AB 1310 requires county superintendents of schools to create and maintain local control and accountability plans (LCAPs) for every county-operated school or program using the state template, present them to the county board for adoption, and update them annually. The LCAP must cover a prescribed set of state priorities — including a discrete set of school climate measures — and the plans are effective for three years.
The bill also compels county superintendents to prepare an annual, public summary of how they will support districts and charter schools in implementing the LCAP framework, specifying goals, metrics, actions, and funding. The Department of Education must compile those county summaries into a single public document each year.
At a Glance
What It Does
The bill mandates county-level LCAPs built on the state template, lists specific state priorities to be addressed (teacher assignment, standards implementation, family engagement, pupil achievement, engagement, climate, access to course of study, foster/expelled pupil coordination), and requires an annual county support summary submitted with the LCAP and compiled by the state.
Who It Affects
County superintendents and county offices of education bear primary responsibility; school districts, charter schools, and county child welfare and juvenile court actors must coordinate with county offices; the Department of Education collects and publishes the county summaries; pupils (including foster youth, English learners, and unduplicated pupils) are the focus of the measures.
Why It Matters
This shifts clarity and some operational responsibility for LCAP implementation to county offices, elevates school climate to an explicit accountability priority, and creates a new, statewide repository of county-level support plans that can be used for oversight, technical assistance, and research.
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What This Bill Actually Does
AB 1310 places clear, structured duties on county superintendents to create a Local Control and Accountability Plan for every school and program they operate, using the state board’s template. Each county LCAP covers the full roster of state-defined priorities — from teacher assignment and facilities to student outcomes and school climate — and the statute requires county boards to adopt those plans.
The law sets administrative rhythm: an adopted LCAP is effective for three years, but counties must revisit and refresh it every year by July 1.
The bill defines what must appear in the plans. Beyond test scores and graduation rates, it expressly requires school climate indicators — suspension and expulsion rates, results from the California Healthy Kids Survey, and other local survey measures of safety and connectedness — and it instructs counties to include coordination plans for expelled and foster pupils, access to broad courses of study, and targeted services financed by supplemental funds.
Counties may rely on qualitative evidence, such as school quality reviews, alongside quantitative metrics, and data should align, where practicable, with the California School Dashboard reporting format.To operationalize county support, AB 1310 obligates county superintendents, beginning with fiscal year 2018–19, to prepare an annual summary describing how the county will help districts and charter schools implement the LCAP framework. That summary must identify support activities, funding sources, specific goals and metrics for county actions (including timelines and measurable progress indicators), and the concrete assistance the county will provide to districts identified for technical help.
Counties must present the summary to the county board and, starting with 2019–20, submit it with the LCAP; the Department of Education then aggregates those submissions and posts a compiled report by November 1 each year.
The Five Things You Need to Know
The county superintendent must develop and present a county LCAP using the state board’s template and each plan must cover every school or program the county operates.
An adopted county LCAP is effective for three years, but the county must update it annually on or before July 1.
School climate is an explicit state priority in the county LCAP and must include suspension and expulsion rates, California Healthy Kids Survey results, and other local survey measures.
Beginning 2018–19, counties must prepare an annual summary describing how they will support districts and charters in implementing LCAPs, including goals, metrics, actions, and the funding sources for those actions.
The Department of Education must compile county summaries into a single public document and make it available on its website by November 1 each year.
Section-by-Section Breakdown
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County LCAP development and presentation requirement
This clause requires each county superintendent to prepare a local control and accountability plan using the template the state board adopts and to present that document to the county board of education for adoption. Practically, this centralizes the format and key content expectations at the state-template level while assigning the operational task of drafting and adoption to the county office, making county offices the formal authors of county-level LCAPs.
Three-year effective period and annual updates
An adopted county LCAP runs for three years but must be updated every year by July 1. That creates a rolling planning window: counties draft longer-term strategy but are required to make annual revisions, which forces periodic reassessment of goals and resource allocations and creates an annual compliance checkpoint tied to the fiscal calendar.
Scope—each school and program must be covered
The county LCAP must include, for each school or program operated by the county superintendent, every item in the state template. This means county plans are granular: they cannot be high-level county aggregates. Compliance requires school-by-school data collection and program-level narrative, which increases the administrative and data-integration demands on county offices.
Teacher assignment, facilities and standards implementation
The statute makes teacher credentialing and appropriate assignment, access to standards-aligned materials, and facility maintenance explicit priorities. It also requires counties to set out how they will implement state academic standards and ensure English learners can access core instruction and language development standards. These provisions tie quality-of-instruction inputs and EL access directly into accountability planning rather than leaving them as discretionary descriptions.
