Support built for the hours beyond the bell — and the systems behind them.
Beyond the Bell Consulting Group partners with school districts, county offices of education, charter schools, and community-based organizations on leadership development, Expanded Learning programming, LCAP strategy, and the data work that ties it all together.
the standard curve — and the trajectory we work toward
The track record behind the work
Four throughlines: develop the leaders, plan and fund the work, bring people along, and prove it's working.
Every engagement draws on the same core toolkit — leadership, program design, funding strategy, and data fluency — sized to what your organization actually needs.
Leadership & Org. Development
Building the leaders and structures that make everything else stick.
Planning & Compliance
The documents and dollars that make programming possible in the first place.
Engagement & Partnerships
Bringing families, staff, and outside providers into alignment with the plan.
Continuous Improvement
Structured inquiry and data fluency that keep the plan honest over time.
We don't hand off a plan. We build the cycle that keeps improving it.
Improvement Science sits underneath everything we do — including how we run our own engagements.
See our full approach →Don't just take our word for it.
I have had the pleasure of working with Mr. Plá for several years and have consistently been impressed by his leadership, expertise, and commitment to students and families. He is a culturally proficient leader who understands the importance of creating programs that are responsive to the diverse needs of school communities.
Mr. Plá has done an exceptional job developing San Jacinto Unified School District's Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (ELOP), positioning it as a model and state leader. His extensive background in education gives him a unique understanding of the breadth and depth of school district operations and, most importantly, what it takes to create meaningful opportunities for students.
One of Mr. Plá's greatest strengths is his willingness to listen to educational partners, value their feedback, and use both educational partner input and data to continuously improve programming. His leadership has helped create an exemplary after-school program that is student-centered, inclusive, and focused on quality outcomes.
I am confident that Mr. Plá will bring this same level of expertise, passion, and commitment to Beyond the Bell. I highly recommend him and believe his leadership will make a significant positive impact on schools, students, families, and educational communities.
Having worked alongside Ben Plá for years, I can say with confidence that the leadership he brings is exactly what makes Beyond the Bell Consulting Group worth engaging. He turns complex problems into clear direction, strengthens the programs and teams around him, and guides organizations through change with focus and follow-through. For any group serious about developing its leaders, Ben and Beyond the Bell are a genuine asset.
Ready to talk about what's working — and what isn't — in your programming?
Get in touchWork that starts in the classroom and shows up in the boardroom.
Each service below can stand alone or combine into a longer-term partnership — most organizations work with us across more than one at a time.
Leadership & Organizational Development
Leadership Development & Coaching
Strengthening the structures, practices, and leadership behaviors it takes to move an organization forward — for individual leaders and whole leadership teams.
- Leadership coaching and leadership-team development
- Strategic planning and mission/vision development
- Leadership retreats and decision-making structures
- Professional development workshops and facilitation
Cultural Proficiency & the LEAD Framework
Moving cultural proficiency from conversation to practice, using our LEAD Framework — Listen with Trust, Execute with Clarity, Align with Purpose, Drive Impact.
- Cultural Proficiency Leadership Workshops
- LEAD Leadership Development
- Culturally Responsive Systems Review
- Leadership Team Facilitation
- Continuous Improvement & Equity Coaching
Planning & Compliance
Expanded Learning Programming
ELO-P and ASES program design, staffing models, and quality standards that make the extended day feel intentional, not additional.
- Program design aligned to Expanded Learning Opportunities Program quality standards
- Staffing models and community-based organization partnerships
- Integration planning between the school day and extended day
- PBIS and tiered behavior support systems built for afterschool settings
- Inclusive practice design for students with IEPs
- Site-level implementation coaching and walkthroughs
ELO-P Plan Support
Drafting and revising the required Expanded Learning Opportunities Program Plan itself — the document your funding depends on, done right the first time.
- Full ELO-P Plan drafting or annual revision
- Alignment to CDE guidance and reporting requirements
- Stakeholder input synthesis for the plan narrative
- Board adoption timeline and presentation support
LCAP Strategy & Support
Stakeholder engagement, goal-setting, and board-ready drafting that turns your Local Control and Accountability Plan into a real operating document.
- Stakeholder engagement design and facilitation
- Goal, action, and metric alignment across LCFF priorities
- Board presentation drafting and narrative support
- Mid-year progress monitoring frameworks
Budget Support
Mapping ELO-P, LCFF, and categorical funding to what you're actually trying to do — so the budget and the plan tell the same story.
- Multi-year budget projections for expanded learning and LCAP goals
- Categorical and blended funding mapping
- Spend-down planning and carryover strategy
- Budget narratives for board and community audiences
Engagement & Partnerships
Community Engagement
Real input from families, staff, and students — gathered in a way that holds up as genuine stakeholder engagement, not a box to check.
