Meeting Notes from February 23, 2012 Advisory Committee Meeting

Our Supporting All Employees – Classified Advisory Committee meeting on February 23 was a good working session.  Our focus was on trying to determine the competencies (COMPETENCY: ability: an ability to do something, especially measured against a standard) that are important for all classified employees.  The agenda and presentation materials are available for review.  However, please note that I added some notes to the presentation materials based on the discussion and for clarity.  Those were not on the slides at the time of the meeting, they are just to provide more information to folks accessing these materials through the blog.

The LAUSD has a framework, or catalog of required competencies, for teachers, and for school leaders.  These are fairly comprehensive and are in a near-final state.  There is also an initial attempt at one for District leaders that still needs a great deal of review if it’s determined that it will be used at all.  You can find the full frameworks at the District’s Supporting All Employees web pages.  The documents that I have included are a simple listing, or summary of the competencies that are covered by those frameworks.  In order to try to create some consistency across the frameworks, at least in the sense of using the same or similar competencies, I made a rough attempt at trying to see where competencies aligned across all the frameworks.  All these documents were made available to the meeting attendees in order to provide some ideas on how to proceed.  We are not required to align, especially if alignment means that the framework for classified staff will not be meaningful.

Finally, we spent quite a bit of time brainstorming what to include in the framework for classified employees.  We talked about some competencies that are more overarching, and include other competencies within them, similar to the way the other frameworks are structured.  We threw in ideas for competencies that might be important, even though we realize that we are not necessarily calling them by the best name.  We will have to refine that work before we start to define our competencies.  We want to make sure that our final product is clear, easy to understand by anyone that reads it (without their having to read the definition), and makes sense for all classifications.  We can probably also include some other competencies that are more specific to some positions in order to provide some customization.  These details will still need to be worked out.  The notes that I have included are simply a listing of the areas we discussed.  This document is editable, so please feel free to provide your comments.  You will also see that I have included some comments based on the discussion that we had.  I’ve also included a list of other names for the competency areas for generating ideas. Whew!  That's a lot of stuff.  Hope it makes sense.  If not, send me a comment through the blog and I'll try to clarify.

My next steps are to try to come up with some sort of structure utilizing the information that we gathered.  So, our next meeting will include an outline that we can modify as we see fit.  I’ll keep you posted on the progress of that and will have another survey shortly to determine the best next meeting date.

Meeting Notes from February 8, 2012 Advisory Committee Meeting

The following are my notes from the Supporting All Employees – Classified Advisory Committee meeting we held on Wednesday, February 8, 2012.

From a variety of sources, including our recent survey of classified employees, we have identified a number of potential focus group participants throughout the District.  One of the discussion topics at the meeting was how to engage individuals that indicated an interest in participating in focus groups.  Additionally, how do we find others that would like to be involved but are not yet aware of this initiative?  Because many sites have very few staff available to carry on the work, many individuals are unable to leave their work location during the work day.  Some may be available in the evenings or on weekends, but that does not work for all due to other commitments. 

Advisory Committee participants came up with several ideas on how to engage potential focus group members.  As a result, initially I plan to connect with representatives from the various collective bargaining units (CBUs) that represent classified employees.  Only one CBU was represented throughout the entire meeting on 2/8.  I will share some of the ideas that the group came up with and proceed from there.

How to engage potential members of focus groups

-In-person

-Digital – MyPay-like prompt – survey

-Stipend

-Provide statistics

-Town hall type meeting

-Webinars

-Word of mouth

-SAA meetings

-Incentives

-Phone calls (sample size)

-Union representatives

-TV station (KLCS)

-Kiosk (suggestion e-mail box)

We also asked the participants at the meeting to discuss what we should address with our focus groups.  We started with five recommendations that the Teacher Effectiveness Task Force developed, and which we aligned to the classified service (see presentation from the 11/3/11 Advisory Committee meeting).  We asked participants to address that section, out of the five areas of recommendation, which had the highest priority from their perspective.  Participants broke into groups to discuss the various topics.  Based on the notes, we will go back to the Advisory Group to ask them to prioritize and frame the discussion with focus groups.  These notes are the starting point.  Additionally, many participants agreed that there are many interrelated components within these areas.

Evaluation/Multiple Measures

-Engagement with students, parents, teachers

-Can evaluation be expanded (more categories)?

-Need relevant, update form that encourages feedback

-Mandatory annual evaluations (for real!) (Does the constant churn make all of this less relevant?)

-What would help supervisors provide feedback and utilize the probationary period?

-Can we make the disciplinary process less tedious and lengthy?

Career Pathways/Differentiated Compensation (Recognition)

-Gift cards – merit pay could end up being divisive

Tenure/Probationary Period

-Too long/too short?

-Is it viewed as part of the selection process?

-Only meaningful if administrator takes time to give feedback for performance improvement

Support Mechanisms

-Shadowing

-Training - technical (i.e., computer skills), customer service
-U-Tube-y employee training videos

Legislation

Too early to determine – will wait to see the direction in which we are moving and consider related legislative and policy issues.

Towards the end of the meeting we began discussing competencies and their role in our subsequent classified evaluation, but also their role in the entire classified career cycle.  We are working toward building a list of competencies that are applicable to all classifications within the classified service (currently, there are approximately 1,100 classifications).  We ran out of time before we got beyond an introduction.  The group is very interested in this part of the work.  We will likely work toward creating a framework, similar to those that the District is beginning to use for teachers and school leaders.  This process will probably take several months as we work through various iterations and seek feedback from various stakeholders.

Finally, our proposed next meeting date was Wednesday, March 28.  However, the group is anxious to begin the work on developing our list of competencies.  It is not only important what those competencies are, but also how we communicate them.  We will consider the culture that the District is working to create when defining and communicating competencies.  Therefore, here is a link to a brief survey with some potential meeting dates toward the end of February.  If you plan to participate in the next Advisory Committee meeting, please complete the survey and return it so that I can schedule the next meeting on the most convenient date.  Please keep in mind that this work will probably take place over the next few months.

We had a very productive Advisory Committee Meeting last Wednesday, February 8.  I will post the notes and some other materials and information early next week.  In the meantime, here are the agenda and presentation materials.  We mainly focused on the results of our recent survey of classified staff.  You can find a link to the results document in my prior post (2/7/12).  I will create a brief survey and add a link to it in my next post so that we can determine our next meeting date.  We began a discussion about competencies but ran out of time.  We will actually be spending quite a bit of time exploring this topic over the next several months.

Happy New Year!  Okay, I know it’s already February, and the year isn’t quite so new anymore, so happy new-ish year.  Since my last post, we launched a survey of all 38,000 LAUSD classified employees to find out their experience with/exposure to various support mechanisms.  We had about a 7% response rate – not bad considering we had a fairly short window for response, we didn’t do any pre-notification that the survey was coming, nor did we send any follow-up reminders.  Most employees received the survey in an e-mail.  We did mail it by internal and U.S. Mail for a small group that don’t access the internet with their LAUSD sign-on or are substitutes not located at a specific site.

While most of the survey results are at least somewhat positive, they are not overwhelmingly so.  We will be exploring, at our next Advisory Committee Meeting, how to address some of those issues, including how to communicate the supports we do have.  Our next Advisory Committee Meeting is on Wednesday, February 8, 2012, at 3:30 p.m.  These meetings are open to the public.  If you would like to join us and do not work in the Beaudry building, please comment to this blog so that I can ensure that you have the appropriate access to the meeting.  I will post the meeting presentation materials after the meeting date.