CALSA's Summer Institute 2026

This session examines how one school district strategically launched artificial intelligence through an inside-out leadership model—beginning with capacity-building for administrators, alignment of governance, and ethical guardrails before scaling to classrooms. Participants will explore a district-wide approach to AI implementation that builds coherence, trust, and sustainability by engaging leaders first, establishing board-approved guidelines, and developing site-based teacher leads supported by a structured professional learning calendar. The presentation offers a replicable roadmap for districts seeking to integrate AI responsibly while strengthening instructional practice and organizational capacity.

What does it look like when a school district truly listens—to students, families, teachers, principals, and board trustees—before charting its future? This session tells that story.
Salinas Union High School District (SUHSD), one of California's largest and most diverse high school districts, embarked on a multi-year, community-centered process to develop its Framework for the Future and Portrait of a Graduate. Serving over 15,000 students in the heart of the Salinas Valley—where the children of farmworkers sit beside the children of engineers—SUHSD's work required a process as bold and inclusive as the community it serves.
In this session, district leaders will share how they moved from aspiration to action: designing a co-creation process that centered student voice, elevated family wisdom, and built ownership across every layer of the organization. Attendees will leave with a replicable process, practical tools, and the inspiration to launch their own community-driven visioning work.

In this session, participants will explore the strategies and systems needed to develop strong, equitable leadership across every level of education. Attendees will gain actionable insights to strengthen their leadership impact and build sustainable pipelines that prepare the next generation of school leaders.


Key Learning Objectives:

• Understand organizational dynamics and leverage formal and informal structures. 
• Cultivate influence through relationships, credibility, and equity-focused decision-making. 
• Identify and develop emerging leaders through mentorship, stretch opportunities, and leadership pathways. 
• Build systems and structures that sustain leadership beyond individual roles. 
• Reflect on leadership legacy and actionable steps to grow the next generation. 
• Format & Approach:
   Engaging keynote with sectioned slides, actionable strategies, reflection prompts, and steps for immediate application. Includes tools for leadership reflection, pipeline creation, and long-term leadership growth.

What does it take to move from fragmented initiatives to a coherent, equity-centered system that truly responds to students, families, and communities? This session introduces the Community Schools Blueprint through the SEEDS framework, Sustainable Transformation, Equity in Action, Empowerment & Roots, and Co-Created Innovation, as a living, adaptive approach to systems alignment and community-centered design.
Grounded in an ecological lens, the Blueprint recognizes schools as part of a broader, interconnected system where students, educators, families, and community partners co-construct the conditions for thriving. Participants will explore how the SEEDS domains serve as both anchors and drivers for continuous improvement, supporting districts in aligning programs, strengthening shared leadership, and building coherence across initiatives.
Rather than presenting a one-size-fits-all model, this session creates space for reflection and sense-making. Through examples and guided dialogue, participants will examine how to leveraging data, community voice, and cross-sector collaboration to deepen impact and sustain meaningful change. The session will also highlight connections to key California frameworks, including the California Community Schools Partnership Program and the CA English Learner Roadmap.
Participants will leave with practical tools, reflection prompts, and entry points to support their own community schools efforts, whether initiating or refining, while staying grounded in equity, responsiveness, and collective ownership.

Equity does not live in mission statements—it lives in systems.
Each year, schools make critical decisions about course offerings, placement, staffing, and instructional time. Too often, these decisions are treated as operational rather than instructional. In reality, the master schedule is one of the most powerful systems determining who has access to rigorous learning—and who does not.
Aligned to Somos el Puente entre Generaciones, this session challenges leaders to confront a persistent truth: inequities endure not only through bias, but through systems we have inherited and maintained. Master schedules, in particular, often reproduce patterns of tracking and limited access—quietly and predictably.
Participants will engage in analysis of real scheduling artifacts and data to:

• Identify where master schedules restrict access for multilingual learners, students with disabilities, and historically marginalized groups
• Examine how placement, sequencing, and staffing decisions shape opportunity
• Apply protocols to uncover inequities embedded in routine practices

Participants will leave with:

• Validation in your beliefs and frustrations in the existence of systemic barriers
• Practical strategies to align staffing, course offerings, and student placement with equity goals
• Immediate next steps to redesign systems that expand access to rigorous learning for all students

This session centers master scheduling as a critical lever for systems transformation—moving from compliance to intentional design, and from tradition to access.

