Several Riverside Unified School District (RUSD) Board of Education trustees last week signaled they would like the district to take more risks when implementing new teaching strategies after receiving a mid-year update on the district’s latest approach to education.
“If we don’t do things differently, drastically differently, we’re not going to get drastically different results,” Trustee Brent Lee said at the April 9 meeting. “If we keep taking these little, tiny, incremental steps, the results are going to come slow too.”
The mid-year report was provided to the board as an update to a November 20 discussion in which the board reviewed the California School Dashboard data, the state’s official student performance accountability system. The site’s data indicated RUSD students had improved in both English language arts and math. However, the district still remained below the state benchmark.
Assistant Superintendent Daniel Sosa, at the November meeting, explained the district had implemented a new professional development strategy for educators in an effort to improve student learning and increase its academic performance.
During the April 9 meeting, Sosa reviewed the new structure and explained how it was designed to teach educators four core concepts meant to remove learning barriers, catch struggling students faster and get better results. To offer ongoing support to teachers as the district transitioned to the new structure, he added, RUSD hired more than a dozen coaches and trained about one-third of RUSD’s educators on the new approach.
Stay up to date with the latest from The Record. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter today!
In both English and math, Sosa said students have shown increased academic growth in just a short few months. However, he emphasized it would take time to train all the teachers with the new strategies as some of the faculty seemed hesitant to take on the coaching.
He said the coaching initiative, funded through federal grants, is scheduled to sunset in 2028.
“We need to continue to build the instructional culture that coaching is welcomed in schools and welcomed in every classroom,” Sosa told the board. “It takes vulnerability on the part of the receiving teacher to do that, and sometimes that takes some time to be able to build.”
Several of the board members, like Trustee Jesse Tweed, said they were supportive of the new strategies — especially when it came to emphasizing professional development.
“I think this should remain an ongoing investment, at least to some degree, as much as possible,” Tweed said. “Just about every other professional industry requires ongoing learning and support.”
However, Lee said he felt the district was running out of time to transition to the new approach at the district’s current pace and believed the coaching should be required while the funding for it exists.
Trustees Dale Kinnear and Noemi Hernandez Alexander asked about the barriers preventing RUSD from growing its teaching practices faster, like being able to create low-stakes internal tests to catch struggling students rather than waiting for statewide scores.
Sosa said he believed there were three main structural barriers that have kept RUSD from being more successful: a knowledge gap about the new strategies among staff, a lack of motivation from some educators to implement the updated methods and a priority misalignment among some campuses.
“Maybe it is some of our previous position to be a little risk averse,” Sosa said. “ I think by the questioning and some of the statements, I had at least heard that the board would be open to us, maybe taking some risks in doing things differently with some assessment practices.”
The Riverside Record is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet providing Riverside County with high-quality journalism free of charge. We’re able to do this because of the generous donations of supporters like you!