The Saugus Union School District held a public hearing on its 2026-27 Local Control and Accountability Plan during the June 3 governing board meeting, and the approval of the LCAP is scheduled to take place later this month.
The LCAP is a three-year plan for California school districts that outlines the district’s academic goals, as well as the services and actions it will implement to achieve student success.
For the upcoming school year, the Saugus district anticipates to receive $7.3 million in supplemental funding primarily directed toward unduplicated pupils, but all students may benefit from LCAP goals and actions, Edwin T. Clement, district assistant superintendent of education services, said during the presentation.
The Saugus district’s LCAP goals remain the same as previously stated, which is implementing structural programs and services that allow students to close the achievement gap in core academic areas, create school environments that are responsive to student and educational social-emotional learning needs to increase engagement and connectedness to school, and engage parents in the school community and decision-making process to create a core instructional program aimed at meeting the needs of all students. There are five goals in total.
During the presentation, Carin Fractor, the district’s director of curriculum and instruction, noted that it takes time to see data shifts, which is why the state implements a three-year process for the LCAP.
Both Fractor and Clement went through all the goals and actions and then shared the changes or shifts made based on educational partner feedback for the third year of the LCAP plan.
For Saugus, “the data is trending in the right direction, especially for our duplicated students” she said during the meeting. Duplicated students are students who fall under one or more of three categories, which are low income, English learners and foster youth.
Out of the district’s 9,169 students enrolled, the 2025-26 school year saw 36.4% of unduplicated students.
A new column added to the presentation was labeled “contributing,” indicating that the actions are identified in the LCAP for supplemental funding and that the district must demonstrate that the funding is being used to increase or improve services targeted toward unduplicated pupils.
For goal No. 1, closing the achievement gap, all actions were being directly supported by supplemental funds from the LCAP. Those services include English language arts and mathematics teachers on special assignment, professional learning communities, site resources to enhance unduplicated pupil learning, and technology access, among others.
For goal No. 2, which focused on meeting the academic needs of English learners, most of the actions were identified as contributing. However, Fractor said other students may also benefit from those resources. One program that was not considered a contributing action was the dual language immersion program, which Fractor said is a general offering available for all students to enroll in, although it also provides benefits to English learners.
In the student engagement and wellness goal, the social emotional learning curriculum action was labeled as non-contributing. Clement stated that the district’s Character Strong curriculum was included in the presentation because it’s related to the goal overall, but it’s not being funded through the LCAP funds.
Actions that are a part of the student engagement and wellness goal include behavior support teams, school engagement and school connectedness, mental health and social-emotional support activities as well as positive behavioral intervention and support, professional development and additional school psychologists.
For family engagement services, it was a mixture of contributing and noncontributing. Translation services were labeled as contributing because it targets working with a specific demographic of families that may need the service to become more engaged with the school community.
Clement noted under goal No. 5, diversity and understanding, it was the least amount for which the district has used supplemental funding, because materials were already previously purchased or implemented beforehand.
“So as we’ve seen higher needs in other areas, we’ve increased the number of social workers, we’ve increased the number of behaviorists, so those are shifts and actions. Still working on the same goals, and although it’s based on our data, and it’s based on our outcomes,” Clement said.
A new update required this year was the Learning Recovery Emergency Block Grant funding update or LREBG for short. Any funding that districts across the state still have left over from that blockgrant is allocated specifically for the LCAP.
“You have to have a metric aligned to it, and you need to use evidence-based practices, and also it has to be tied to meeting the needs of students based on needs assessment,” Fractor said. “It must be intended to close learning gaps for English language arts and mathematics.”
The Saugus district is seeing $797,284 of LCAP allocation for the 2026-26 school year.
“We’ll look at what funding is still expended for next year to continue these actions,” Fractor added. “We did do a local needs assessment, really looking at how do we really target this specific funding in addition to our supplemental funding to accelerate learning for our students. We did look at specific student groups, at specific school sites, and really found how we could best use the funding tied to evidence-based practices to accelerate learning for specific students.”
Under goal No.1, changes to the LCAP in response to educational partner input and needs assessment, the district will increase funding for professional development in the areas of reading, writing integration, and foundational literacy including the use of LREBG funds. Professional development for math curriculum will also be increased and there will be a removal of 21st Century TOSA positions.
For goals No. 2 through 5, all funding will continue for current actions.
Approval of the 2026-27 LCAP is set to take place at the June 30 regular board meeting scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. The Saugus district office is located at 24930 Avenue Stanford, Valencia.
