‘Historical failure’: Thousands of students being left behind by Sacramento school district
Marcheri Smith hovers behind her son Tulley as he strains to hear his teacher’s instructions on Zoom and worries, like many parents at Sacramento City Unified schools, whether her son is falling behind.
With spotty internet, tight budgets, glitchy devices and piling responsibilities, Smith’s family is just trying to make it through each day.
“I don’t sleep at all,” she said.
Parents, school experts and educators say their worst predictions of the coronavirus pandemic’s effect on children are being revealed with each passing day of learning from home: Despite sincere efforts by teachers, aides and administrators, the Sacramento City Unified School District is failing to step up and help its most vulnerable students.
Most of the district’s 46,000 students live in low-income families; about 72 percent qualify for free or reduced lunch. The financially strained district must not only educate through distance learning, but also offer healthy meals to thousands of students, provide after-school programming and outdoor exercise, create safe spaces for foster and homeless youth, and help English learners and children with special needs thrive.
In some neighborhoods covered by the district, as many as one in four households don’t have a broadband subscription. It took weeks for the district to distribute Google Chromebooks to students in need. Sacramento City Unified issued nearly 27,000 Chromebooks to the students who requested them, roughly 64 percent of the student population.
The district is aware of the ongoing connectivity issues and has been working through the pandemic to rectify them, said spokeswoman Tara Gallegos in an email. The district, for example, has purchased and distributed hundreds of WiFi hotspots, she said.
School districts across the country have scrambled to improve access to meals and the internet amid distance learning.
In Baltimore, parents can go to any school to pick up meals from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Other districts, such as St. Paul, Minn., have offered weekly home delivery of meals to families in need.
The school district in Arbuckle purchased hundreds of WiFi hotspots over the summer from multiple internet providers to cover families in different service areas. In Woodland, nearly all the district’s parking lots have been outfitted with WiFi coverage. Sac City Unified’s parking lots also have wireless coverage, though the district provides neither desks nor school supplies outdoors.
Earlier this year, Sacramento Regional Transit outfitted 10 buses with wireless hotspots and parked them in neighborhoods with low internet access, including at some Sac City Unified schools. That pilot program, which served 140 locations each week, ended in July.
Educators and families are worried that thousands of children are falling behind in Sacramento, and that they’ll never have a chance to catch up.
“The district has not been honest and truthful with the public and itself about its historical failure to provide quality education for all kids,” said Carl Pinkston of the Black Parallel School Board.
COVID-19, distance learning create disparity
While thousands of families struggle, wealthier parents often have reliable internet and extra laptops at home for their children. Families have joined pods so their children can learn with peers around a kitchen table. Others can afford additional one-on-one tutoring to ensure their children don’t fall behind.
Janae Bryant, whose daughter attends John F. Kennedy High School, works from home alongside her husband and is able to closely monitor her children’s needs.
“We are very fortunate,” she said. “After I’m done with my workday, it’s nice that I am there to make sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”
Michelle Cromeenes, whose twins attend Sacramento New Technology High School, said distance learning has been going well for her seniors. While Cromeenes works from home, her twins attend class on their laptops independently and don’t rely on her help.
The dependent charter school, which serves 200 students, has always had a small number of students in each class. With distance learning, that proved to be an additional blessing.
“They get the attention that they need,” Cromeenes said.
However, many families and students are falling through the cracks, advocates say, with the pandemic intensifying existing educational disparities. Prior to COVID-19, California Department of Education data showed students in the district who identified as socioeconomically disadvantaged performed 44 points below standard in English Language Arts, and 70 points below standard in math.
Researchers have begun to estimate the long term impact of distance learning. One analysis by the consulting group McKinsey & Company estimates that even if in-class learning resumes in January, students could lose three to four months of learning if they receive average quality remote instruction. Students receiving lower-quality remote instruction could lose as much as seven to 11 months of learning, and students who drop out can fall more than a year behind.