- Family and student survey design and facilitation
- Advisory committee structuring (ELAC, DELAC, LCAP committees)
- Multilingual outreach planning
- Engagement summaries built for plan narratives
Strategic Vendor Partnerships
Evaluating and structuring partnerships with community-based organizations and outside providers so quality and accountability travel with the contract.
- Vendor and CBO evaluation frameworks
- RFP design and proposal review
- Contract terms tied to program quality standards
- Ongoing partner performance check-ins
Continuous Improvement
Improvement Science
Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles, driver diagrams, and root-cause protocols that help teams test their way to what actually works.
- PDSA cycle training and facilitation
- Driver diagrams and root-cause analysis
- Building networked improvement communities across sites
- Coaching for site and district improvement teams
Data Analysis
Dashboards and disaggregated reporting that connect classroom-level data to LCAP goals — built to be read by a board, not just a spreadsheet.
- Dashboard design and build for district and site leaders
- Disaggregated reporting by student group
- Data storytelling for board and community presentations
- Program evaluation tied to LCAP metrics
Not sure which service fits? That's usually the first conversation.
Talk it throughWe run every engagement the same way we ask your teams to run their programs.
Two frameworks sit underneath everything we do: Improvement Science for the data and program work, and our LEAD Framework for the leadership and culture work. Neither is treated as a one-time initiative — both are how we operate, from the first conversation to the last debrief.
Plan
We define the problem precisely — with your team, using your data — before proposing a single solution.
Do
Small, testable changes go into practice at a scale you can actually observe and adjust mid-course.
Study
We look at what the data actually shows against what we predicted — including where we were wrong.
Act
We adopt, adapt, or abandon the change — then widen the cycle to the next site, grade band, or program.
The LEAD Framework
Cultural proficiency doesn't take hold through a single workshop — it takes hold when it's built into how an organization listens, decides, aligns its people, and measures results. LEAD gives leaders a practical pathway for doing that: Listen with Trust. Execute with Clarity. Align with Purpose. Drive Impact.
Listen with Trust
Effective leadership begins with listening — intentionally seeking out the experiences and needs of the students, staff, families, and partners an organization serves, and creating room for that input to actually be heard.
Cultural proficiency connection: understanding culture begins with understanding people. Listening lets leaders treat differences as assets, and build solutions with communities rather than for them.
Execute with Clarity
Values only matter if they show up in practice. This step translates commitments into clear expectations, defined responsibilities, and systems that hold up under scrutiny — examining whether daily operations actually support the outcomes an organization says it values.
Cultural proficiency connection: equitable outcomes take more than good intentions. Barriers inside policies and procedures have to be named and addressed directly.
Align with Purpose
Sustainable change happens when people, practices, resources, and priorities point in the same direction. This step examines whether decisions, budgets, and day-to-day leadership behavior genuinely connect back to the organization's stated mission.
Cultural proficiency connection: it becomes sustainable once it's built into the organization's systems and priorities, rather than run as a separate initiative on the side.
Drive Impact
The real measure of leadership isn't activity, it's outcomes. This step focuses on identifying what success actually looks like, using data to monitor progress, and adjusting course when results reveal a persistent gap.
Cultural proficiency connection: organizations have to be willing to examine who's benefiting from their systems, who isn't, and what leadership action closes that gap.
People. Systems. Purpose. Impact.
Sustainable organizational improvement happens when these four elements work together — it's the philosophy behind every engagement we take on.
People
Develop and empower the individuals responsible for the work.
Systems
Create structures that make successful implementation easier.
Purpose
Connect decisions and resources to the organization's mission.
Impact
Measure whether the work is creating meaningful results.
Organizations often have strong ideas — what they lack is a system for turning those ideas into results.
Beyond the Bell Consulting Group works at the point where strategy meets implementation: helping educational organizations strengthen leadership, improve systems, develop high-quality programs, and use data to produce meaningful outcomes for students and communities.
To strengthen educational organizations by developing leaders, improving systems, and transforming data and strategy into meaningful outcomes for students and communities.
Educational organizations where strong leadership, effective systems, engaged employees, and continuous improvement create opportunities for every student to succeed.
Benjamin Plá
Benjamin Plá
Founder & Principal ConsultantSan Jacinto Rotary Club — President
- M.S., Leadership — Grand Canyon University
- B.S., Applied Business Analytics — Grand Canyon University
- Presenter, Boost Conference — "From Barriers to Belonging: Using Data and PBIS to Mainstream Students with IEPs into Afterschool Enrichment"
- Presenter, Riverside County Office of Education's Excellence Through Education Conference — "When All Else Fails, L.E.A.D.: Leading with Purpose, Seeing the Promise"
- Presenter, Q10 International Educational Conference — "Disrupting Inequities: Leading Highly Effective Teams for Positive Climate and Student Growth"
Benjamin Plá is an educational leader and systems-improvement practitioner with over a decade in public education. He currently leads San Jacinto Unified School District's Expanded Learning Program — strategy, budgeting, staffing, compliance, and quality across multiple sites — after building his expertise as a district Coordinator of Assessment & Accountability and five years as an Equity Co-Lead.
