At a State of Our Schools presentation Monday, Superintendent Dave Cash told families that the Santa Barbara Unified School District isn’t satisfied with its student achievement scores yet, but is working vigorously to move forward.
More than 100 people attended the meeting at Franklin Elementary School and asked pointed questions about the upcoming Common Core Standards and the district’s process of reclassifying English learner students.
Cash, with Franklin family advocate Tere Jurado translating, said the district has hired more bicultural and bilingual staff in the past two years than ever before. The district’s achievement gap shows lower scores for students with disabilities, economically-disadvantaged students, English learners, and Hispanic and Latino students.
Every student must the California High School Exit Exam to get a diploma now, but Cash said that if he had his way, the exam would be eliminated and replaced by the assessments in the Common Core Standards. The new assessments will be on computers and adapt depending on a student’s answers — a huge difference from the multiple-choice tests and No. 2 pencils of today, Cash said.
“We’ll learn more about what students know as opposed to what we do now — learn what they don’t know,” he said.
With that emphasis on computer-based testing in the future, the district is also pushing to get more technology into every school.
Parents asked Cash about the reclassification process, which is the opportunity for English learner students to be designated as fluent English proficient. Despite hundreds of students scoring high enough to be eligible for reclassification, Cash said the district has a poor track record of doing so.
“We have over-identified English learner students,” Cash said, adding that the district has slightly changed its criteria so it will be easier in the future. “This hasn’t been addressed by our district for a decade.”
The problem is in the implementation, administrators have said. In 2010-11, the district reclassified only 57 out of 445 elementary students who were eligible.
At a Board of Education meeting last year, Emilio Handall, assistant superintendent for the elementary district, said the district is getting stuck at the meetings themselves.
“We made this very easy for every site — each site every year gets the names of qualified students; they just failed to take action on it,” Handall said.
Cash also mentioned the future expansion of the restorative justice program. The program at Santa Barbara Junior High School has been so successful that the district wants to bring it to Santa Barbara High School, La Colina Junior High, La Cumbre Junior High and Goleta Valley Junior High schools next fall.
— Noozhawk staff writer Giana Magnoli can be reached at gmagnoli@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.