HUSD Talks Assessment And Budget
In Which: Assessment shows progress on absenteeism, Public calls to keep Family Engagement Specialists and drop punitive practices, And The budget picture gets a little worse.
Assessments Improve But Much Work Needed
The Hayward Unified School District (HUSD) took a look at the 2024 California Dashboard, which gives a district-wide overview of how HUSD is doing in a number of areas:
Chronic Absenteeism
Suspension Rates
English Learner Progress
Graduation Rates
College/Career Readiness
English Language Arts
Mathematics
One of the important parts of this dashboard is that it breaks out how different student demographics are doing, including racial/ethnic groups, socioeconomically disadvantaged, English learners, Homeless and Foster youth, and Students with disabilities. This is a lot, and it’s kind of nerd stuff, but looking at the dashboard gives an overview of how students across the district are performing in a number of areas and who is doing better and who needs some help.
The Good News
There’s some good news here where improvements are being made. College and Career Readiness is where HUSD shines the most—it’s the only measure where almost everyone is in the green. That’s increased by 10% so that 46% of students are supposed to be ready. Good news for the workforce, I guess.
But Chronic Absenteeism—where a student misses 10 or more days per year—dropped 13% over last year. That still means almost 27% of students are Chronically Absentee, and thought that’s a lot higher than the 2019 level of 12%, it’s a lot lower than the 2022 high of 55%.
Graduation rates are also up by about 3% to 77%—that’s graduation within 4 years. Unsurprisingly, the ones who are doing the worst here are English Learners, Homeless students, and Students with disabilities. Coincidentally, the City just agreed to prioritize student homelessness in the future, so there’s a good chance this will help graduation rates.
Interestingly, student Homelessness doesn’t seem to have a noticeable impact on absenteeism—perhaps because HUSD provides so many basic services that students are almost required to attend—or Career readiness.
The Bad News
Unfortunately, everything else is either doing worse or just staying flat. For English Language Arts, the only groups doing well are Filipino students, with our Hispanic students—many of whom are also probably English Learners—being the only ethnic group in the red. The English Language Arts readiness dropped by 7.5 points.
Nobody is doing well in Mathematics, unfortunately. Filipino and White students are doing the best, but they’re still in the Yellow—hardly thriving—while every other Racial and Ethnic group is in the Orange or Red—big trouble there. Almost 60% of students aren’t meeting the basic math standards, according to the assessments.
Suspension rates have also increased—despite having a policy in place to address it. According to a comment from Trustee Oquenda, on November 9th, 2022, the HUSD Board passed a “restorative practices policy to inform exclusionary practices.” This would be an attempt to reduce things like suspensions, expulsions, and other punitive practices. And while suspensions went down in 2022, they have continued to increase since then—going up by 30% from 2022 to 2023.
These numbers also only count the number of students who have been suspended at least one time. It doesn’t capture how many times a student is suspended, whether it’s once or a dozen times throughout the year.
It’s also important to point out that just generating all of this data is a burden on students. “It being very demanding on a student who’s taking both this intense English proficiency test as well as all the other CASP exams, which could be upwards of 3 additional exams.” This is all on top of the regular coursework and Staff time needed to administer and process the exams. Even generating the data costs a huge amount of time and money.
What Are They Doing About It?
Obviously, the data can only show what the problem is. You then have to actually do something about it to change things. A lot of what HUSD is doing is informed by the Systemic Instructional Review (SIR), which is a big plan put together by the Alameda County Board of Education in partnership with a company called WestEd that outlines ways to turn things around.
The Executive Summary—because who has time to read a 30 page document like this—recommendations show some interesting issues across the district. It recommends things like “prioritize academic instruction as the focus for mandatory teacher professional learning,” indicating that the core focus of a teacher’s job—academic instruction—is apparently lacking among teachers.
