Sequoia Union High School District supports keeping existing advanced courses

“I think we do need to really focus on helping students self-reflect and make decisions and if they don’t agree with adults or want to give feedback to adults, to give them the confidence to do that, I think that’s the most important thing to focus on in terms of after ninth grade,” Trustee Amy Koo said. “There are a lot of different ways to get people to be more successful and we need to make sure students are a part of the decision-making.”

Wednesday’s discussion was prompted by an update held in September about a decadeslong effort by the district to streamline courses. The controversial move combines some honors and standard offerings with the goal of improving student outcomes through more diverse classrooms.

Over the past decade, the district and its sites have made changes to course offerings including discontinuing an advanced integrated science course for incoming ninth graders that no longer met college entrance requirements to instead enroll all freshmen into Biology-P, condensing ninth grade English Language Arts classes at Woodside, Sequoia and Menlo-Atherton high schools and making similar changes to other math and science offerings.

A large group of parents, students, educators and other community members, many affiliated with the advocacy group Sequoia Union High School District Students First, have continued to argue that by combining classes and doing away with some honors courses, the district is holding back high achievers. Many also took issue with the lack of community outreach as the changes were implemented.

“I believe our course options affect our community’s perception of our schools and that over time the community’s perception of our schools will have an impact on our schools,” board President Richard Ginn said, who advocated for bringing the issue back for a discussion. “I don’t think we should ignore that or pretend the course offerings will not have an impact on who chooses to move to our community, who chooses to go to private school or not. So if the goal is to have a diverse class of students and a large number of those people choose to go to some other school, you don’t have the diverse set of students in the class. That’s an impact I think shouldn’t be ignored.”

Alternatively, many educators, administrators, students and parents have argued the changes have greatly benefited students and the new courses are adequately rigorous. A district study of the course changes, which looked at grades, test scores, graduation credits and college and career prerequisites, found that while there appeared to be little to no effect on high-achieving populations, groups that have struggled in the past saw improvements including fewer course repeats and higher rates of students meeting college entrance requirements.

A majority of trustees appeared hesitant to make substantive changes on the fly during the Wednesday meeting. Trustee Carrie DuBois noted staff are typically more involved in such conversations. Ginn noted DuBois and other trustees opposed asking staff to work on a presentation for Wednesday’s discussion but DuBois noted she was more interested in being able to ask staff questions.

“I don’t think as a board we’re actually supposed to solve problems tonight or quickly,” DuBois said as part of her opening statement. “I hope, as a board, that we will respect the work that is done by educators and not just hastily reverse course because some things need time. We also need to work with our parents. Our parents are our most important partners and when we do things that are big we need feedback.”

Trustees unofficially expressed their support for maintaining existing advanced placement courses while staying open to adding new ones but opted against making changes such as reinstituting removed honors courses.

Instead, they asked that a discussion on the new combined courses be brought back once the strategic plan is complete. They also asked for a discussion to be had on how to help better prepare ninth graders for their sophomore year including improving opportunities for freshmen to take an elective without needing to take on a seventh period.

Superintendent Crystal Leach, who reiterated the district is not eliminating AP courses, noted staff has continued to review the ninth grade experience, meet with leaders from feeder districts and improve courses, absent board direction. Leach said the report on the freshmen experience could come before the board in early January with the goal to implement improvements by the next school year.

“We will continue to keep the AP and IB classes we have and we will continue to evaluate student needs and evaluate offerings as the desire comes up absent the board direction,” Leach said. “As educators, we are constantly looking at everything we do and balancing and calibrating it. We have heard the comments that have come in about, potentially, classes being soft and those will continually be calibrated and looked at and evaluated and different decisions made.”