San Diego high school students in jeopardy of failing to meet graduation requirements might get sent to the coach's office in the fall – for remediation, not laps and push-ups.
The San Diego Unified School District will establish a graduation coach at each of its 16 comprehensive high schools to help struggling students make it to commencement ceremonies in June.
The program is part of a broader effort to lower the high school dropout rate.
“We have 10,000 ninth-graders and 6,000 seniors,” Superintendent Terry Grier said. “We are losing 4,000 students. We have got to do something to help them.”
The new coaches will work with up to 1,600 seniors each year to make up failed classes and pass the high school exit exam while maintaining their current course loads needed to graduate.
But these students will not have to retake the failed courses, per se. Rather they will revisit the classes on computers, using a new software program designed to assess their knowledge of a class and prescribe the work needed to pass it.
For example, a student who failed sophomore English would get a diagnostic ranking for that course from the software. The student would then be assigned a certain number of hours of computer work needed to raise the grade to a passing mark.
Later in the school year, the coaches would also work with freshmen who earned failing grades in at least three courses in their first semester of high school. The coaches would assign those students to after-hours programs and other interventions designed to keep them on track to graduate.
The district spent $278,000 on the software system – and the training needed to use it – from Apex Learning Inc., a Bellevue, Wash., company that is a leader in the virtual schools movement.
Principals and teachers from San Diego campuses tested the software before the school board voted to buy it at its meeting Tuesday. Students will begin making up courses this month in a trial run of the new system, which carries a stamp of approval from the Western Association of Colleges and Schools.
The graduation coaching jobs will be filled from a pool of existing employees. Each high school has two extra positions that have been historically assigned duties at the discretion of the school staff. The coaching job will take up one of those positions.
The new program is one of several virtual offerings that the district will make available to struggling students in the coming years. Additional online courses will be developed at Garfield and Twain high schools, two alternative campuses.
Maureen Magee: (619) 293-1369; maureen.magee@uniontrib.com
