California State University’s fall 2024 enrollment has risen to 461,000 students, driven by record gains among first-time, first-year students that nonetheless left the system short of its fall 2020 peak.
Preliminary data shows enrollment across the 23-campus system has inched up 2%, buoyed by more than 68,500 new first-year students this fall.
But Cal State has not yet returned to its 2020 high point, when enrollment hit 485,550 students. Headcount dipped for each of the next three school years, settling at 454,640 students in fall 2023.
In a news release, Chancellor Mildred García said the system is pursuing a “multi-year, holistic enrollment growth strategy” and is focused on recruiting and retaining students, including community college transfers.
“This promising upward momentum demonstrates the confidence that Californians have in the extraordinary power of a CSU degree to transform lives, particularly for America’s new majority, comprised of first-generation students, students of color, low-income students and adults seeking new opportunities,” García said.
Cal State reported a 7% increase in enrollment among transfer students, a 2% increase among graduate students and a 1% increase among continuing undergraduate students.
Preliminary figures show that 54% of CSU’s first-year students are Latino and that 4% of first-year students are Black. CSU did not break out data on Native American, Asian American and Pacific Islander student enrollment, nor was campus-level enrollment reported. The university system expects to release final systemwide numbers in November.
FAFSA fallout?
Increased enrollment at Cal State will be welcome news to observers who feared that the rocky rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) application might depress enrollment.
Changes to the application that debuted last year were designed make the process faster and more efficient for families. But delays and glitches plagued the new form, a critical step students must complete to find out whether they’re eligible for federal aid such as Pell Grants, loans and work-study programs.
The troubled FAFSA cycle sparked worries that students who were uncertain about their financial aid packages would put off enrolling in college this school year. Previous research has found that receiving grant aid boosts students’ persistence and degree completion.
Financial aid officers and advocates also voiced concern about how the new application was affecting California students from mixed-status families. Many of those students — those with at least one parent without a Social Security number — had trouble submitting the FAFSA form.
The delays prompted both Cal State and the University of California to extend their spring deadlines for new students to declare their intent to register for fall 2024 classes, a recognition that many families would need more time to better understand how much their education would cost.
California ultimately fared better than most other states in terms of FAFSA completions, according to data from the National College Attainment Network. The state notched a 56% FAFSA completion rate, exceeding a rate of roughly 52% among high school seniors nationwide. That’s despite a 7% year-over-year decline in the number of FAFSA completions in California.
Cal State credited financial aid staff at its universities with helping students to work through a frustrating FAFSA cycle and processing provisional financial aid offers quickly. (The news release cited a rise in federal Pell Grants at CSU, but did not say how much awards increased.)
Difficulties with the FAFSA rollout might also have been offset by California’s universal FAFSA completion policy, which was passed in 2021. Assembly Bill 132 tasks school districts with ensuring that graduating seniors complete the FAFSA or the California Dream Act Application, but gives students the ability to opt out of doing so. A recent report by the Public Policy Institute of California found that applications from high school seniors ahead of UC and CSU’s March 2 deadline climbed 16% in the policy’s first year.
Denise Luna, the director of higher education policy at research and advocacy nonprofit EdTrust-West, said in a written statement that Cal State’s preliminary numbers indicate that giving prospective students more time to consider the costs of a CSU education was not just the right thing to do, but also “the strategic thing to do.”
“This year’s applicants need the same flexibility,” she wrote. “Since financial aid application timelines are delayed again, we will be looking to the CSU to plan to once again extend their intent-to-register deadline in 2025.”
Post-pandemic prognosis
CSU’s preliminary fall headcount is also a step toward reversing pandemic-era enrollment declines.
Enrollment across the CSU system fell 1.7% in fall 2021, part of a nationwide drop during Covid-19. Seventeen of the system’s 23 campuses saw a year-over-year enrollment slump.
Cal State campuses reacted with strategies designed to entice students back, including programs to re-enroll students who stopped attending college with incentives like waived fees and priority registration.
But CSU enrollment continued to slide in fall 2022, a consequence of record-low enrollment at the state’s community colleges, which had the knock-on effect of fewer transfer students entering Cal State.
Demographic trends in the state’s K-12 system may also affect CSU’s student body going forward. In the 2022-23 school year, K-12 public school enrollment fell for the sixth consecutive year. The California Department of Finance projects a drop of more than 660,000 public K-12 students over the next decade if current fertility and migration trends continue.
Still, CSU sees this fall’s numbers as a good omen. Preliminary fall 2024 enrollment, though 5% below the 2020 peak, “signals additional growth in the coming years,” a system announcement said.
The ambitious effort is aimed at high schools creating career pathways in fields such as STEM, education and health care, but it has faced a troubled rollout.
CDE first announced the grant awards in May and then pulled them back in July. The announcement that the grants were revoked once again came on Oct. 1.
CDE said the agency temporarily removed the September grants results after school districts “questioned the funding results,” according to a statement from CDE spokesperson Scott Roark. This decision was made to “ensure the integrity of the grant distribution process, so that all [Local Educational Agencies] receive their allocated funds based on correct and verified data.”
Advocates call the Golden State Pathways an important investment to improve the economic mobility for the next generation of Californians. But they are frustrated that more than two years after the legislature approved the program, money has not begun to roll out.
“To our knowledge, the CDE hasn’t been forthcoming about why they’ve recalled these latest results, nor why we’re seeing yet another delay, which we find alarming,” said Denise Luna, the higher ed policy director for EdTrust-West. “What we need to see as soon as possible is grant award information that the CDE can stand by and for those monies to flow to districts immediately.”
The advocacy group was one of the signatories of a September letter calling on state leaders to release the promised funds by November.
The Golden State Pathways Program was approved by the legislature in 2022. The application called for grant proposals for programs that would begin in April. But the CDE didn’t announce the grant results until May 31. In July, CDE announced it was recalling and reviewing those grants.
CDE has offered no explanations about what caused the problems that led to the recall of the May grant results or those results announced Sept. 20.
After the July recall, administrators told EdSource that there were some clear red flags: some school districts had been awarded up to three times the amount of funding that they had applied for. Schools were counting on that money for this school year.
