Los Angeles Unified carrying focus on recovery into new school year

Students in AP Biology at King/Drew Medical Magnet observe roly-polies during an experiment on the first day of school.

KATE SEQUEIRA/EDSOURCE

Los Angeles Unified is focused on academic recovery as Covid-19 takes a back seat for the district this new school year. As LAUSD moves into its second week back, attention is on ensuring all students return to the classroom and on addressing the gaps in learning made evident by the district’s most recent round of testing. 

“The last couple of years we focused on Covid protocols,” school board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin said at a news conference last week. “We worried about whether we would catch it, what was happening physically in our classrooms. Now, we get to focus on, instructionally, what’s happening in our classrooms, socio-emotionally, what’s happening in our classrooms, what relationships we’re building.”

Though data has not yet been released, Carvalho said last school year’s Smarter Balanced testing demonstrates “significant declines” in areas such as reading and math across all grade levels. That’s why this year will focus on acceleration, he said.

“I can assure you, it’s not meant to be perfect,” Carvalho said. “It is meant to reflect all the fears that we have felt, meaning significant declines in achievement performance.”

The testing, which is the first statewide assessment the district has conducted since the start of the pandemic, still doesn’t take into account many of the students who were absent last year. The district estimates between 10,000 and 20,000 students were “missing” as students ended the first year back after virtual learning.

LAUSD is currently emphasizing its efforts to get students back in school and conducting phone and in-person outreach to chronically absent students. Accounting for Covid-19 absences, the district reached an 89% attendance rate on the first day of school, up from 77% on the first day last year and, near the end of the first week back, attendance peaked at 93%.

The district is starting the new year after a summer focused on recovery, as some students worked toward catching up on classes over the last few months. LAUSD enrolled 120,000 students this summer — significantly more than in previous years. While the primary grades mostly focused on enrichment opportunities, there was a focus on credit recovery among the upper grade levels, according to Carvalho.

Senior Makiyah Frazier spent the summer finishing up two classes online: ninth grade science and geometry. Her mom, Melissa Payton, said she found online learning program Edgenuity to be the better option since there wasn’t a bus to take Frazier from their home in South L.A. to Hamilton High School on the Westside, which she attends during the school year.

She’ll have to finish another two classes this school year during study hall, however, since she was limited to taking just two online this summer. Despite that, Frazier said she was satisfied with the flexibility, which gave her the time to work on her own time without the Zoom and communication chaos she and her mom recalled from virtual learning during the pandemic.

“It wasn’t like she could be one on one with a teacher or just have the extra enthusiasm,” Payton said as she discussed the toll of the pandemic on Frazier’s learning.

Aside from the academic effects, the socio-emotional impact of the pandemic is something that’s made recovery a long journey for other families too. That’s been the case for Dorothy Pincus’ daughter who attends Hamilton High School as a senior and retook an online history class during the summer. Pincus attributes her struggles in school to the nature of the transitional year and the depression and anxiety that surfaced with Covid-19 and following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

“My daughter, she has been a student her whole life,” said Pincus, who said her daughter’s academic situation changed greatly with the pandemic. “Because of the pandemic, everybody went online, and it caused a lot of problems.”

The asynchronous nature of the summer class allowed her daughter to finish her assignments early and also enjoy vacation, an effort by Pincus and the rest of the family to return to a bit of normalcy, she said. Looking at the year ahead, Pincus hopes the district will focus more on expanding mental health support for students.

At the elementary and middle school levels, Ellen Ochoa Learning Center Principal Marcos Hernandez said much of the help that’s been needed has been in math, particularly word problems. Summer gave the Cudahy school the opportunity to work with students in small groups to help them develop conceptual understanding. More than 300 students participated in summer programming at the school, including some from neighboring schools, Hernandez said.

“There was a lot more enthusiasm and kids lining up early and wanting to stay after,” Hernandez said, saying that he hoped the excitement would continue.

For others participating in LAUSD’s summer school, enrichment classes were the route to continue the motivation for learning after a string of rocky school years. Maria Dominguez, whose third grade twins attend Ricardo Lizarraga Elementary School in Historic South Central, spent their summer continuing to explore their love for STEM, participating in activities like composting.

“What was cool about it was when we had to rip off the skin of the fruits and vegetables,” said David Dominguez, one of her third graders who participated in the virtual programming. 

Maria Dominguez didn’t want that excitement to stall amid the summer. For her the last few years have been all about dedicating extra support to her sons to encourage their enjoyment of learning. She’s made sure that they’ve spent time at home practicing their reading and writing to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on their progress.

“I’m looking for programs that can help my sons so that they don’t get further behind,” she said in Spanish. “The pandemic put all of us behind.”

As the district continues into the new school year, it’s expanding investments and focusing on ensuring classrooms are adequately staffed. The district directed additional funding toward tutoring, the arts and expanded learning programming after it passed its budget in June. It also said it filled more than 1,500 teaching positions this year, with 500 still being processed, though the teacher’s union remains skeptical about the district’s ability to fix the shortage so quickly. On the first day, 400 staff members had been redeployed to classrooms across the district.

“We are driven by that which is most critical for our students — their academic development, their cognitive development, their social and emotional well-being,” Carvalho said at a press conference after his back to school address two weeks ago.