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.