Sac City Unified to Reduce Class Sizes k-3

By Duane Campbell

The Sac City Unified district has decided to reduce class sizes in k-3 classes down to a maximum of 24 students for the fall of 2016,  a good decision and a long overdue decision according to an article by Loretta Kalb in the Tuesday Sacramento Bee .

Community groups such as the Communities Priorities Coalition, parents groups, and the teachers union (SCTA) have been pressuring the district to make this decision for over two years.

The district has received over $67 million in additional funding since 2013 as a result of the economy recovering from the Great Recession  and Prop. 30 ballot measure.   The district  receives some $237 million in revenues from the change in state policy known as the Local Control Funding ( LCFF) that requires that this revenue be spent on specific populations,  low income, English Learners, foster children, and Special Education.    This year the  funds have already been allocated to purposes other than class size reduction by the administration and the School Board  in spite of the community demands  to spend the funds on class size reduction.

Watching the Board, it is often difficult to tell who or what body is making decisions on this significant new  LCFF funding .

Class sizes in Sacramento grew significantly during the Great Recession and teachers were dismissed while  new teachers not hired. 

The welcome  decision to reduce k-12 class size back toward the national average  will require the hiring of some 100 new teachers.  SCUSD and other local districts will have difficulty recruiting credentialed teachers as the number of students studying to become teachers has fallen during the economic crisis.

The Story on SCUSD Superintendent that the Bee will not tell you.

Thank you Cosmo Garvin for writing what the Bee will not report on.

Cosmo Garvin. Sacramento News and Review. 9/11/2014. Page 15.

The Bee is clearly still sore about the loss of the previous superintendent, Jonathan Raymond. Raymond seemed to enjoy sticking it to teachers (and the occasional principal) and generally followed the playbook for corporate-ed reform.

He left quite suddenly during the last school year. The public reason was that he wanted his kids to be closer to their grandparents back in Boston. Surely a tough decision, to leave what he described as his “dream job.” But family comes first.

This summer, Raymond took a job as president of an education nonprofit called the Stuart Foundation—in San Francisco.

The Stuart Foundation is a major funder of something called the California Office to Reform Education. You may recall that Raymond committed Sac City schools to participate in the CORE, to help fund it, and to tie teacher evaluations to student test scores as part of the deal.

This was intensely controversial—and done without public input or any vote of the Sac City school board. The board only reversed Raymond’s decision after he had bailed, and after protests from teachers, parents and community groups.

It’s not so surprising that a plum job for Raymond was waiting on the other side of the revolving door. But what about the family thing?

Carol Ting, the Stuart Foundation’s chief operating officer, told Bites, “That was his plan. But then the recruiter came along and offered him his dream job.”

Dream job, huh? Anyway, Raymond slipped out the back door in a hurry, to take a dreamier job, or to escape whatever nightmares had cropped up here in Sacramento. Either way, even in his absence he was an important presence at the school-board-candidates forum held in Oak Park last Sunday.