MUSD wins $1.7M grant

Madera Unified School District won a $1.7 million grant for the California Learning Communities for School Success Program (LCSSP). The grant will be spent through 2020 to try to improve student outcomes.

LCSSP funds local education programs aimed at reducing truancy and supporting students who are crime victims or at risk of dropping out of school.

Madera Unified will use the grant to implement a district-wide Multi-Tiered System of Supports framework to expand and integrate a Restorative Justice program with the district’s existing Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports program.

These two evidence-based, nonpunitive programs are designed to create healthy, equitable, caring schools that prevent and address behavioral disruption, support accountability and healing, and reduce numbers and rates of student suspensions and expulsions.

“The proposed program will advance three of the four Madera Unified LCAP goals and three corresponding strategies,” said Babatunde Ilori, MUSD director of performance management and internal communications. Those goals are fair access to high-level programs, data-driven learning and collaboration by educators, and safe and healthy environments, both for educators and students.

The LCSSP program was developed after California voters passed Proposition 47 in November 2014 and Assembly Bill 1014 and Senate Bill 527 in 2017. Prop. 47 reduced the penalties for some drug and property crimes considered less serious and non-violent, and set aside 25 percent of the resulting state savings for education grants.