It also calls for aligning curricula, instructional practices, and assessment across all school sites. That hints that there’s drastically different curriculum, instruction, and assessment being done depending on the school site—meaning which school you go to in HUSD could have a huge impact on how well you’re even taught.
If you’ve ever looked closely at public schools in the US, however, this shouldn’t be a surprise. Between different needs and different PTA fundraising capacities, the browner and more poor a school is, the more likely they are to have worse teachers and worse outcomes. No school in HUSD is going to impress someone from Palo Alto, but the assessments and SIR indicate that the same paradigm exists within the district.
Board Calls For Oversight, Data, And Communication
Trustee Oquenda kicked off the comments by calling for accountability when it comes to improving student outcomes. “I want to stress the importance of accountability as we’re talking about these scores,” she said, “and where we see the most need to really think about how we’re getting into the classrooms… Who is held accountable making sure we’re in the classrooms, looking at what is happening and knowing how to support all our educators around the shared goals?”
The focus was on administrative oversight of the classrooms, which seem to be having issues with uneven instruction. “I would like to see some plan for how often do we have our admins going into classrooms… to make sure that these scores move.” Trustee Rawdon expressed concern about uniformity on the English Language Arts instruction, referencing problematic George W. Bush-era curriculum that is still apparently being taught 25 years later. Staff said that it is still being addressed is in “transition.”
Trustee Bruckner-Carillo was especially focused on Chronic Absenteeism, especially when it came to the cost—which Superintendent Reimann put at $4,200,000 per year at minimum as the report doesn’t count the number of days a student is absent. He also pushed for more data collection to develop targeted strategies for groups and students at risk of chronic absenteeism.
Superintendent Reimann agreed that absenteeism is one of the most important issues to address, even beyond the funding implications, “We can have the very best instructional strategies, we can have the greatest facilities, we can have the best teachers, but if our students aren’t in the classrooms, then we can’t serve them.”
Trustee Prada stressed the importance of collaboration with the Family Engagement Specialists. “I was a little shocked to hear that you guys aren’t collaborating with the family engagement specialists and the counsellors yet,” she said, “because I would like to see that happen, honestly, yesterday.”
Trustee Prada said creating a sense of belonging is a way to address absenteeism and the Family Engagement Specialists play a key role. “It’s a key component in this work that we’re doing addressing the reasons why our students aren’t there.”
Public For FESs And Against Exclusionary Policies
During over an hour of public comment, students, parents, and staff spoke in support of programs and policies that were important to them. They fell into three broad categories.
Keep Family Engagement Specialists
About a dozen people spoke in support of keeping Family Engagement Specialists (FESs). Despite not having made any recommendations about what to cut or how, it seemed clear that a lot of people assume that FESs are on the chopping block in the coming cutbacks. Support came from parents and teachers, showing just how much they actually do.
And looking at their job description, it’s easy to see how broad the role actually is. “Family Engagement Specialist encourages and coordinates parent education and involvement in various District and school programs and other activities to ensure equity of opportunity and access; perform liaison duties among staff, community resources and parents; refer families to local agencies or services as appropriate; utilize and update designated District communication and outreach portals and protocols.” Even just coordinating parent education and involvement should be a full-time job, but from testimony from parents and teachers, it’s clear their job is all over the place.
Youth Advisory Council Against Substance Abuse
Students from across the district on the Youth Advisory Council spoke out against substance abuse and the punitive polices currently used to address substance abuse on school sites. Students spoke about how ineffective it is to suspend a student for substance abuse when they’ll just go home and continue to do it there. They rightly called for changes to Board Policy to address the issue, some even citing specific policies by number.
Trustee Oquenda addressed the students by pointing out that the Board had already acted in 2022 by approving a “restorative practices policy to reform exclusionary practices.” However even she admitted it didn’t seem to matter as much as it should. “Of course, the work is still in progress,” she said, “but the Board did take action two years ago.” She asked Staff to get a copy of the policy to the students, who demonstrated that the policy change hadn’t actually addressed their lived realities.
