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Pleasanton Unified School District saw a huge success in this year’s summer programs including a 94% pass rate for high school students, staff said during a report to the school board last month.
Apart from data on the high schoolers, the 2022 summer programs update provided the board insight on how all three levels of education served a disproportionately high level of traditionally marginalized students.
Jamie Mather, coordinator of summer programs, intercession and extended learning for the district, said 433 elementary, 177 middle and 558 high school students took part in the summer classes.
“These are our students who need some extra support and some academic intervention to be able to meet grade level standards, and specifically at the high school level, hit the credits needed for graduation,” Mather told the Board of Trustees on Sept. 22.
He said that in total, the district typically serves over 1,000 students from preschool through the end of high school and even those in adult transition programs.
“We really had an opportunity to serve some of our students who are in need of academic support, academic intervention, and also our students in special education who are eligible for extended school year,” said Ed Diolazo, deputy superintendent of student support services.
At the elementary school level, Athena Duran, elementary principal of summer programs and vice principal of Amador Valley High School, reported to the board that the focus was on intervention for math and English.
Malcolm Norrington, secondary principal of summer programs and Foothill High School vice principal, said that was the same for middle school, but for high school students it was an opportunity to improve their grades.
“There’s a lot of research that shows that summer gaps can be really difficult for children, especially for struggling students,” Trustee Kelly Mokashi said. “So having these types of programs to benefit our students, they are of tremendous value.”
Norrington said that these students, as well as the other education levels, were some of their most marginalized students in PUSD and it was nice to see their hard work pay off with 94% of them passing.
Mather also said that the district also saw a lot of success in its Positive Behavior Intervention and Support System, which is an evidence-based, tiered framework for supporting students’ behavioral, academic, social, emotional and mental health.
“It is important that we provide all of these extra services for our students who go to summer school, because as we saw, they’re disproportionately from members of some of our more marginalized communities,” Mather said. “Whether it be low socioeconomic status, Latinx, emerging bilingual, these are the populations that can oftentimes use a little extra support and it’s good that we’re able to give it to them during summer school and identify during summer school.”
One of the questions that Board Vice President Steve Maher asked was how the district could bring that to 100% of students passing, to which Norrington said that maybe one way is to move away from Amador due to the distractions from the surrounding area.
“We’re on a campus like Amador in the summer and there’s so much going on but again, we would have to look at those that didn’t pass and reasons why because we did everything we could to keep students in school,” Norrington said.
The update also included information on the extended school year programs.
Mather said the purpose of the extended school year program was to reinforce and maintain a student’s individualized education program (IEP) goals so students with special needs don’t fall back during summer.
“We provide services to maintain progress on those goals, not to necessarily move forward,” Mather said. “We just don’t want a lot of regression during the summer.”
He added that they also improved the walk-in services they provided for those who need specific help on one issue.
“Walk-in services meant that a student really just needs one specific IEP service during the summer, they might need speech and language pathology or something similar, and they can literally walk onto campus and get that,” Mather said.
In other business
* The board approved to add and implement two new job descriptions that would help support the district’s three expanded learning opportunities programs (ELOP) — Kids Club Horizon Early Education Center and STEAM Preschool.
The district and the California School Employees’ Association, Chapter 155 have agreed on the memorandum for the implementation of an expanded learning lead and early learning expanded care analyst.
The lead position would help with hands-on support for students and staff while also developing and supporting the programs overall. On the other hand, the analyst position will focus on reporting to the state and financially monitor the accounts for the expanded learning programs.
“We definitely need someone to lead the program, because it’s a new program,” said Julio Hernandez, assistant superintendent of human resources. “The lead will be working with the staff to support that and then the other person who is the analyst is making sure that we’re compliant with the state requirements and that we’re also monitoring the accounts for the ELOP.”
According to the district’s website, the new ELOP provides funding from the California Department of Education for after school and summer school enrichment programs for transitional kindergarten through sixth grade.
The ongoing funding for the program comes from the state and is based on the district’s student count percentage.
