Meeting Called to Discuss School District's Program Improvement Status

Parents wanting to know more about the San Bruno Park School District's program improvement status are being invited to attend a meeting today that has been planned to get community input.

This year, the school district was because, despite students continuing to show above-average scores on statewide tests, a certain percentage of students failed to score high enough on the tests.

The school district will now have several years to improve its test results or risk facing sanctions under No Child Left Behind.

The meeting will focus on several topics, which are all meant to allow residents to share their concerns and ideas:

• explaining what the program improvement designation means for the school district
• taking suggestions from the public on what the district should include in its plan to exit program improvement
• informing people about how the district and schools will support children's learing throughout the process

Superintendent David Hutt said the district has already been forming committees to start developing a plan to address the program improvement status. Part of that effort has been to create task forces on English-language learners and special education students, whose scores in the statewide tests were just points away from their goals last year for English and math.

As a whole, all of the schools in the district, except for Belle Air Elementary and Crestmoor Elementary, saw their API scores drop.

Today's meeting will be an "opportunity to present information to parents and get their input on what should be done by the district to move out of PI," Hutt said.

Following the meeting, Hutt said, the district will begin working on its yearly plan that has to be submitted to the state that shows how the schools are educating kids. Now that the district is entering program improvement, the district will also have to include in that plan an analysis of how the district is run and how improvements could be made.

The meeting will be at 5:30 p.m. at Crestmoor Elementary. There will also be another meeting held to get community input at 8:15 a.m. on Nov. 17 at Belle Air Elementary.