Cry To Keep Parent Language Classes
A group of Spanish-speaking parents called on the Board to keep the parent English-language education classes that are regularly held at the HUB—it’s possible these are run though the Hayward Adult School, though it’s unclear whether the ones at the HUB are the same.
The parents pointed out the importance of the classes for the parents and the community that they’ve found, both between students and with their teacher. The classes are free of charge and showcase another example of how many support services have become the responsibility of underfunded institutions—like schools and libraries—because nobody else is willing to do it.
If these services are going to be housed under the school district, the powers that be should be putting up the money to fund them.
Budget Outlook Is Worse Than Anticipated
The HUSD Budget update gave some dismal news to add to the already drastic cuts that are going to be necessary in the coming year. Due to increased costs—especially in Special Education, whose use has increased drastically after the COVID lockdowns—the deficit has increased to $51,000,000. The District is developing a Fiscal Solvency Plan, which they’ll present between February and March.
HUSD is already doing what it can to save costs, including delaying payments to textbook publishers, saving $2,800,000, and reducing contract expenditures for services by $5,000,000. Non-essential recruitment is delayed and all new hiring requests will be reviewed by the executive team, and increased purchasing controls are cracking down on small expenditures throughout the year.
Trustee Oquenda spotted something in the report that seemed to look like restricted funds—money that goes to special programs like Special Education or other grant money—was being pushed into the General fund. Thankfully, the reverse is actually true—some restricted funds didn’t have enough money and so General funds were used to make up the difference.
Trustee Bruckner-Carillo stressed the need for communication and transparency to support staff during the budgeting process. Superintendent Reimann agreed, “We are acutely sensitive to the needs of our staff,” he said, “We are very sensitive and very supportive of the fact that our staff are committed to our schools and students.”
Trustee Bruckner-Carillo also called for follow-up engagement with the public, perhaps in the form of a second round of Town Halls. The Superintendent seemed supportive of the idea, but said that the whole Board needed to discuss that idea before it went forward.
Trustee Prada asked about the number of people who responded to the survey, which was 1,850 total survey responses, as well as 229 people who signed in to Town Halls, and 600 staff at the meetings. However, they were still waiting to get back the paper surveys at the time. Trustee Prada seemed upset at the level of engagement, given the size of our district—though if we assume that the 19,000 student district has exactly that many family units, a 1% response rate to a mass-survey is pretty standard.
Trustee Prada also brought up SB937, which seems to prohibit a local agency from asking for payment of fees until after the certificate of occupancy is given—it’s unclear how, exactly, this will help HUSD, but instituting some kind of fee structure could be a tactic to make some services revenue neutral.
Not Overspending, But Underfunding
Trustee Rawdon asked a question, mostly for the benefit of the public, around how the District spent the COVID-era ARPA money and how that impacted the budget. Superintendent Reimann talked, at length, about what the District had spent its money on—Chromebooks, cleanliness, and services to address Chronic Absenteeism. “HUSD did what it should have done,” he said, “it used the funds to support students.”
He pointed out that use of these needed services, especially Special Education, is up drastically and its continued use will cost money. He also pointed out that the issue has less to do with fiscal responsibility and much more to do with the money that’s actually available. He pointed out that the State Budget is down—which accounts for 75% of the Districts funding—and that HUSD provides a lot of services to students, especially those who are low income and disproportionately impacted.
“It’s not just HUSD,” he said. “It’s a systemic issue.” He pointed to SFUSD, OUSD, San Ramon Valley and Fremont—all affluent districts that are facing budget cuts. All told, 12 of the 16 School Districts in Alameda County are facing budget cuts. The District hasn’t overspent, the money has gone away.
“We don’t have kids that are saying, ‘We have too many resources in our schools,’” Superintendent Reimann said. It’s clear that cuts will have to be made. But the Superintendent stressed that the plan is to find the “least harmful” way of responding.