Schools with a connection to a college or university have a long history in the United States, providing a place where research and new teaching techniques can be tried, tweaked, assessed and passed on to others.

So it was with much fanfare that the Washington Unified School District in West Sacramento partnered with the University of California, Davis, a major research university, and Sacramento City College, a community college, to start up West Sac Prep, a grades 6-12 charter school, in 2007.

The aim was to reach kids "who do not speak English as their first language; come from low-income families; attend low-performing schools in the district, as measured by the California Academic Performance Index; and whose parents did not graduate from college."

Another was to reduce dropout rates. The school would give students at high risk of dropping out "the opportunity to graduate with both a high school diploma and as many as 30 college credits, or the equivalent of two years of college."

Five years on, the school's charter is up for renewal. The Washington Unified school board holds a public hearing Thursday, with a final decision Feb. 9. The picture is mixed, and the school board will have a tough decision. This is not a slam-dunk.

The school got a wake-up call in December when the California Charter Schools Association called for nonrenewal of 10 charter schools in the state, including West Sac Prep.

Public schools in California are measured by the Academic Performance Index, in place since 1999, which uses student results on the California Standards Tests and other indicators to score schools on a 200-to-1,000 scale. The target for all schools is 800. West Sac Prep started with an API of 685 in 2008. It dropped to 643 in 2009 and to 556 in 2010. In 2011, it got back up to 639, essentially where it was in 2009.

Even accounting for the school's population – nearly half coming from families with no history of college-going, 74 percent lower-income (many in extreme poverty) and 20 percent English learners – West Sac Prep performs below schools with similar populations.

West Sac Prep board members – Harold Levine, dean of the UC Davis School of Education; Kathryn Jeffery, president of Sacramento City College, and Dayton Gilleland, superintendent of Washington Unified – believe, however, that the school has turned a corner.

The 83-point API gain from 2010 to 2011 is "not haphazard or random," says Gilleland, but the result of deliberate changes – a shift to project-based learning, a college preparatory mathematics curriculum designed by UC Davis, a staff that has jelled.

Kids are staying in school – a 96 percent retention rate. In 2011, students were above the statewide average in passage rates on the state's exit exam, required for graduation.

The West Sac Prep board knows the school has to achieve a better "balance in the crosswalk between accountability and different learning models," says Levine.

The Washington Unified board may want to explore something less than a five-year renewal to ensure that the one-year improvement is sustained over time. West Sac Prep has enthusiastic teachers, supportive parents and a strong board committed to academic performance, key ingredients for a turnaround.

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