Roark acknowledged that this delay is “frustrating” but stated that the reevaluation was done to “ensure the integrity of the grant distribution process.”
“The review of these results is a top priority for CDE as we work to expedite the process and deliver final outcomes as quickly as possible,” he wrote, in a statement.
Tulare County Superintendent of Schools Tim Hire, who is heading the lead agency for the state, said that he is not sure what kind of technical issues the CDE is facing in rolling out these grants. However, he has seen the CDE take additional steps to ensure the grants are rolled out more smoothly, such as bringing on Erika Torres, deputy superintendent of strategy, policy and special projects.
“I think there’s been some movement and some effort by the CDE to improve the process,” he said.
Right now, everyone is in a “holding pattern,” said Hire, but these regional agencies are doing everything they can to prepare for the grants to be disbursed — and ultimately help students to have unique experiences and opportunities that prepare them for fulfilling careers.
“We’re continuing to plan and try to do everything we can to prepare the regional leads,” he said, “so that when the allocations come — and everyone agrees that they’re appropriate and accurate — they can fast-track the work of the districts.”
A sign in support of public school is seen outside a home next to Sutro Elementary School in San Francisco on Oct. 9, 2024. The school is among the 11 schools previously proposed for closure within San Francisco Unified School District amid decline in enrollment and budgetary woes.
Credit: Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle via AP
San Francisco must do everything it can to avert a state takeover of its schools.
That’s the stark message brought by Carl A. Cohn, the only outside educator to be brought in to help the team of city administrators set up by Mayor London Breed to help the school district overcome multiple crises, including a looming budget shortage, declining enrollment, and the departure of its superintendent, the second in two years.
“I remain a huge fan of local control,” said Cohn, a revered figure in education circles in California and nationally. “I fundamentally believe that if historically underserved students are going to be rescued, it is going to be by locals, not by state government or higher levels of authority.”
Carl A. Cohn
The challenges facing the 48,000-student district are being experienced to some degree by many others around the state. Just across the San Francisco Bay, Oakland Unified and West Contra Costa Unified, which includes Richmond, are grappling with comparable challenges.
San Francisco’s, however, seem especially acute.
“I think the loss of federal pandemic relief funds, coupled with declining enrollments will make things difficult for most districts, but San Francisco is probably ahead of the curve on this,” he said.
There’s little that Cohn, who projects calm and reassurance but can also be disarmingly direct, has not seen in his 50 years in an array of roles in public education.
He was superintendent of the San Diego and Long Beach school districts, the second- and third-largest in California after Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD). His 10-year tenure at Long Beach was especially noteworthy for fostering academic excellence and accountability, resulting in the district winning the prestigious Broad Prize For Urban Education.
He was appointed to the State Board of Education by then Gov. Jerry Brown, who later recruited him to lead a new state agency, the California Collaborative for Education Excellence.
He has been brought in to deal with various trouble spots over the years. He co-chaired a commission of the National Academy of Sciences to look into whether District of Columbia schools had exaggerated their academic results under the leadership of Michelle Rhee, then arguably the best-known, and most controversial, school superintendent in the nation.
He was the court-appointed monitor overseeing a consent decree to improve special education in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Currently, he is co-leading an initiative with Harvard professor Jennifer Cheatham to prepare school superintendents to cope with the political polarization roiling school districts across the country.
He has also been a mentor to generations of school superintendents, and trained many of them as a professor at Claremont Graduate University, and at the University of Southern California before that.
Cohn has never had to close schools himself and says that San Francisco must do everything it can to find alternatives to doing so. That is similar to a mindset Breed appears also to have embraced, and was a major reason behind the resignation of Superintendent Matt Wayne last week.
For now, at least, school closure plans are on hold. “The challenge with closing schools from a symbolic point of view is that it can be seen as the beginning of the death of a community,” Cohn says.
“There are multiple ways to cut a school district budget,” he says. “And if you have to, there are ways to do it so it is not a huge negative.”
He recalls being sent to Inglewood Unified a dozen years ago by then-State Board President Michael Kirst to take stock of the deep financial hole the Southern California district was in.
He found a lackadaisical attitude among school officials about the prospect of a state administrator with the power to overrule local decisionmaking. “They seemed to think the takeover wasn’t such a big deal, that after the bailout they would get their authority back,” he says. “And here we are, 12 years later, with the district nowhere near having an elected school board with any authority.”
The district is still overseen by an administrator appointed by the county.
Cohn has yet to meet Breed, but two weeks ago he came from Palm Springs, where he is based, to meet with the mayor’s School Stabilization Team made up of top San Francisco officials, co-led by Maria Su, the longtime head of the city’s Department of Children, Youth and Their Families. In an unexpected move last week, the school board appointed Su to be the new superintendent, at least until June 2026.
He points out that, unlike other large urban districts in California, the city of San Francisco commendably contributes funding to its schools, which means it has a more direct stake in their functioning.
What is essential is strict oversight over how the district spends its money, he says. He recalls the first day he was given a tour of the administration offices at Long Beach Unified as a 31-year-old educator in the district.
On the second floor was a tiny office with a sign on the door reading “Position Control” right next to the budget office. He was told it was the most powerful office in the district — one that determined what staff could be hired at a school. “Even if you were the superintendent you could not get a position filled unless Position Control said it was in the current budget.”
In addition, each year the district’s research office issued what was called a “quota bulletin,” which decreed how many employees a school qualified for based on its enrollment. Its edicts, he says, were “treated as a sacred document that had been handed down from Mt. Sinai.”
A similar parsimonious ethos is in place in parochial schools. “What is notable about these schools is that they are not over resourced,” said Cohn, who advises the California Catholic Conference on its schools. “You won’t find an assistant principal, a counselor, a reading specialist unless the school has the enrollment to support it.”
“My impression is that these types of controls were not present in the San Francisco school system,” he says. “It’s important for spending to be based on actual enrollment and not on wishful spending.”
He says it would be important to bring all key parties together — the mayor’s stabilization team, incoming Superintendent Su and her deputy, board representatives, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, and the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, a state-sponsored oversight agency — and put them all in the same room to have a “candid conversation.”
