Board Member Spotlight: Brianna García
Brianna García wants CCAP to become a household name, the go-to place for California charter school authorizing.
“What I would ultimately like to see for CCAP, is that if anybody has a question about charters they go, ‘Oh, I know who to call. I know who has that information. I know who can help us with that,’” she says.
García is a vice president with School Service of California (SSC), an education consulting firm. She joined the CCAP board in 2018, because she believes that its mission to provide support, training and resources to improving authorizing practices is critical for improving education for all charter school students. Good authorizing is much more than following the state’s minimum legal requirements, explains García, especially because they are not very easy to understand and do not give authorizers a clear idea of how all the pieces fit together to form high-quality, comprehensive oversight.
García took an unexpected professional path to working with charter school authorizers. She graduated from the University of Southern California with a bachelor’s degree in architecture, a Master of Planning degree and a Master of Real Estate Development degree, which led to a job with a redevelopment agency. She moved into the real estate side of education when the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) asked her to serve as a facilities development manager to oversee buying land to build new schools. García jokes that while most people go into education for the kids, she was in it for the buildings and real estate; but she is serious about the connection between the two.
Having well-built, well-maintained schools is important, says García. “You can have the best teacher in the world, but if the room is 40 degrees or 50 degrees because it’s 40 outside and [students] are freezing, they’re not going to learn anything, they’re not going to be able to focus or concentrate.”
Much of her work at LAUSD involved helping district-authorized charter schools that were looking to build schools, as well as overseeing the implementation of Proposition 39, the 2000 voter-approved ballot measure that requires school districts to share public school facilities with charter schools, among other things.
At SSC, García helps school districts become more efficient and effective in all areas, from administration and budgeting to staffing and facilities. Her work with charter schools has expanded to include reviewing charter school petitions, and what she sees in many petitions has reinforced her commitment to CCAP’s mission to “ensure quality charter schools in California’s public education sector by providing a network of support and resources to build the professional capacity” of authorizers.
The most common misstep that she finds in charter petitions is a lack of understanding about state funding and budgeting, especially in small districts that often do not have the bandwidth or the resources to do this work, or that are challenged by high staff turnover. “There’s always somebody new sitting there,” she says.
García is encouraged by CCAP’s recently released Initial Charter Petition and Annual Report Toolkits for authorizers, but notes that training authorizers to use the toolkits is critical. The toolkits have a lot of good information, but there is a lot of it, and usually when she or CCAP receive calls from authorizers they need information on a specific issue immediately.
“We need to be able to show them how the toolkits can be pulled apart so they can pull that piece that they need, but then also get them thinking about that bigger long-term picture,” says García. “I think, ultimately, the better the authorizer, the better the charter school, which is the best thing for kids.”