CEO’s note
by Vernon M. Billy
chools are microcosms of the communities they serve and as society grows more complicated, so do the challenges confronting public education. If we hope to keep pace with the demands of the modern world, we must innovate and refuse to set limits on our ambition. Repeating the same practices and hoping for different results is not a plan, nor is waiting on government and corporate leaders for deliverance that may never come.
Of course, CSBA will always advocate aggressively for policy, legislative and legal conditions that improve schools, but when we have the chance to take matters into our hands, we need to seize the opportunity — even if it’s outside our comfort zone. This is why CSBA has invested significant time and energy over the past four years to elevate education workforce housing (EWH) as an unconventional yet effective approach to addressing one of the most pressing issues facing our state — affordable housing — and one of the most critical goals for our schools: the development and retention of high-quality staff.
EWH responds to three of the state’s most pressing challenges: housing affordability, shortages of teachers and school staff and disparities in educational outcomes. Public school employees often struggle to live in the communities where they work, making it difficult to recruit and retain staff and creating destructive churn in roles required to teach and support our students. When potential staff avoid entering the education field or leave the profession for one where they can live close to work and more easily put a roof over their heads, it leads to high rates of turnover and acute staffing shortages. These destabilizing factors hinder efforts to improve results for students overall and exacerbate conditions that contribute to California’s gargantuan achievement gap.
Since turnover is generally more severe at low-income schools serving large numbers of pupils from struggling student groups, it compounds the already significant challenges faced by those children. Research tells us that teacher quality has the greatest impact on student achievement of any on-campus factor, and anyone who knows their way around a school site will tell you that solid support staff are essential to its proper functioning. So, as a tool to address housing affordability for school staff, reduce turnover and create the kind of stability needed for better academic and social outcomes —especially for disadvantaged students — EWH holds special promise.
The connection between EWH and stronger schools is increasingly evident to the many local educational agencies that are considering or have already embarked on EWH developments. As of this writing, more than 165 LEAs, about 17 percent of the state, have expressed interest in CSBA support as they determine whether workforce housing makes sense for their districts and county offices of education. This would have been unthinkable even a few years ago, but that was before CSBA partnered on a groundbreaking report with UCLA’s cityLAB, the Center for Cities + Schools and Terner Center for Housing and Innovation — both at UC Berkeley — and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Education Workforce Housing in California: Developing the 21st Century Campus, contains surprising facts supporting the viability of EWH, generating a surge of interest in the idea. Among the most striking findings: every single county in the state has land suitable for the development of EWH. Collectively, California school districts own 75,000 acres of developable land encompassing one acre or more, and a majority of these properties are located where early and mid-career teachers, as well as many classified employees, face severe housing challenges.
It’s no secret that housing affordability is one of California’s most persistent problems; not just in large metro areas, but throughout the state. Similarly, staffing shortages are a fact of life in many schools, a situation likely to deteriorate as baby boomers retire en masse. While school districts and COEs constantly strive to improve working conditions and staff experience as a means of recruiting and retaining talent, there are limits to what they can do from a compensation standpoint — particularly when compared to the private sector.
Given this disadvantage, I had always wondered whether school districts could leverage their most valuable asset — property — to help level the playing field. Several years ago, I heard from a number of trustees expressing an interest in repurposing vacant or underutilized property as housing for school staff. At the time, only three such sites had been completed in the state, so the track record was thin and the resources available to LEAs were almost nonexistent. It was clear to me a significant opportunity existed here for schools and that CSBA was well-positioned to fill the void and help guide our members down a path where few had traveled. With CSBA co-sponsored legislation (Assembly Bill 2295) now in effect, there is a clear path for school districts and county offices of education to build high-quality, affordable homes for their employees on land they already own. For many education officials, the only remaining barrier is knowledge.
To help educate board members and move projects forward, CSBA created a wide-ranging resource library, which includes an EWH handbook, recordings and presentations from previous workshops, fact sheets on all EWH sites in the state, sample board resolutions, requests for proposals from LEAs that have successfully built workforce housing and much more. The resource library also includes a first-of-its-kind interactive map of all workforce housing developments in California. which illustrates the growing interest in EWH across the state. Users can see where projects have been completed, are under construction, in progress and under discussion, and use other site resources to acquire strategies to better navigate researching, building support for and developing education workforce housing.
CSBA has also convened cohorts of LEAs to participate in an intensive workshop series preparing governance teams to launch an education workforce housing project. To date, 15 LEAs have been accepted into a comprehensive EWH planning program funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and led by CSBA’s Education Workforce Housing Department along with our partners, cityLAB and the Center for Cities + Schools. In this series, subject matter experts lead participants through research on the history of EWH, data collection and analysis, visits to existing EWH sites, goal development, review of funding options and regulations, site selection and design, neighborhood impact analysis, and community engagement, project planning and more. The experience provides LEAs with the knowledge needed to capably handle every stage of an EWH project.
More EWH sites are enacted every year, and they’ve been met with rave reviews from staff, school communities and local media. Currently, cityLAB and the Center for Cities + Schools are conducting case studies on outcomes at Casa Del Maestro in Santa Clara Unified School District, Sage Park in Los Angeles USD, the Alameda in Salinas Union HSD and 705 Serramonte in Jefferson Union HSD Early versions of the studies indicate LEAs that built employee housing report huge improvements in staff retention and recruitment of new teachers and classified staff, along with other benefits. This is why it’s critical that education workforce housing remains an education-centered solution and one that specifically supports the goals of school districts and county offices of education.
Now that there’s proof of principle for EWH, as well as ample media coverage, people in other fields have started to cast a covetous eye toward the underutilized property owned by school districts. Some have even wondered aloud whether this property might be used for affordable housing generally, instead of exclusively for school staff. We must carefully guard against this encroachment and take advantage of the opportunity presented by underused school property lest we see this promising opportunity snatched out from under us before it has a chance to flourish. To that end, anyone ready to work with an expert in EWH should register for a free consultation with Property Planning Solutions, a partnership between CSBA and real estate advisory firm DCG Strategies. The potential is too great to ignore. Find more information at www.csba.org/propertyplanning.
The six school districts in California that have built successful housing developments for staff provide a template for other LEAs to follow, offering clear lessons on how to plan for, develop and manage education workforce housing that supports our core mission of preparing students for success in the world. The opportunity is out there; it’s time to bring it home.
