Second Lindsay Unified campus added to list

A second Lindsay Unified School District campus has been unexpectedly added to a list of California’s worst-performing schools.

Lindsay High School was added last Thursday after the California State Board of Education altered its method of calculating the “lowest-achieving” pool of schools.

Jefferson Elementary School, also part of LUSD, was on the initial list.

Intended to pinpoint the bottom five percent of educational institutions statewide, changes in the convoluted methodology have left administrators concerned the list is not truly representative of the schools most in need of the resultant opportunity to apply for millions in federal funding.

“There’s a great deal of confusion around this, because they keep changing the rules,” Lindsay Unified School District Superintendent Janet Kliegl said.

After the Board of Education approved a waiver changing the calculation that determined which schools were California’s worst, a total of 37 secondary schools were removed entirely from the classifications, while the same number — all in Program Improvement, but not in the state’s lowest five percent — took their places.

Lindsay High, currently in Year 1 of Program Improvement, was one of those schools that did not make the first cut, but is now designated as “persistently lowest-achieving.”

Jefferson Elementary has been in Program Improvement for five years to date.

Kliegl believes the LUSD schools made the list — the original, and then the revised — because the district has not recently made significant progress in increasing test scores on English-language arts and math exams.

The Department of Education’s original calculations took a three-year average proficiency rate for English-language arts and mathematics, and ordered the results to determine the worst performers over that time period.

“I was concerned because in our district we made very good growth for a number of years, and then it sort of stalled,” Kliegl said.

Since the district’s scores began stagnating, Lindsay Unified staff have implemented a number of reforms Kliegl hopes will become evident with a rise in test scores in the near future.

Because she is anxious the reforms the grant funds require could alter the gains made with recent reforms, the district’s decision to apply for an improvement grant remains under consideration.

“At this point, we’re doing a ‘needs-assessment’ to determine what our options are,” Kliegl said. “Does applying for that grant increase our options, or decrease our options and limit what we want to do?” she asked.

The grant, which is available to educational agencies in which one or more schools was included on the list, could give the district $50,000 to $2 million per year for three years.

“We’ve begun this significant reform, and I’m not willing to jeopardize it,” she said.

In the meantime, Kliegl is focused on the positives — the opportunity to utilize federal money to make LUSD campuses better — rather than the negative designation.

Still, she does not think the “lowest-achieving” title, deposited upon only seven schools in the county at the moment, is entirely representative of the truth.

“The fallacy of this designation is that these are not the lowest-performing schools in the county,” she said.

-- Contact Sarah de Crescenzo at 784-5000, Ext. 1045, or sdecrescenzo@portervillerecorder.com.