How to Use This Toolkit

Welcome & Purpose

ELAC holds powerful potential to honor and grow family leadership, support multilingual learner success, and build thriving school communities. This bilingual Toolkit includes customizable meeting templates—complete with slide decks, facilitator guides, and handouts—designed to help your team lead meaningful, inclusive ELAC meetings.

Grounded in family voice and shaped by insights from community Listening Sessions—and rooted in the English Learner Roadmap Principles and CDE requirements—this Toolkit reimagines what ELAC can be. Rather than framing ELAC solely around compliance, the Toolkit helps facilitators see requirements as energizing opportunities to elevate parent voice and showcase how families contribute meaningfully to school improvement. It positions families not just as participants, but as powerful leaders and partners.

This Toolkit is powered by five Best Practices that are woven into every meeting: Build Community First, Honor Language and Culture, Design for Equity and Access, Center Family Voice, and Grow Family Leadership.

Ultimately, the ELAC Toolkit is grounded in the belief that family engagement is essential to student success. By equipping ELAC facilitators with practical tools and energizing strategies—and by uplifting families as change-makers—this Toolkit transforms ELAC into a space of connection, collaboration, and collective impact.

Who It’s For

This Toolkit is for site administrators, ELAC facilitators, family engagement staff, and anyone involved in leading or supporting English Learner Advisory Committees.

Start Here

1. Explore the “Begin with Purpose” Section
Ground yourself in the values, tools, and strategies that define this Toolkit.

2. Review the ELAC Best Practices
Visit The Heart of ELAC to explore five core practices that guide this Toolkit. These principles turn every meeting into an opportunity to build connection, elevate family voice, and grow shared leadership. 

3. Understand the Requirements
The CDE ELAC Requirements page outlines legal responsibilities and how your ELAC meetings can fulfill them.

Plan with Intention

4. Build a Planning Team
Identify your site’s ELAC team—include staff, family leaders, and community partners when possible. Meet regularly to plan together. During meetings, model shared leadership by co-facilitating with others. This approach builds facilitator capacity, strengthens trust with families, and demonstrates equity of voice in action.

5. Know the Calendar
Gather key dates like:

• ELPAC testing windows

• Parent-Teacher Conferences

• LCAP input sessions

• SPSA deadlines
  
  

These milestones can guide your meeting topics and ensure ELAC conversations stay timely and relevant.

6. Survey Families
Ask families when and how they prefer to meet. Their input increases participation and signals that their voice matters from the start.

7. Design for Impact
Choose from the 8 or 6 meeting models depending on your site’s needs and capacity.

8. Honor & Grow Family Leadership 
Anchor your planning in the belief that all families bring leadership in different ways—through presence, questions, encouragement, or advocacy. The Honor & Grow Family Leadership tools help recognize and grow these strengths by building confidence and capacity over time, through relationships, and with intentional support.

9. Engage with Outreach & Incentives Tools
Use the Outreach & Incentive Inspiration Boards to increase visibility, build connection, and encourage participation.

Use the Meeting Templates

Each template includes:

• A clear purpose statement

• A summary of how the meeting fulfills ELAC requirements

• A time-stamped agenda aligned with ELAC Best Practices

• Links to editable slide decks, handouts, and take-home tools

• A prep checklist for your facilitation team

• A detailed facilitator script with slide-by-slide guidance

• A debrief tool for team reflection and planning

• A short note of encouragement for the facilitation team

All templates are editable. Customize them to reflect your school’s strengths, languages, and families. Please credit Santa Cruz County Office of Education. 

After the Meeting

• Use the debrief template in the facilitation guide to reflect on how the meeting went

• Gather family feedback and use it to shape future meetings

• Invite new voices to co-lead or support future outreach

• Share outcomes with your school principal or School Site Council

Support & Feedback

Need help? Want to share an idea?

Visit our Contact Page to request support or send feedback. Your insights help us improve and grow this Toolkit together.