Courtesy of: Thomas Courtney

Fifth-grader Erick Zavala interviews his classmate Manny Zepeda to find common interests they would like to learn more about in the 2021-2022 school year. Both are students in Thomas Courtney’s class at San Diego Unified.

Thomas courtney

September 26, 2021

I’ll make you a bet. View the latest US Census Bureau demographic map for your California city and you’ll find pretty much the same thing I found in mine: The geography of our cities couldn’t be more divided by ethnicity if drawn this way. way on purpose. And as we have seen time and time again, this segregation of our cities based on both racial and economic lines has exacerbated shortcomings in our school system that we have long overlooked.

But we have a resource that can help us identify and close these gaps – if only we would take the time to pay attention.

The California Healthy Kids Survey, or CHKS, is a state initiative to collect student responses on a range of topics from social and emotional well-being to school climate. It is presented annually so that the children and families we serve can help us better understand these gaps, even when we cannot see them ourselves in our classrooms. Unfortunately, the results of this survey are not often seen and rarely discussed by education officials across our state.

And because I appreciate the contribution of the students and families I serve, I fully support SB 699, a bill that would place their survey data alongside test scores, attendance and suspension rates on the Californian school dashboard. I arrived at this position by what I found in the survey results of my own district, the results of my fifth graders among them. I immediately saw contradictions.

For starters, 24% of fifth-graders who responded across the district believed that questioning themselves was pretty much or completely unnecessary in school. Since 40% of the 5,149 responses came from my school, I had to think about how my students might feel the same in equal proportions. If that was true, then 24% of my class – or seven kids in my class – thought that questioning themselves was of no use to them. I asked myself: how could this be when 97% of responses from San Diego Unified, or maybe my whole class, felt their families had high expectations of them?

I kept reading, and suddenly the pre-pandemic social and emotional well-being needs of my students hit me like a brick as well.

From the responses, only 10% – or three kids in my room – wake up all the time excited for school, only 23% – or seven kids – give themselves a high rating of optimism, and, horribly – only two. children – or 7%. , see themselves as having a passion or “enthusiasm” for learning.

Worse yet, 19% of fifth graders in our district – maybe four of my own students – feel sad all or most of the time, and 11% said they could never find someone on the school campus to talk to when needed.

Only 78% – or about 22 of my 32 students – feel safe at school all the time, and 13% – or four of my own students – may have seen a gun at school. Suddenly I wondered how the students in my class were concentrating long before the start of the pandemic. Did district leaders – was I, for that matter – consider this data before the pandemic?

As I continued to read, it didn’t surprise me anymore that only 35% – or about 11 of my kids – have great self-confidence. Or that 27% – or nine of my kids – would have great trust in others and 40% – or just 14 students in my class – would give themselves a high degree of empathy.

I mean, 37% of the students felt they had no say in the activities or the rules of the class, and 47% of the boys and 34% of the girls had been punched or pushed in school.

Based on this data, these children had things other than school that they were worried about. And I clearly had no idea what it was, but I could have. In fact, we could all start to have an idea and do something different after the pandemic, if we put the results of the Healthy Kids Survey on the dashboard of California schools by discussing and writing to our elected leaders about the subject. of SB 699.

Is it okay to talk about post-pandemic change in schools without considering the perspectives of the families and students we serve? Are test data, participation rates and suspension rates really good enough now? Or are we finally ready to insist that our children deserve more, because they tell us this themselves?

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Thomas courtney teaches grade five at Chollas-Mead Elementary School in San Diego Unified and is a Senior Policy Member of Teach Plus California and a member of the EdSource Teacher Advisory Committee. A 22-year teacher in Southeast San Diego, Courtney was named the 2020-21 San Diego Unified Elementary District Teacher of the Year.

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