By Megan Burks
[Editor’s Note: Field Guide is a weekly email bringing you the news, explainers and action items needed to navigate your changing community. Click here to subscribe.]
|
District Considers Closing Some City Heights Schools
The San Diego Unified School District is looking at an estimated $57 million budget shortfall next school year and a $65 million shortfall the following year. To help fill those gaps, the district is looking into closing or consolidating schools in up to 10 clusters.
Schools in the Hoover and Crawford clusters made the district’s list of possible closures.
A committee exploring which schools to board up will be looking at enrollment trends, including the proportion of local students attending, and student performance. Such factors don’t bode well for City Heights schools on the list.
Eighty percent of schools in the Crawford cluster and 53 percent of those in the Hoover cluster are considered performance improvement schools because they have not met targets on state tests two or more years in a row. Under No Child Left Behind, that means parents can choose to pull their children out of the cluster and send them to better performing schools. Few City Heights parents do because they are unfamiliar with such provisions or have limited means to transport their kids elsewhere.
Advocates for the City Heights clusters say the closure process is unfair for City Heights schools, which continue to improve despite having high English-learner and low-income populations.
[Video: See how poverty affects student performance at Lincoln High School.]
City Heights Schools See Improvement on State Tests
San Diego schools saw improvement on state tests this year, including at Mann Middle School, a performance improvement school in the Hoover cluster.
About 30 percent of students there were proficient in both math and English three years ago. This year, 55 percent were proficient in math and 44 percent proficient in English.
SDUSD has also seen improvement on the California High School Exit Exam, especially among students of color. In recent years, the gap between white and Latino students on the math portion of the test went from 25 to 17 percentage points.
Teacher Layoffs Could Set Students Back
City Heights educators, however, worry that such gains will be compromised by teacher layoffs. This year, at least 32 teachers were laid off in the Crawford and Hoover clusters.
Mann principal Esther Omogbehin told voiceofsandiego.org that teachers in low-income neighborhoods are often the newest and, thus, the first to go. The resulting shuffle of teachers means a loss of stability and potential loss of gains.
[Click here for an interactive map of schools that lost teachers.]
Nonprofits Filling Gaps for Students
City Heights nonprofits are increasingly cushioning students from budget cuts. Several host after school programs and tutoring services. Others advocate for students at the district level, like the Mid-City CAN School Attendance Momentum Team, which made sure local students wouldn’t miss school because they couldn’t get whooping cough vaccinations.
This week, we highlight Price Charities’ effort to extend mental health services to uninsured, underinsured and undocumented Hoover students and their families.
We also look at a summer research trip put on by the Ocean Discovery Institute for budding scientists and environmentalists at Hoover.
More On School District Woes
How to Fix Schools: What Mayoral Candidates Say
State Finances May Not Improve Enough for District to Make Good on 2010 Labor Deal
State IOUs Force Districts to Borrow Money