The Board held a special meeting of the Board of Trustees on Wednesday evening that aimed to address graduation requirements for the 2026-27 school year. The meeting consisted of public comment, a presentation by market research company Hanover Research, and a conversation on agenda items moving forward.
While the Board chose not to vote on the status of Ethnic Studies as a graduation requirement, they agreed to have staff further research the limitations of taking courses outside of school and the required content taught in the quarter-long Life Skills class. Both of these items could give students more flexibility in their schedules, addressing a main push by community members.
The District has faced a lot of contention recently over its revision process of the Ethnic Studies class, leading many to request that it be an optional class or have its curriculum revised. During public comment, several community members expressed concern regarding the Ethnic Studies curriculum, the lack of transparency of its contents with parents, and its graduation requirement status.
“There’s no full curriculum, and incredibly, the class has already started even though the Board hasn’t formally approved a final version because it doesn’t exist. How can you mandate a graduation requirement for a class that hasn’t even been written or vetted?” District parent Diana Bloom said.
“The present curriculum pursues, as you just heard, advocacy, resistance, including revolt and rebellion. The District materials openly list advocacy as a goal,” parent Alan Fisher, whose son recently graduated from M-A, said. Fisher referenced California’s anti-discrimination law AB 715, noting that under reports of its language, teachers must avoid discussing “advocacy, personal opinion, bias, or partisanship.”
In previous meetings, the Board claimed that they would discuss the status of the class as a graduation requirement this fall. However, during the study session, they agreed that no new information has come up and decided not to add anything related to Ethnic Studies to the future agenda, despite strong comments from Trustee Richard Ginn.
“I am not undermining all the comments that our passionate community members have said. I have listened to them, and I read every single email, and regardless of where people stand, a brand new curriculum started yesterday, and I don’t have the data point from the students,” Trustee Mary-Beth Thompson said.
“I know in the past, there’s been an argument that, ‘Hey, ethnic studies is not needed because that content is incorporated into US History.’ But I would have to understand how well it’s actually incorporated in US History. Otherwise, there are still gaps in what is being taught. So, to have that discussion [on whether Ethnic Studies remains a graduation requirement] I would want to know what is in US History versus Ethnic Studies and do that comparison,” Trustee Amy Koo said.
“There may be things in the class that students don’t get in some other class, but whatever they would take instead would also be something that they didn’t probably get in any other class,” Ginn said in response to Koo’s comment. “Like, let’s say a student took AP Computer Science. They didn’t get AP Computer Science anywhere else either, so they’re taking one thing they wouldn’t get anywhere else, or some other thing they wouldn’t get anywhere else, and letting them have a choice.”
“It’s just whether you believe in giving people choices and elective freshman year, or you want everyone locked in freshman year,” he added.
In alignment with the District’s annual strategic plan, the Board aimed to address the plan’s third goal: “Readiness for Career, College, & Life.” Specifically, they looked to compile and discuss data from StudentTracker provided by the National Student Clearinghouse to examine trends in two-year and four-year college enrollment, A-G requirements being met, and comparisons to other schools.
Following public comment, the Board introduced Content Director Nicole Thomas, District Student Success Liaison Louisa Song, and Counseling and Transitions Coordinator Dr. Glenda Ortez-Galan from Hanover. The three experts joined trustees to provide insights and answer questions throughout the presentation by Thomas and District Director of Program Evaluation and Research, Dr. Diana Wilmot.
Hanover selected six California school districts—labeled as “peer” districts due to their similar racial makeup, enrollment size, special education size, and English Learner (EL) population—to compare to the District’s graduation and career readiness rates. Ultimately, these comparisons helped reveal the District’s strengths and weaknesses when it came to preparing all students for college.
The key findings from Hanover’s research were that the District meets or exceeds state and A-G requirements for English, social studies, and science. Yet, while the District meets the two-year state requirement for math, it does not for A-G, which requires all students to take at least three years of a math class. Additionally, the state, and consequently, the District, does not require students to take a world language, which also does not meet A-G standards of fulfilling two years of one language.
Additionally, the data showed that the District has strong overall graduation rates, but specific subgroups—EL and Socio-Economically Disadvantaged students—are behind peer districts in terms of college and career readiness.
After acknowledging these areas of improvement and seeing what other districts are doing to better prepare their students for the future, Board members were encouraged to write down questions that they had on post-it notes to read aloud.
Koo proposed to make it an action item for staff to research what the other districts are doing to help them succeed in areas where SUHSD is falling behind. However, that was ruled out because other trustees pointed out how the feeder schools of those districts play too large a role in determining students’ success, which would be different for schools across the District.
Thompson and Superintendent Crystal Leach brought up issues about Life Skills, the quarter-long class paired with the Ethnic Studies class that has been a district graduation starting with the freshmen class of 2022. While the class itself is not mandated by the state, nor an A-G requirement, it contains curriculum material that the state requires schools to teach. While some of our district’s “peers” offered semester-long classes, similar to Life Skills, the District has Life Skills as just a quarter-long class, distributing the rest of the needed material amongst PE and Biology.
“If you removed the Life Skills requirement, is there room for those things that at one time we thought were important to teach our students, to fit into a different class? I mean, we wouldn’t know unless we looked,” Leach said.
None of the trustees felt comfortable with their knowledge of the material within Life Skills that was mandated by the state. “We wouldn’t know unless we looked. That is what I’m very much interested in, and—to go to [Ginn’s] original point about grad requirements and opening up space in freshman year—to me, this would give you more data to play around with,” Thompson said. The Board decided they’d look more into the contents of the Life Skills class.
Another topic that was brought up by Trustee Sathvik Nori was the District’s cap on the amount of classes students can take through single-credit dual enrollment—previously called concurrent enrollment—for high school and college credit. Currently, students are allotted a maximum of 40 credits that they can take outside of school, with no more than 20 required course credits earned through concurrent enrollment.
“There isn’t really anything that has changed, per se, from what we’ve talked about before with ethnic studies, but we’ve raised all these other questions. It’s these other questions that I’d be interested in getting some research, so that we can kind of understand some of the implications if you went down that route,” Koo said.
The Board will convene again on Wednesday, Oct. 29, at 6 p.m. for a regular meeting.