His path — from classified positions to district leadership — gives him a rare, firsthand view of how decisions made at the top actually land on employees, students, and families at the school site.
Listen with Trust
Strong leadership begins with understanding people, context, and the systems influencing their work.
Execute with Clarity
Ideas only create value when people understand expectations, responsibilities, timelines, and outcomes.
Align with Purpose
Programs, resources, employees, and strategies should connect directly to the organization's larger purpose.
Drive Impact
Leadership ultimately requires producing measurable improvements for the people and communities being served.
Want to know if we're the right fit for your organization?
Introduce yourselfNotes from the work — before you need a consultant.
Short, practical perspective on the questions we hear most from district and program leaders. General information, not legal or compliance advice — always confirm current requirements with your county office or the CDE.
From Barriers to Belonging: Including Students with IEPs in Afterschool Programming
A common gap in expanded learning programs isn't a lack of willingness to include students with IEPs — it's a lack of system. Afterschool staff are often trained differently than school-day staff, work with less behavioral data, and are left to figure out support in the moment rather than ahead of it.
Benjamin has led work applying PBIS (Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports) directly to an expanded learning setting — building tiered systems of support, staff readiness before students arrive, shared behavior language across a program team, and a weekly cycle of self-assessment and adjustment rather than one-time training. The approach treated inclusion as a systems problem to redesign, not a compliance requirement to accommodate.
The work has since been presented at the Boost Conference as a model for other expanded learning programs working to move from access to genuine inclusion.
What Actually Belongs in an ELO-P Plan
Most of the ELO-P Plans we review treat the document as a compliance form — fill in the boxes, submit, move on. The strongest ones treat it as an operating plan the program actually gets run against all year.
At minimum, a solid plan should clearly address program access and eligibility, staffing and supervision ratios, how the extended day connects to (rather than duplicates) the regular school day, alignment to the state's quality standards, and how families and staff were actually engaged in shaping it — not just informed after the fact.
The part districts most often shortchange is the budget narrative: showing the connection between what's funded and what's happening on the ground. That link is exactly where most program-quality problems, and most audit findings, tend to start.
LCAP Stakeholder Engagement, Beyond the Compliance Minimum
It's possible to meet every stakeholder engagement requirement in your LCAP and still end up with a plan nobody outside the district office actually recognizes. Holding the required meetings isn't the same as engagement that changes what the plan says.
The difference usually comes down to timing and translation. Engagement that happens early enough to actually shape goals — not just react to a draft — produces different plans than engagement that happens after the direction is already set. And feedback that gets translated into specific actions and metrics holds up better under board and community scrutiny than feedback that gets summarized into a paragraph and shelved.
If your engagement process feels like a formality, that's usually a sign the timeline needs to move earlier in the year, not that the process needs more meetings.
Why Improvement Science Beats the One-Time Initiative
Most program problems in education don't get solved by a single well-intentioned initiative — they get solved by a team that keeps testing small changes and actually looking at what happened. That's the entire premise of Improvement Science, and it's a different posture than most districts default to.
The instinct under pressure is to roll out a full solution everywhere at once. The alternative — a PDSA cycle — tests a change at a small enough scale that you can tell the difference between "this worked" and "this looked fine but we don't actually know."
The organizations that get the most out of this approach aren't the ones with the most resources. They're the ones willing to admit a first attempt didn't work, and treat that as data instead of a failure to hide.
Have a question this didn't answer?
Ask us directlyWhat to expect before you reach out.
Initial Conversation
A short call to understand what you're working on and whether we're a good fit — no cost, no obligation.
Scope & Proposal
We put together a clear written scope, timeline, and cost estimate for you to review internally.
Agreement & Setup
A signed engagement agreement, with invoicing or purchase-order setup handled to match your district's process.
Delivery & Check-ins
Regular check-ins throughout the engagement, with clear deliverables at each milestone.
Working with public agencies
- Insurance & documentation: proof of insurance and any vendor documentation your district requires can be provided upon request.
- Invoicing: we can invoice directly or work within your district's purchase order process.
- Agreements: a written engagement agreement is provided for your review before any work begins.
- Timeline: most engagements begin within 2–4 weeks of a signed agreement, depending on scope.
- RFPs: happy to respond to formal RFPs/RFQs — reach out and we'll follow your process.
Let's talk about your programming.
Tell us a little about your LEA and what you're working on. We typically respond within two business days.
Hemet, CA 92544