“Getting a handle on what exactly they need to do to retain local control seems like a real important value,” he said.
One thing schools can have no impact on is declining birthrates, Cohn points out. So other strategies to attract and retain students will be needed.
He notes that San Francisco has many private, parochial and charter groups — more than most communities. He suggests conducting focus groups with people who are opting out of more traditional public schools to find out more precisely “what it is that those schools are offering that San Francisco isn’t.”
That could suggest strategies that San Francisco could offer — from more child care to innovative magnet schools — to support families and to encourage them to enroll their children in district schools.
San Francisco schools are especially vulnerable to being taken over by the state. In recent years, when the state bails out a district financially, authority to appoint an administrator has been delegated to the county offices of education. But because San Francisco is both a city and a county, it would be subject to, in Cohn’s words,”an old-fashioned state administrator.”
With Mayor Breed up for reelection in two weeks, and with four of seven school board seats also on the ballot, the district faces many unknowns.
Regardless of what happens on Election Day, Cohn says a fundamental issue the district has to address is “what kinds of resources a school gets based on its enrollment so that future spending doesn’t spiral out of control because someone thinks ‘I need this’ or “I need that.’”
Cal State Northridge is one of 23 CSU System institutions.
Larry Gordon/EdSource
As the end of adecadelongpush to graduate more students nears, California State University made slight progressin 2024on increasing the four-year graduation rate for freshmen but saw six-year freshman rates stall and four-year transfer rates drop, new statistics show.
Those numbers show the difficulties the university system faces in its final efforts to improve its graduation rates, even after significant overall improvement toward ambitious goals over the previous nine years.
The data were presented Tuesday at a two-day symposium on graduation goals ahead of spring 2025, when the system’s much-scrutinized Graduation Initiative 2025 effort is supposed to end. California State University (CSU) officials urged colleagues to learn more about why many students are dropping out or taking so long to finish.
Across the CSU system, freshman six-year graduation rates have plateaued at around 62%, the same as in 2023 and 8 percentage points below the system’s graduation goal for 2025. Freshman four-year graduation rates ticked up to36% in 2024, a 1 pointgain from the previous year. But they fell shy of the system goal to hit 40% by 2025.
Transfer students’ performance was a mixed bag. Cal State is just 1 percentage point from reaching its goal of a 45% two-year graduation rate for transfers, a decent increase from 41% in 2023. But among transfer students who entered CSU in 2020,four-year graduation rates dropped from 79% in 2023 to 75% this year, putting them 10 points below the Graduation Initiative 2025 target.
CSU also tracks graduation rates for its 23 campuses, all of which have been assigned varying goals. But the university system has not published campus graduation rates for 2024 to a dashboard available online, and those were not included in the public report Tuesday.
Though the system’s current graduation rates compare favorably to similar public universities, Chancellor Mildred García said they are “not good enough.”
About 25,000 first-time students who entered CSU in 2018 did not graduate in six years, Garcia noted. “That’s 25,000 students whose dreams are deferred, 25,000 students who left — and because of the cost of living in the state, are leaving with debt,” she said. “We’re not going to take responsibility for that? I think we have to, we have to talk about the elephant in the room and really examine, again: Are support services really helping? Are we listening to our students?”
García said the university system must also do more to connect recent graduates with careers, like a Cal State graduate she encountered working in a hospitality job who said they can’t find work in their desired field.
“Where is our responsibility there?” she said. “There’s so many options for them. How are we teaching them about the amazing career options that are out there, so they could know which way they want to go?”
García’s remarks followed a presentation about the system’s graduation and persistence rates by Jennifer Baszile, the associate vice chancellor for student success and inclusive excellence.
The system is yet to close the gap between students without Pell Grants (more affluent students) and lower-income students receiving such assistance. Among the CSU cohort that started in fall 2017, roughly 68% of more affluent students without Pell Grants graduated in six years. Among Pell Grant recipients, that figure was just 56%.
Officials have previously attributed at least part of their trouble closing equity gaps to the coronavirus pandemic, which added pressure on students who have to work or care for family members.
Cal State also touted some good news.Since the effort began, the system has nearly doubled its four-year graduation rate, Baszile said. A Cal State analysis comparing CSU to state systems like the City University of New York and the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education — after making adjustments to leave out top-tier research institutions — found that CSU’s six-year graduation rates for freshmen was near the top of the pack.
Higher graduation rates are also a good deal for students. Baszile noted that getting their degrees faster means money in the pockets of Cal State graduates, since they can join the workforce sooner and save on the additional fees and tuition they would have paid if it took longer to finish their programs.
A closer look at how some students fared
The past 10 years have seen notable demographic changes at Cal State. The university saw its incoming freshman classes grow 31% between 2009 and 2019. During the same period, the population of first-generation, Pell Grant and/or historically underserved students increased by 50%, according to Baszile’s presentation.
Baszile then turned to persistence rates, which measure the percentage of students who return to a campus after each year of education.
Overall, the analysis found that 84% of first-time students in the 2018 cohort came back to campus for a second year. But equity gaps emerged early. First-year persistence among students who were Latino, male and first-generation was 78%, lagging 6 points behind the system average.
Disparities were amplified in subsequent years. The divide ultimately fed into lower graduation rates: 48% of Latino, male and first-generation students graduated in six years, again trailing the 62% graduation rate among all students in the 2018 cohort.
“More than 50% of the Latino, male, first-generation students who started in 2018 are no longer with us. They are gone,” Baszile said. “We might be able to help them re-enroll. There’s always a chance. But think about on your university campuses: How much energy, how much effort, how much investment is required to have students fully depart and have to identify them, re-engage them and bring them back?”
How to stop students from ‘leaking out of the pipeline’
Baszile and Dilcie D. Perez, Cal State’s deputy vice chancellor of academic and student affairs, urged colleagues to learn more about the specific reasons why students leave CSU — in the hopes of preventing more students from following them out the door.
“We’ve got to find a way to go get those students and bring them back,” Perez recalled saying to Baszile in one of the many conversations the two have had about improving student persistence. “And (Baszile) was like, ‘Yes, but how about we never lose them?’”