If previous generations fought for access to the classroom and to be represented in the classroom, this work is about equipping the next generation of students with the agency to lead their classrooms and campuses in ways that best meet their needs. In the traditional school model, interventions are often things that are "assigned to" students, rather than "developed with" them. For students experiencing inequities, top-down approaches can inadvertently reinforce inequities and feelings of disenfranchisement. This session chronicles the shift that progressed Thurgood Marshall Secondary School (6-12) in Pasadena from compliance-based, adult-driven intervention systems to systems born from student agency. We will explore how the power of student agency can combat inequities students experience.
Student-driven equity initiatives at Marshall include:
1. Student-Driven PBIS (Positive Behavior, Interventions and Supports)
Traditional PBIS often fails when adults impose behavior expectations upon students. When students are trusted to define and place value on their own positive behaviors and then teach those behaviors to one another, engagement and buy-in increase, while challenging behaviors diminish.
2. Student-Led SEL Lessons
Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) can feel clinical when delivered solely by adults. We demonstrate a model where students are trained to facilitate and then record SEL mini-lessons for their peers. This approach ensures that the language, examples, and scenarios used are culturally appropriate and authentic, reducing the "relevance gap" that often plagues standard SEL curricula.
3. Peer Mediation and Restorative Justice
To close the equity gap as it relates to student discipline, we must move away from punitive measures that disproportionately affect students of color. When trained student leaders facilitate conflict resolution, they are reinforcing skills taught through PBIS and SEL lessons to help their classmates reflect, repair relationships and resolve conflicts, which reduces suspension rates, keeps students in the classroom and frees up time for administrators to engage in coaching teachers in culturally responsive teaching.
4. Whole-Class Data Chats
Equity thrives in transparency. When teachers relinquish the data analysis to students through classroom data-chats, classroom community is strengthened as students see one another as partners in learning and skills development. "Whole-Class Data Chats" allow students to analyze and reflect on their own data in community and then write goals to monitor their own progress and hold each-other accountable. This practice demystifies "the system" and empowers students to foster a classroom community that emphasizes shared accountability over individualized shame.


By the end of this presentation, participants will be able to:

• Identify specific points in their current intervention framework where student voice can be integrated.
• Understand how to and why student agency is vital to closing the equity gap
• Anticipate the impact of student agency on school climate and long-term equity outcomes on their campuses.
• Envision a path to student-led initiatives at their schools.

Affinity spaces play a meaningful role in helping Latine/x staff feel connected, seen, and supported within educational institutions. Grounded in the theme Somos el Puente entre Generaciones, presenters will reflect on the origins of ACOE’s Latine/x affinity group, lessons learned, challenges, ongoing growth and impact on participants and agency culture. This session will explore how affinity spaces can foster connection, community, mentorship, and leadership across generations and roles. 


Rather than presenting a best or model practice, we will invite open and honest conversations about what it takes to build and sustain affinity spaces in our organizations. Participants will leave with ideas, reflections, and practical considerations for building or strengthening affinity spaces that honor identity, foster belonging, and support intergenerational connection and leadership.

This session introduces the BEACONS Comprehensive Biliteracy and English Literacy Professional Learning Model, a research-based framework designed to strengthen literacy outcomes for multilingual learners through coherence, equity, and instructional precision. Grounded in the California ELA/ELD Framework, the English Learner Roadmap, and the California Dyslexia Guidelines, BEACONS supports educators in translating research into high-impact classroom practice.
Participants will explore the BEACONS 6E instructional model (Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, Evaluate, Extend) and how it integrates foundational skills, meaning-making, language development, effective expression, and content knowledge within a unified literacy system. The session emphasizes how explicit and systematic foundational skills instruction can be meaning-centered and embedded within culturally and linguistically responsive learning experiences.
Through classroom examples and cross-linguistic applications, participants will examine how to design instruction that leverages students’ full linguistic repertoires and supports biliteracy development across languages. The session also highlights the use of multiple data sources—such as decoding, writing, comprehension, and language development—to inform responsive, MTSS-aligned instruction.
Aligned to California’s Quality Professional Learning Standards, this session equips educators with practical tools and a clear vision for advancing biliteracy as a pathway to equity and opportunity.