worked tirelessly to meet the individual needs of our students during these difficult times. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and closure of schools in March 2020, a full California School Dashboard was not published in 2020 or 2021. The areas of need described in this section are based on local indicators and available state data. CUSD’s 2019 Dashboard results are also included. Although we’ve experienced success in “All” categories, the 2019 Dashboard demonstrates that the district needs to improve significantly across multiple Dashboard indicators for some student groups.

To build upon these previous needs, Clovis Unified extends its commitment to our significant subgroups through actions and services in the 2022-2023 LCAP. We learned over the last few years that technology access was a struggle for our LI students, along with our homeless and foster youth students. They were the students of greatest need when we surveyed students and parents and distributed devices and hotspots. We included a new action/service in the 2021-2024 LCAP to specifically meet this need. We have designated $500,000.00 for this. We are continuing that action for the 2022-2023 LCAP. We know that students have more access to the additional resources with internet access at home and are able to communicate more effectively with their teacher and school. We implemented iReady in our schools with the 2021-2024 LCAP and students have the opportunity to access individualized, targeted lessons when they have full-time access to technology.

Foster Youth and Homeless students are a focus area in our district. We are currently receiving Differentiated Assistance for these groups because of gaps in academic areas and for chronic absenteeism (homeless). This LCAP continues to fund personnel at our Student Services and School Attendance (SSSA) Department. These personnel directly support the foster youth and homeless students. To work with foster youth and homeless, the SSSA office employs an Assistant Director, Intervention Guidance Learning Specialist (GLS), and an administrative assistant. The LCAP also funds six attendance officers who support these students. The SSSA intervention team including attendance officers manages cases, makes individual family contacts, conducts needs assessments, coordinates transportation, and provides educational supplies to students. SSSA sponsors tutoring opportunities for foster youth and homeless students. They provide 1:1 social-emotional check-ins and act as liaisons for the group homes within our district.

For students with disabilities (SWD), there are actions and supports to meet their unique needs. We plan to expend $101,898,100.00 per year through the LCAP to support students with disabilities and implement the actions within their IEPs through support of resource specialist teachers at Title 1 schools. We also plan to bolster support for SWD at the SSSA office with a program specialist who focuses specifically on SWD and students who are homeless and in foster care to ensure they are properly placed and receive services in a timely manner. We plan to hire mentors and tutors at the alternative sites to work with SWD to extend opportunities for 1:1 support to help fill any learning and social emotional needs to successfully transition students to the comprehensive school site. These actions were implemented in last year’s LCAP and are continuing for the 2022-2023 LCAP.

Our work with EL students is important. With this LCAP, we plan to expand the offerings for our EL students by providing them more support and additional time to achieve grade level standards. For the 2022-2023 LCAP, we have increased intervention and push-in time and are offering additional courses for support at the secondary level. We are revising our EL summer school program format to embed academic language support within the regular summer school classrooms. With the last LCAP, we hired a Learning Director on Special Assignment to coordinate districtwide services, testing requirements, and professional development activities for these students.

We know that our SED students, EL students, foster youth, homeless, and LI students struggled with distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our data historically shows that these students underperform ALL students when measured by state and local assessments. That trend continues this year. Last year we expanded our actions and services to offer interventions before and after school and to offer additional intervention classes during the school day, specifically for identified students. We also have in place our Transition Team members (multiple personnel assigned to FY, EL, and LI students in each area of the district) to meet the social-emotional and academic needs of students and to connect them with activities and resources at the school sites that will help them be more likely to succeed in school. This aligns with the feedback we received from our educational partners and we will be continuing these services in the 2022-2023 LCAP. 

Of special concern this year is a focus to continue efforts to close learning gaps in ELA and Math, when measured by local metrics (specifically iReady). We plan to continue to offer iReady and expand the intervention services through this system. This year was our first year with the full iReady system in place. For the LCAP, we have winter data available. We look forward to using CAASPP data as it becomes available to us this summer for the 2021-2022 school year. This will provide us additional data to identify student strengths and areas for improvement. To support ELA and Math growth, we are expanding intervention actions and services in this upcoming LCAP.

Full successes and identified need descriptions are available in the LCAP document located on the LCAP webpage.