President Richard Yao of Cal State Channel Islands said his campus has started using exit surveys. The first challenge is getting a response; once students leave, he said, they can be hard to reach. The next is making sense of the idiosyncratic reasons students depart.
“When we look at the exit data, why students are leaving, it is not just one thing,” Yao said. “The variability is off the charts, and it’s so individual. So for us, right now, we’re struggling.”
One throughline in the data, he said, is that students who leave are struggling academically. But he encouraged colleagues to look beyond academic performance, too.
“We have to identify what’s happening in that first year in our classrooms, in our residential areas, in our co-curricular — what is it that may be contributing to those poor outcomes, whether it be mental health, basic needs — and maybe taking a deeper dive into what is contributing to those poor academic outcomes as well,” he said.
While 14 Cal State universities notched six-year graduation rate increases over the previous year, nine schools in the system saw their rates decline.
San Jose (+ 4.6 percentage points), East Bay (+ 2.4 percentage points) and Fresno (+ 2.1 percentage points) were among the campuses with the greatest increases in six-year graduation rate. Those figures represent the difference in completion among first-time, full-time freshman students who started in 2018 and those who began in 2017.
But several campuses’ graduation rates slipped year-over-year, with the deepest dips at three of Cal State’s smallest campuses. Cal Maritime posted the biggest downswing, falling 7 percentage points. Stanislaus (- 4.6 percentage points) and Monterey Bay (- 4.1 percentage points) recorded the next-largest decreases. Two of Cal State’s largest campuses — San Diego (- 1.8 percentage points) and Long Beach (- 1 percentage point) — also saw six-year freshman rates go down slightly.
That’s according to campus-level statistics the system unveiled this week, coinciding with Cal State’s November board of trustees meeting. The university system is nearing the end of a decadelong campaign to graduate more students, which will conclude in spring 2025. It has made marked improvement toward hitting top-line goals across the system, but is falling short on some targets. Cal State officials have said that the pandemic set back progress on some graduation metrics. They also cite a need to focus on retaining students entering their second and third years of school, particularly students of color.
Cal State knows “that we have a leak, that in that second to third year we’re losing a significantly high number of our students of color and probably male students of color, quite honestly,” said Dilcie D. Perez, Cal State’s chief student affairs officer. “We’re bringing them in. But if the mechanism doesn’t change, we’re going to lose students.”
Systemwide data presented last month shows that Cal State’s freshman four-year graduation rate across all campuses increased slightly during the 2023-24 school year over the previous year, but that its six-year freshman rate plateaued and four-year transfer rate fell.
Cal Maritime, the university system’s smallest campus, was an outlier in terms of how much graduation rates fell from spring 2023 to spring 2024. The school, which specializes in shipping and oceanography programs, experienced the system’s greatest decrease in four-year graduation rates among students transferring from the California Community Colleges over the past two school years. Flagging enrollment has plunged the school into financial difficulty, which culminated this week in a vote to merge the maritime academy with Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in order to keep it afloat.
Eight other campuses including Bakersfield (- 3 percentage points) showeddeclines in four-year transfer graduation rates. Humboldt (+ 5.8 percentage points) and Monterey Bay (+ 4.1 percentage points) gained the most, comparing four-year transfer graduation rates for the 2018 cohort to their peers a year earlier.
Systemwide, Cal State is aiming to have 40% of first-year students graduate in four years and 70% of first-year students graduate in six years by spring 2025. Individual campuses also have their own graduation rate targets, which can be more or less ambitious than those that apply to the system as a whole.
None of the system’s universities met their individual campuses’ graduation rate targets for first-time, six-year graduation rates among students who started in 2018. There has been more success on four-year rates. San Diego, Long Beach, San Jose, Sacramento and Northridge met their four-year target for first-time students who started in 2020.
Clarity matters when explaining to parents how their children did on standardized tests. An imprecise characterization of a complicated score can mislead parents into assuming their kids performed better than they did.
That issue is at the heart of the opposition to draft revisions to descriptions of students’ scores on the Smarter Balanced assessments that are sent home to parents. While the degree of difficulty of the tests and their scoring wouldn’t change, the characterization of the results would, like replacing the term “standard not met” with “inconsistent” for the lowest scores.
Parent focus groups this week
The California Department of Education is scheduling three online focus groups to gather thoughts, questions and concerns on proposed changes to how scores on the Smarter Balanced statewide assessments will be reported publicly. The meetings are for parents, teachers and students.
Tuesday, Dec. 3, 6 to 7 p,m.: Session 1, in English
Wednesday, Dec. 4, 7 to 8 p.m. Session 2, in English for students only
Thursday, Dec. 5, 6 to 7 p.m. Session 3, in Spanish
The State Board of Education delayed its adoption at its November meeting because of criticism that the revised wording may compound, not solve, current unclear language.
Board members listened to children’s advocacy groups who chided state officials for not first consulting with teachers and parents before taking any action — which state officials acknowledged they hadn’t done.
In a letter to the state board about the proposed changes, particularly the labeling of low test scores, nine student advocacy groups — the Alliance for Students — argued that the revised language “will only serve to obfuscate the data and make it even more challenging for families and advocates to lift the needs of our most underserved students.” Signers of the letter include Teach Plus, Children Now, and Innovate Public Schools.
Getting the terms right is important for the assessment scores to be useful to parents and teachers, Sarah Lillis, executive director of Teach Plus California, told EdSource. “We want to make sure the signals sent by the descriptors foster dialogue” and encourage parents to ask the right questions.
“We echo the concerns of our colleagues,” testified Lindsay Tornatore, representing the California County Superintendents at the board’s Nov. 13 meeting. “Outreach to parents, families and the community should have been prioritized to engage in multiple opportunities prior to the changes being made.”
In response, the California Department of Education hastily scheduled online presentations this week for parents and teachers, with the expectation that they will consider any recommendations at their next meeting in January.
How scores are reported
A student’s scores on the Smarter Balanced tests in English language arts and math and on the California Science Test fall within one of four achievement levels that provide context on how the student performed. Level 4, with the highest attainable scores, is also labeled “Standard Exceeded.” Level 3 is labeled Standard Met; Level 2 is Standard Nearly Met, and Level 1 is Standard Not Met. Many of the dozen states and territories that give Smarter Balanced use the same definitions.
