District Shares Expertise--at Cost

Three California school systems did some last-minute shopping of their own--at Capistrano Unified School District.

The districts all bought copies of the south Orange County school district’s plan for identifying and helping students who might have to be held back a grade.

Last year the state Legislature outlawed social promotion, ruling that students who do not perform at grade level will be retained.

Fearing pandemonium next June when the state’s elementary students can no longer count on social promotion to propel them to the next grade, Capistrano Unified officials decided to make a blueprint of their own coping methods.

The book, a product of a year’s worth of staff research, was developed when district officials saw no other available resources, said Susan McGill, executive director of elementary instruction for Capistrano Unified.

“We thought, ‘Surely we’re not the first people to do this,’ but nobody was doing anything,” McGill said. “After we developed the materials . . . we thought ‘This is good’ and maybe it would be helpful to other districts.”

The materials look simple. Along with a copy of the state law, they include a series of forms on which parents and teachers can list the specific terms for helping each struggling student.

At-risk students are identified by low scores on the district’s grade-level tests and poor classroom performance.

The forms also ask for a list of past interventions, teacher recommendations and pledges parents make to provide help at home.

“It helps us to keep track and document each student,” McGill said. “If we end up recommending retention, it helps parents to have information, and we need to make sure we have documented what we have done.”

Officials in the Garden Grove Unified and Newport-Mesa Unified school districts quickly snapped up copies of the training materials, at a cost of $69 for the handbook or a combination handbook/CD-ROM for $139. The San Rafael Elementary District in Marin County also purchased copies.

“We would have done the same thing, but it would have taken much longer,” said Debbie Kaplan, associate superintendent for San Rafael. “This saved us a lot of time.”

Kaplan said she was pleased by similarities in the districts’ population and testing methods and the CD-ROM’s adaptability.

“What was nice was that it’s really thought out,” she said. “It’s very easy to see the process and apply it to our own policy.”

But the content may not be helpful to all districts, because the information is tied so heavily to Capistrano Unified’s CORE tests, a test the district developed for its own students, said Bonnie Swann, director of elementary education and curriculum for Newport-Mesa.

“Much of it we cannot use because the test is something only Capistrano Unified conducts,” Swann said.

Capistrano’s materials were among about six Swann’s department purchased as guides for their effort to develop their own plans, Swann said.

Sharing solutions is often the only way to implement state mandates that don’t come with instructions, said James Morante, spokesman for the California School Boards Assn.

“There’s a new soup du jour reform every month,” Morante said. “You find it more necessary than convenient to do these endeavors. Capistrano Unified has done the labor to develop a useful and practical tool. They’re providing a service for other districts.”

But while districts often share ideas, Capistrano Unified’s solution is innovative given the short timeline, said Bob Anderson, an administrator in the standards and assessment division of the California Department of Education.

“I hadn’t heard of anybody having a product for this particular [situation],” Anderson said. “It’s a real challenge to districts to come up with a plan which suits the needs of every student.”

Although Anderson said it would be nice if districts shared their solutions for free, Kaplan wasn’t bothered by the cost.

“A lot of districts will share their information for free,” Kaplan said. “But . . . personally I think we’ve gotten so much help from the product that it is worth [the price].”

In charging other districts for the materials, Capistrano Unified officials pointed to the amount of time staff spent creating the document. “We’re definitely not in the retail business,” McGill said. “The price [covers] our cost.”