Parental involvement and family engagement
The bill requires county LCAPs to describe efforts to solicit parent input at individual school sites and to promote participation by families of unduplicated pupils and pupils with exceptional needs. It encourages research-based family engagement practices and positions families as partners in program development — language that both sets expectations for county outreach and provides a template for documenting family engagement activities.
Pupil achievement, engagement and school climate metrics
This block lists the specific outcome and process measures counties must address: statewide assessments, UC/CSU A–G completion, CTE sequence completion, AP pass rates, college preparedness indicators, EL progress and reclassification rates, attendance and dropout/graduation statistics, and climate indicators (suspension/expulsion, Healthy Kids Survey, and local perception surveys). By enumerating these measures, the law narrows the universe of acceptable indicators and ties county plans to comparable statewide data sources.
Use of qualitative information, data alignment and consultation
Counties may include qualitative evidence (for example, school quality reviews) to explain local context and progress. The statute asks that reported data align with the California School Dashboard 'to the extent practicable' and requires consultation with school staff, bargaining units, parents, and pupils when developing the plan. Together these clauses balance standard metrics with local context and mandate stakeholder engagement during plan development.
Annual county support summary and state compilation
Starting in 2018–19, counties must prepare an annual summary describing how they will support districts and charters in implementing the LCAP framework, with specifics on activities, funding sources, goals, metrics, and actions for districts identified for technical assistance. From 2019–20, counties submit this summary with their LCAP, and the Department of Education compiles the county-provided information into a single public document each year (posted on the department’s website by November 1). This creates a standardized, state-level view of county assistance strategies.
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Explore Education in Codify Search →Who Benefits and Who Bears the Cost
Every bill creates winners and losers. Here's who stands to gain and who bears the cost.
Who Benefits
- Students subject to school climate measures (particularly foster youth, English learners, and unduplicated pupils): the explicit inclusion of climate indicators and coordination mechanisms aims to surface supports and gaps that affect these students directly.
- Parents and families: the statute requires documented family engagement practices and school-site parent input, which formalizes a role for families in planning and monitoring school supports.
- School districts and charter schools identified for technical assistance: the county summary must specify the assistance counties will provide and the funding sources for it, making county support more transparent and easier to hold to account.
- Researchers and advocates: standardized county-level summaries aggregated by the Department create a new public dataset for cross-county comparison and program evaluation.
- County offices of education (in the sense of clearer mandate): counties gain a defined statutory role and a statute-backed template for how to support districts, reducing ambiguity about expectations for county-level intervention.
Who Bears the Cost
- County superintendents and county offices of education: they must gather school-level data, draft school-by-school plans, create annual support summaries, and administer stakeholder consultation — all resource- and staff-intensive activities.
- School districts and charter schools: they will need to supply county offices with granular data and coordinate with county-led reviews and supports, which can strain district data teams and administrators.
- California Department of Education: compiling county submissions into a single public document each year imposes administrative and information-management work on the agency (and may require staff time or systems changes).
- County child welfare agencies and juvenile courts: the law requires coordination and information-sharing about foster and expelled pupils, adding work for these agencies to transfer records and respond to education-related requests.
- Local bargaining units and school staff: increased documentation of assignments, materials access, and program changes may create negotiation pressure or require additional collective-bargaining discussions, especially where county actions implicate working conditions.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The central dilemma is balancing statewide comparability and minimum expectations (a standard template, specific climate and outcome metrics, and public county summaries) against local context and capacity: the statute seeks consistent accountability information while relying on county offices to tailor supports to diverse districts — a combination that improves transparency but risks imposing uniform metrics and administrative burdens that may not fit every community.
The bill tightens county-level accountability and standardizes what must be reported, but that standardization brings trade-offs. School climate is measured with indicators (suspension/expulsion rates, survey results) that are easy to count but can mischaracterize schools that use alternative discipline or serve higher-need populations; reliance on these metrics risks incentivizing short-term compliance rather than durable climate improvement.
The statute allows qualitative evidence and local measures, but provides limited guidance on weighting or reconciling disparate data sources, leaving counties to make difficult choices about comparability and rigor.
Operationally, the requirement that county LCAPs cover each school and program and that counties prepare annual, detailed support summaries creates substantial data, coordination, and budgeting demands. The statute instructs counties to specify funding sources for support activities but does not create a funding stream; absent additional resources, counties and districts may face unfunded mandates or shift money from other programs.
Finally, the law creates potential overlap with district LCAP processes and with existing state dashboards and technical assistance structures, raising questions about duplication, lines of responsibility, and how the state will use the compiled county summaries — for technical assistance targeting, oversight, or public comparison.
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