The target is to score at least Level 3, which indicates a student is working at grade level. In the 2023-24 results, fewer than half of students achieved Levels 3 or 4: 53% scored at levels 1 or 2 in English language arts, and 64.5% scored at Levels 1 or 2 in math. The tests are given to students in grades three through eight and grade 11.
Statewide scores were worse in science, which is given to students in grades five, eight, and once in high school, 69.3% failed to meet Level 3 — the grade-level standard — in 2023-24.
In response to criticism that the existing labels are vague, imprecise and confusing, Smarter Balanced representatives decided to create a new set of labels and brief descriptions, which states have the option to use. This is particularly so for Level 2 — the “Standard Nearly Met” label. Many parents don’t understand what nearly meeting grade-level standards in particular means.
Under the Smarter Balanced draft for the scoring bands, Level 4 would become “Advanced,” Level 3 would be “Proficient,” Level 2 would be “Foundational,” and Level 1 would be “Inconsistent.”
A draft description for Level 2 in language arts for third to fifth grade would read, “The student demonstrates foundational grade-level skills and shows a basic understanding of and ability to apply the knowledge and skills in English language arts/literacy needed for likely success in future coursework.”
In letters and in remarks at the board meeting, critics indicated they’re fine with “Advanced” and “Proficient” but are unhappy with the labels Foundational and Inconsistent for Levels 1 and 2.
“The language is confusing and not engaging for families with the first two levels,” said Joanna French, director of research and policy strategies for Innovate Public Schools. “If a student is not at grade level, be direct about that. You cannot address a problem you cannot see.”
Tonya Craft-Perry, a 15-year teacher who is active in the Black Parent Network of Innovate Public Schools, said that “’Foundational’ could lead parents to believe their children are doing better than they are. It makes the district and teachers look better, but if a low score requires intervention, a parent needs to know that,” she said.
Several board members indicated that one easy remedy would be to include language in the revision’s current descriptions. The wording makes clear that a student scoring in Level 2 “may require further development” to demonstrate the knowledge and skills to succeed in future grades or, for older students, in college courses after high school. Students scoring in Level 1 “needs substantial improvement” to succeed.
News media oversimplifies
In a two-page explanation, Smarter Balanced blamed the news media for much of the misunderstanding over the current wording of the labels.
“The media often incorrectly reports that students who aren’t proficient ‘can’t do math’ or ‘can’t read.’ This is not true. The Smarter Balanced assessments are aligned to grade-level content, and students who achieve Levels 2, 3, and 4 do, in fact, demonstrate a continuum of grade-level knowledge and skills,” it said.
Students at all three of those levels are showing that they “understand core content,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the California State Board of Education, at the board meeting.
But as scores progress from one level to the next, students convey increasing accuracy and complexity in their knowledge and skills. Smarter Balanced said students demonstrate this in how they respond to more complex reading passages, concepts and advanced vocabulary, or in math, the number of elements in equations and difficult word problems.
Rob Manwaring, a senior adviser to the advocacy group Children Now, said that the new labels would feed the “reality gap in the perceptions of parents that their kids are doing better than they are” in school. In an often-cited 2023 parent survey in communities nationwide, survey firm Gallup and the nonprofit parent advocacy organization Learning Heroes found that, based on their kids’ report cards, parents’ perceptions were out of whack with how their children did on assessments. In Sacramento County, where 28% of students were proficient in math tests, 85% of parents believed their children were proficient.
“Now we are suggesting that students scoring below standard are foundational. Many parents will conclude, ‘My kid is doing fine,’” Manwaring said.
Students walking on the campus of Cal State San Marcos on Dec. 3, 2024.
Credit: Amy DiPierro / EdSource
Diego Lopez, a student in his last year at Cal State San Marcos, gives the north San Diego County campus high marks. The Army veteran likes his classes, feels the campus is generally well-managed and appreciates that at the school’s current size, “you can just chill, and relax, and not get too overwhelmed.”
But Lopez can tell the student body is expanding, especially at the start of the semester, when he has to navigate crowded parking lots.
“The parking lots are so full, so you have to make sure you get here early. And then just right across the street, you see all the construction being done,” he said. “You can definitely tell: This school is growing a lot, and it’s growing fast.”
The number of students at the suburban Cal State San Marcos campus has mushroomed over the past decade. It’s now home to 14,655 students, an almost 15% jump since 2015, among the sharpest increases of any Cal State campus in that period.
But that is not the case across the 23 campuses of the California State University system. Overall systemenrollment has settled at 2.7% lower than a decade ago after tumbling more deeply during the pandemic.Andbehind that numberis a more complicated picture, with some individual campuses showing double-digit percent increaseseven asothers have experienced big decreases.
While San Marcos students have raced to find parking in the first weeks of recent academic years, Sonoma State students in contrast can usually find dozens of empty spaces in the Bay Area school’s main parking lot. The campus has suffered the worst enrollment loss in the university system, contracting from 9,408 students in 2015 to 5,784 students in 2024. Recent statistics suggest it had the highest dorm vacancy rate in the Cal State system in spring 2023, prompting the university to open some housing to nonstudents.
Falling enrollment has prompted a period of tight finances at the Sonoma State campus. Tess Wilkinson, a fourth-year transfer student studying communications, said she saw fewer courses being offered. She suspects budget cuts are one reason why.
“I even noticed some professors that had regularly taught courses in my major were no longer on the course schedule at all,” she said. “Some courses were thrown together to accommodate abrupt faculty changes — and student engagement in my classes felt like it had decreased.”
The divergence between San Marcos and Sonoma shows how the enrollment challenge facing the nation’slargest university system defies a one-size-fits-all solutionabout how to serve students and where to spend money around the state.
The trend continued this fall, with enrollment up from the year before at 15 campuses and down at eight. That uneven distribution of new students is in part due to regional differences in population, the cost of living and labor markets. It may also reflect whether they cater primarily to commuters or on-campus residents, offer higher- or lower-demand degrees and serve more or fewer students sensitive to last year’s federal financial aid delays.