“Learning loss will probably be greatest among low-income, Black, and Hispanic students,” the analysis found. “Lower-income students are less likely to have access to high-quality remote learning or to a conducive learning environment, such as a quiet space with minimal distractions, devices they do not need to share, high-speed internet, and parental academic supervision.”
Smith has had to switch out Tulley’s school-issued Chromebook twice because of broken microphones and sluggish video. Tulley struggles to hear new words or phrases through the computer during his instruction at Leataata Floyd Elementary School in Sacramento. Sometimes, Smith can’t understand what the robotic-sounding voice is saying.
It has felt impossible to catch up with a cascade of new apps and websites and browser extensions to use and download. Smith relies on Comcast’s discounted $10 internet service, but the WiFi connection is barely stable. The school district has partnered with Comcast to provide free service for six months, but Smith hasn’t heard back about her application for the reduced fee. And she can’t afford the $120 per month quote Comcast gave her to improve her home’s internet speed.
Before the virus, Smith relied heavily on school breakfasts and lunches to keep her son fed. While the district has provided more than 3 million meals to families since the pandemic began, the meal pick-up schedule is unworkable, Smith said. There just isn’t enough time after her son finishes morning classes to pack up the family and drive to the school before lunch pick-up is over.
Every week, the district is serving nearly 150,000 meals across 44 sites, during time periods that the district found “work better for families, nutrition services staff, delivery schedules, and storage,” Gallegos said. There aren’t plans to change the meal distribution schedule.
“Toward the end of the month, I have to ask other people, ‘Can you get something for me for snacks, crackers, meat and cheese, cans of tuna?’ so I can scramble around until I get paid?” Smith said. “By the 20th, 21st of the month, we’re out of food.”
Sac City Unified ‘hasn’t risen to the occasion’
“I don’t think it’s overstating it to say our district hasn’t risen to the occasion, especially for our most vulnerable communities,” said David Fisher, president of the Sacramento City Teachers Association, which has fought with the district for months over a distance learning plan. The sides still don’t have an agreement.
District officials are already seeing signs of trouble. The district knows, for example, that some students are receiving “regular assessments and engagement monitoring and others are not,” Gallegos said in an email.
Community organizers and education advocates say it’s no secret the quality of kids’ education in Sacramento is heavily dependent on where they grow up and how much money their family has — and that the pandemic has exaggerated existing disparities.
Years of being in one precarious financial situation after the next has distracted school officials from addressing the ceaseless crisis of low-income students of color being underserved, said Lorreen Pryor, president of the Black Youth Leadership Project, a nonprofit educational organization that encourages Black students to become civically engaged.
The students who are more likely to be disciplined, to struggle with state tests, to see higher teacher turnover or larger class sizes, and to be underprepared for college are the same students the district is struggling to reach with distance learning, Pryor said.
“I need them to figure out how they’re going to prioritize the students that need to be prioritized in this pandemic,” Pryor said.
COVID-19 created an untenable situation, one that is forcing educators and parents to confront an uncomfortable reality as reopening plans are underway: Lower-income Californians have been disproportionately experiencing the worst health impacts of COVID-19, but are also most likely to be working inflexible, essential and low-paying jobs.
Some of the city neighborhoods with the highest rates of infection are home to under-resourced schools in the district where a majority of the students are nonwhite and low-income, said Fisher with the teachers union.
“It’s kind of a paradox,” he said. “The students who need (in-person classes) the most are the ones who are most vulnerable” to both the virus and to falling behind academically.
There were roughly 1,600 students who were “disengaged” and unreachable by the district last year, said Gallegos, children who were not showing up to class or responding to teachers. Over the spring and summer, the district identified and contacted most of those students and has started providing them “more intensive support,” she said.
There are nine students enrolled in the district who remain unreachable since March, according to Gallegos.
Alacya Siler said she feels fortunate she’s been able to help her son and daughter, who attend John Still K-8 School and complete school work at home. But she knows that not all children in the district have stable homes, reliable internet or steady meals.
“A couple kids are going to the McDonald’s sitting outside, trying to log in to get their school stuff,” Siler said.
This story was originally published October 14, 2020 at 5:00 AM.