It was about 5:30 p.m. when I arrived at Morse High School and the campus was, unsurprisingly, a ghost town save for two teens watching a video on a phone. I could hear their giggles reverberate as I walked through the empty halls.  Then, I reached the auditorium.   Young kids ran around the space excitedly, while families dug into plates of fried chicken, potato salad and Hawaiian rolls at long fold-out tables clustered near the auditorium’s stage.   This was a meeting of Project Ujima, a program run by San Diego Unified’s Family Engagement Department. The program guides ..read more

Last week, San Diego Unified officials gathered at DePortola Middle School for a workshop on the district’s latest Local Control Accountability Plan, or LCAP. The plan is one in a long list of school-related jargon needing an explanation. So, strap on your education caps.   Here’s a basic overview of one of the most important – and overlooked – educational documents.  What Is an LCAP?  More than a decade ago, California adopted a new funding formula that aimed to provide greater spending flexibility and more money to districts with higher populations of marginalized student gro ..read more

On a balmy afternoon, teachers at Johnson Elementary gathered in one of the school’s classrooms. Led by Betsy Hall, a professional learning coordinator for the California Reading and Literature Project, they worked through a series of rules about the English language, reviewing each one with a partner. They hummed with excitement.  Casey Hickenbottom, a second-grade teacher at Johnson, took studious notes.   “I don’t remember learning to read myself, but I do remember teaching kids to read. We did it very poorly before. This is much better,” Hickenbottom said. “We’re heading in ..read more

District officials announced Thursday that they had rescinded 96 percent of the layoff notices issued in March. Of the 234 preliminary layoffs issued, 225 of them had been rescinded. In a statement, district spokesperson Maureen Magee wrote the reversal came after an analysis of revenue trends and expenses and by taking advantage of retirements and resignations that limited the need for actual layoffs. “Despite a significant deficit, I am proud that through data-driven planning that prioritized children’s needs, we have developed a fiscally sound budget with limited impacts on our tremendous ..read more

How we teach kids to read has been in the spotlight for years now. Still, many schools haven’t embraced research-backed methods and continue to employ strategies that have been widely discredited. The urgency to catch up has ratcheted up lately, as schools scramble to get with the program.   San Diego Unified, for example, has taken steps to align its schools scattered teaching strategies with approaches backed by the science of reading. But even as advocates have been encouraged by the district’s efforts, the work has been slow going.   That’s why Board President Shana Hazan was “r ..read more

When I first started as Voice of San Diego’s education reporter, I didn’t know much about education. So, like any good reporter, I did some digging. That’s how I stumbled onto American Public Media’s “Sold a Story,” podcast. It exposed me to one of the highest stakes conflicts I’d never heard of: the “reading wars.”  At their core, they are a battle between methods to teach kids to read and they’ve been around for decades.   In one corner are practices like the whole language and balanced literacy models that, while they’ve relied on faulty strategies, have been ubiquitous in school ..read more

Look familiar? We pulled this post from the Morning Report. Subscribe to our daily newsletter to stay up to date on the latest news. Click here. Marian Kim Phelps is out as Superintendent of the Poway Unified School District.  The embattled district leader has been under fire since November, when students and parents alleged she had harassed members of the Del Norte High School softball team on which her daughter plays. The harassment allegedly stemmed from a May incident at a banquet for the softball team during which some members did not clap for Phelps’ daughter.  In Februar ..read more

Betsy Hall stood at the front of a classroom at Johnson Magnet School in Emerald Hills. She led her pupils, who sat in small groups at circular tables, through chapters of “Uncovering the Logic of English.” The book uses systematic phonics techniques, in part, to lay out simple rules for reading and speaking English.  Hall spoke about how the suffix “ed,” was added to make verbs past tense and why it made three different sounds. She had her students place their hands to their throats so they could feel how their vocal cords rumbled when they said voiced consonants and how they didn ..read more

At 10:55 a.m. on Tuesday, a chime rang over the loudspeaker at Logan Memorial Educational Campus.   “Attention students,” a young voice said, crackling with distortion, “we have a walkout at 11:00 a.m.”  Minutes later, students flooded into the quad. Their numbers grew into the hundreds before they walked through the campus’ bright yellow gates and onto the sidewalk encircling the school.   San Diego Unified School District pitched Logan Memorial as an innovative “cradle to career,” experience that would serve families even before children were born and students from ..read more

In 2015, we sent San Diego Unified School District a public records request for documents related to an educator we had been investigating whom former students had accused of sexually harassing and assaulting them. The district provided next to nothing in response.  We worked with district officials for the next six months to try to get more but nothing more came.   We had many public records requests in front of San Diego Unified and it was taking them an average of 399 days to respond. When we learned that the district was adopting a plan to destroy emails that were over six ..read more