Even in a year when enrollment across the Cal State system rose a modest 1.5%, some campus leaders enjoyed a banner college acceptance season. Cal State Monterey Bay, whose 16% enrollment bump was the system’s largest 2023-24, sold out on-campus housing for the first time in a decade this fall, according to Ben Corpus, its vice president for enrollment management and student affairs.
At the other extreme, lower-enrolled CSU campuses must contend with the financial fallout from less revenue from tuition and fees. Sonoma State and Cal State Los Angeles, which notched the largest year-to-year enrollment drop in the system, have instituted hiring freezes and cut course sections to bridge funding gaps.
Those stakes have not escaped the notice of campuses at both ends of the enrollment yo-yo. EdSource interviewed students, faculty and administrators at Sonoma State and Cal State San Marcos about how they think course offerings, student clubs, construction and, yes, parking are changing as their schools get bigger or smaller.
Students walk on the campus of Sonoma State University.Credit: Ally Valiente / EdSource
Sonoma State
An hour north of San Francisco, Sonoma State University celebrates its location on the edge of the Russian River Valley by naming its dorms for wine varietals and regions from Beaujolais to Zinfandel.
But wildfires have destroyed thousands of homes in this region of the state since 2017, a shock from which its population and already expensivehousing market are still recovering. That has made it harder to recruit students from other parts of the state, who are a significant part of the student body, officials said. Sonoma State’s enrollment has slid almost 39% since 2015. Cal State’s 2022-23 financial statements put the school’s average residence hall occupancy at just 65%. The university has opened some of its student housing to faculty, staff, students with young children or even people visiting campus for a conference.
Collapsing enrollment over the decade slowed to a 1% dip this year. Still, the smaller student body has prompted a serious cash crunch. Sonoma State, which has a $130 million operating budget this school year, anticipates a $21 million budget deficit going into 2025-26.
“It’s pretty simplistic sort of math: We just don’t have enough students paying the tuition to fully cover all of the expenses we have,” Emily F. Cutrer, the university’s interim president, said at an Oct. 28 town hall to discuss Sonoma State’s budget forecast.
Cutrer said the university would have to add more than 3,000 students — a 52%increase over fall 2024 — to cover its current deficit, a goal she estimated is likely three or four years away. The loss of tuition and fee revenue is compounded by rising employee benefits costs, state funding cuts and an estimated $3.6 million that Cal State is expected to reallocate to other campuses.
Sonoma State is under a hiring freeze and is also pressing pause on some travel. The campus in recent years has offered employees early retirements and buyouts. Part-time and full-time lecturer headcount has fallen almost 25% in the last several years, a spokesperson said. Sonoma State notified the faculty union in October that layoffs could be on the way.
“I would ask people to stop asking us to do more with less. It’s exhausting,” Lauren S. Morimoto, who chairs the university’s department of kinesiology, said at the town hall. “We’re demoralized and we’re burnt out.”
Sonoma State’s struggles are a comedown from a campaign under then-President Ruben Armiñana to bill the university as a “public Ivy” – offering plush new facilities at a state university price – in the 1990s through 2010s. Armiñana’s critics charged that the strategy attracted a wealthier and whiter student body compared with the state’s other public universities.
Judy Sakaki succeeded Armiñana in 2016 with the explicit goal of making Sonoma State more accessible and less elitist. Sakaki’s 2022 resignation ushered in a period of leadership turnover; Cutrer is the third person to lead the university since then.
Tim Wandling, who chairs the English department and serves on the board of the California Faculty Association at Sonoma State, said he’s concerned about leadership instability on campus. He also worries that the university’s top brass “want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing blitzes and new programs, and what they really need to do is just downsize their administrative staff and focus on keeping the good faculty that they have, the good students they have.”
Sonoma State is not alone among Bay Area universities hurting for students. San Francisco State and Cal State East Bay are facing similar declines.
Sonoma State’s relative distance from major population centers has long encouraged admissions staff to look outside their own backyard for prospective students.
Sonoma currently draws 35% of its students from its home county, an additional 63%from elsewhere in California and 1.6%from out of state. University administrators and attendees speaking at the October town hall appeared to favor an all-of-the-above recruitment strategy.
Locally, the campus has struck guaranteed admissions deals with several of the region’s school districts and community colleges. And looking outside Sonoma State’s immediate region, the university is also recruiting in Southern California, looking at ways of retaining students it already has and bringing back students who do not immediately re-enroll each term.
Students work at a library on the campus of Cal State San Marcos on Dec. 3, 2024.Credit: Amy DiPierro / EdSource
Cal State San Marcos
On a mild December afternoon, Cal State San Marcos student Diana Ortega Caballero was reading a book on a terrace overlooking construction cranes. Building sites are among the most visible cues of how the campus is expanding after some pandemic dips.
Ortega Caballero, a transfer student from MiraCosta Community College in nearby Oceanside, said she had “a really easy transition” to San Marcos. Almost a third of San Marcos students start at a California community college.
San Marcos is in good company among Southern California’s CSU campuses that have welcomed more students over the past decade due to regional population growth. San Diego State University is leading the system in enrollment gains since 2015, followed closely by Cal Poly Pomona and San Marcos.
Students interviewed at the campus said they’re largely satisfied with San Marcos. Several noted that the campus feels more accessible than larger CSU campuses. But they conceded experiencing occasional snags as the campus expands, like trouble getting into certain classes or a long wait time to see an academic adviser.
Jackson Puddy, who is studying business administration, was standing outside the library waiting for students to arrive for a pickup chess game. He hoped the school’s growing enrollment would bring more money, more professors and perhaps even more members for the small chess club he runs. The only con? “The parking situation — it’s not going to get any better,” he said, even if students can now reliably find a space in a dirt lot downhill from the main quad.
San Marcos’ growth does not immunize it from the belt-tightening other CSU campuses have begun in anticipation of lower state funding. At a board of trustees meeting in September, President Ellen Neufeldt said a lack of additional faculty could lead to larger class sizes and noted that the school has deferred maintenance on aging electrical systems.
