CUSD out of the Department of Education’s doghouse

Cabrillo Unified School District (CUSD) has been removed from the California Department of Education’s list of school districts on Program Improvement (PI). CUSD Superintendent John Bayless appealed the listing when it was announced that CUSD was one of ten districts added to the list on September 20.  However,  Alvin S. Hatch Elementary School has not been removed from the list.

Schools are added to the PI list when the fail to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) set by the state for two years in a row. Program Improvement is a multiyear process which places increasingly severe sanctions on schools and districts if they stay on the list. The only way to get off the list is to meet AYP goals for two years in a row.

Bayless sent a state a letter on September 29 appealing the determination because the District had made significant improvements in performance in the last three years [PDF of Bayless’s letter], across many subgroups of students. Bayless’s letter includes several graphs showing this progress.

The Department of Education accepted Bayless’s appeal for the district and has taken it off the Program Improvement list.

However, the department has not removed Hatch from Program Improvement.  Bayless says that a significant portion of the school’s shortfall can be attributed to the very high participation rate in the the school’s popular Spanish language immersion program.  A third (35%) of the school’s students are in the program, which gives them a serious disadvantage on English-language tests.