“The challenge we now face is that while we are growing, we are unable to hire the essential employees needed to support our mission of student success,” Neufeldt said. “We urgently require more advisers, success coaches, tutors, financial aid specialists and counselors, and the list goes on and on, to assist our amazing students.”
Ally Valiente, a student at Sonoma State University and a member of the Student Journalism Corps, contributed to this story.
Students at Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School in the Burbank Unified School District practice their reading skills.
Credit: Jordan Strauss/AP Images
A panel of reading experts has designated the tests that school districts can use to identify reading difficulties that kindergartners through second graders may have, starting next fall.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement Tuesday of the selection of the reading risk screeners marks a milestone in the nearly decadelong campaign to mandate that all young students be measured for potential reading challenges, including dyslexia. California will become one of the last states to require universal literacy screening when it takes effect in 2025-26.
To learn more
For Frequently Asked Questions about the screening instruments for risk of reading difficulties, go here.
For more about the screeners selected for district use, go here.
For the letter on screening sent to district, county office and charter school superintendents, go here.
For more on the Reading Difficulties Risk Screener Selection Panel, go here.
Between now and then, districts will select which of four approved reading screeners they will use, and all staff members designated as the testers will undergo state-led training. The Legislature funded $25 million for that effort.
“I know from my own challenges with dyslexia that when we help children read, we help them succeed,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement.
Students will be tested annually in kindergarten through second grade. In authorizing the screeners, the Legislature and Newsom emphasized that screening will not serve as a diagnosis for reading disabilities, including dyslexia, which is estimated to affect 5% to 15% of readers. Instead, the results could lead to further evaluation and will be used for classroom supports and interventions for individual students. Parents will also receive the findings of the screenings.
“This is a significant step toward early identification and intervention for students showing early signs of difficulty learning to read. We believe that with strong implementation, educators will be better equipped to support all learners, fostering a more inclusive environment where every child has the opportunity to thrive,” said Megan Potente, co-director of Decoding Dyslexia CA, which led the effort for universal screening.
A reading-difficulty screener could consist of a series of questions and simple word-reading exercises to measure students’ strengths and needs in phonemic awareness skills, decoding abilities, vocabulary and reading comprehension. A student may be asked, for example, “What does the ‘sh’ sound like in ‘ship’”?
Among the four designated screeners chosen is Multitudes, a $28 million, state-funded effort that Newsom championed and the University of California San Francisco Dyslexia Center developed. The 10 to 13-minute initial assessment will serve K–2 grades and be offered in English and Spanish.
The other three are:
Young-Suk Kim, an associate dean at UC Irvine’s School of Education, and Yesenia Guerrero, a special education teacher at Lennox School District, led the nine-member Reading Difficulties Risk Screener Selection Panel that held hearings and approved the screeners. The State Board of Education appointed the members.
The move to establish universal screening dragged out for a decade. The California Teachers Association and advocates for English learners were initially opposed, expressing fear that students who don’t speak English would be over-identified as having a disability and qualifying for special education.
In 2015, then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation requiring schools to assess students for dyslexia, but students weren’t required to take the evaluation.
In 2021, advocates for universal screening were optimistic legislation would pass, but the chair of the Assembly Education Committee, Patrick O’Donnell, refused to give it a hearing.
“Learning to read is a little like learning to ride a bike. With practice, typical readers gradually learn to read words automatically,” CTA wrote in a letter to O’Donnell.
Sen. Anthony Portantino, D-Glendale, reintroduced his bill the following year, but instead Newsom included funding and requirements for universal screening in his 2023-24 state budget.
The Newsom administration and advocates for universal screening reached out to advocates for English learners to incorporate their concerns in the requirements for approving screeners and to include English learner authorities on the selection panel.
Martha Hernandez, executive director of Californians Together, an organization that advocates for English learners statewide, said Wednesday it was clear that the panel considered the needs of English learners and she is pleased that the majority of the screeners are available in Spanish and English.
“Their commitment to addressing the unique needs of English learners was evident throughout the process,” Hernandez said.
However, she said it is important for the state to provide clear guidance to districts about what level of English proficiency is required in order for students to get accurate results from a screener in English.
“The vast majority of English learners will be screened only in English, and without evidence that these screeners are valid and reliable across different English proficiency levels, there is a risk of misidentification,” Hernandez said.
Hernandez said Californians Together emphasized to the panel that it is important for students who are not yet fluent in English to be assessed for reading in both their native language and English, “to capture the full scope of their skills.” In addition, Hernandez said it is crucial for the state Department of Education to offer guidance to districts on selecting or developing a screener in languages other than English or Spanish.
The article was corrected on Dec. 18 to note that the initial Multitudes assessment takes 10 to 13 minutes, not 20 minutes, depending on the grade; a followup assessment can take an additional 10 minutes.
North Dakota became the 47th state to authorize charter schools. There are three states that do not have a charter sschool law. Nebraska, South Dakota, and Vermont. Kentucky has a law but its courts declared them unconstitutional.
When charter schools first began in 1991, they were sold to the public as a miracle cure. Their promoters said they would operate with greater accountability, no bureaucracy, and the freedom to hire and fire at will. Because of this flexibility, charters would produce higher test scores, would cost less, would “save” the failing students, would close if they didn’t get the promised results, and would produce innovations that would help public schools.
None of these promises came true. The charters are no better than public schools, and many are far worse. The ones that produce higher scores choose their students carefully and avoid the neediest, most difficult students. Charters have produced no innovations. They have a well-funded lobby that fights accountability and seeks more funding. They close at a startling rate: more than one of every four are gone within five years of opening.
Charters have also been notorious for waste, fraud, and abuse. Scores of charters have been rife with fraud and outright theft. One online charter operator in Ohio collected $1 billion over twenty years, donated generously to elected officials, and when confronted by an audit and demand for repayment, declared bankruptcy. An online charter operator in California stole nearly $100 million. Some operators of brick-and-mortar charter schools have gone to jail for financial fraud.
The Network for Public Education keeps track of charter frauds. All this information is freely available. Yet North Dakota Governor Kelly Armstrong recited the same broken promises in signing charter legislation. The charters will not produce higher student scores, will push out students they don’t want, and will not produce innovation. In coming sessions of the legislature, their lobbyists will weaken or eliminate the provisions they don’t like. If North Dakota is fortunate, the big charter chains will ignore them because the market is small.
North Dakota Gov. Kelly Armstrong signed Senate Bill 2241 Monday, allowing public charter schools to operate in the state.
The legislation takes effect Aug. 1.
Charter schools are state-funded public schools that have greater flexibility in hiring, curriculum, management and other aspects of their operations. Unlike traditional public schools that are run by school districts with an elected school board and a board-appointed superintendent, most charter schools are run by organizations with self-appointed boards.
Senate Bill 2241 requires charter schools to operate under a performance agreement with the state Superintendent of Public Instruction, according to a media release from the governor’s office. The schools must meet or exceed state academic and graduation requirements and be open to all North Dakota students.
“The public charter schools authorized by this bill can drive innovation, improve student outcomes and increase parent satisfaction,” Armstrong said in a statement.
West Contra Costa Unified’s Stege Elementary School in Richmond.
Photo: Andrew Reed/EdSource
West Contra Costa Unified School District is on the cusp of a new and uncertain era following the retirement of its superintendent, Chris Hurst, who stepped down in December after just over three years on the job.
Whoever is chosen to permanently replace him will face a daunting set of concerns, including ensuring that the district is not placed under state control. For now that job is in the hands of interim Superintendent Kim Moses, who until December was the district’s associate superintendent for business services.
With an enrollment of just under 30,000 students, more than half from low-income families, the district comprises 54 schools in El Cerrito, Richmond and other East Bay communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Chief among the issues the district faces are declining enrollment, persistent budget deficits, a sluggish improvement in post-Covid test scores, teacher shortages, and meeting the multiple needs of a diverse and largely low-income student body, along with a sometimes-contentious school board not always in alignment with its superintendent.
To a greater or lesser extent, these are problems facing many urban districts across California, including some larger neighbors around the Bay Area.
San Francisco Unified also got a new superintendent last month and is grappling with severe budget deficits and intense pressure to close schools.
While Oakland Unified’s superintendent, Kyla Johnson-Trammell, is still in her job after seven years, surviving a teacher strike, the pandemic, and other travails, the district is dealing with similar profound challenges. Both San Francisco and Oakland also face the prospect of a state takeover.
Last Wednesday, at West Contra Costa’s first board meeting of 2025, Moses issued a blunt warning about the need to make further budget cuts to avoid insolvency.
After making $19 million in cuts during the current year, the district still has a “significant structural deficit,” she said, and warned that under current scenarios, its budget reserves “will be exhausted within three years.”
Without further reductions in the next two school years, the district would be “placed under (state) receivership, which means we’ll no longer be in charge of making financial decisions for our district,” she said.
In 1991, the district had the unfortunate distinction of being the first in the state to go insolvent. To rescue it, the district received a $29 million bailout loan, which took 21 years to pay off. Now it is trying to head off a similar fate.
In December, the West Contra Costa school board passed a budget that members said met the standard to receive a “positive certification,” which under state regulations means it would not spend its entire reserve over the next three years.
But the county office of education has refused to approve that certification without the district providing a multiyear deficit-reduction plan. That is what Moses presented to the board on Wednesday night, involving cuts of $7 million next year, and an additional $6 million the following year.
Declining enrollment — by 8% over the past four years alone — is perhaps West Contra Costa’s primary concern, according to Michael Fine, CEO of California’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, an agency created by the state to help districts resolve financial and management problems.
Fine largely attributes the decline — which is mirrored in many other districts, and the state as a whole — to lower birth rates.
“It’s a long-term problem” for schools, he said. “Right now, schools are feeling it most in kindergarten and elementary school. In 10 years, it will be middle school, then high school.”
The problem translates directly into money. In California, schools have a variety of sources of funds, but they are primarily based on “average daily attendance,” that is, the number of kids in the classroom each day. In 2022-23, the district received nearly $24,000 per student from various sources, most of it from the state based on actual attendance, according to Ed-Data.
As enrollment declines — either through lower birth rates or families leaving the expensive Bay Area — so, too, does the district’s revenues. Another factor reducing income is the end of the federal government’s Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief fund, designed to help with Covid-19 recovery. The fund brought the district some $53 million by 2023.
All of which has had an effect on West Contra Costa Unified’s budget.
One approach the district is examining to reduce its deficit is so-called “purpose-based budgeting.” The method, designed to more tightly control expenses, is to evaluate how well specific funds match the district’s priorities.
But that may not be enough.
“Look, I understand. No one joins a school board to lay off people,” Fine says. “But your revenue is going away, and they’re overstaffed compared to their enrollment.”
But Francisco Ortiz, president of United Teachers of Richmond, the union representing teachers, says there are already too many unfilled positions in West Contra Costa, and the district cannot afford to save more by further reducing staff.
“In secondary schools alone, we have 27 vacant FTEs — full-time equivalent (positions),” he says. “And in elementary, it’s 30.8 vacancies and 22 in special ed. The majority of these folks are teachers, some counselors, in elementary, but the majority are classroom teachers.” Most schools, he said, have to use substitutes on a daily basis.
At the board meeting this week, interim Superintendent Moses argued that increasing student attendance and enrollment is the only realistic way to reduce the district’s deficits without making further cuts. For every 1% increase in attendance, the district would generate $2.75 million in additional state funding. To that end, the district is launching what it calls its “Why We Show Up” campaign. “It’s really cut and dried,” Moses said. “We only get revenue based upon the number of children we have in a seat.”
At last week’s board meeting, many parents and teachers expressed concerns that there would be cuts in district offerings like its International Baccalaureate and bilingual and dual immersion programs.
But Moses tried to reassure the school community that no programs would be cut. A big chunk of reductions she is proposing would come from central office reductions, moving teachers out of classrooms with small numbers of students, and so on.
Part of the problem, union leader Ortiz says, is that the district has done a poor job of budgeting for how many teachers it will need each year. As for covering the district’s deficit — to pay for more teachers — he says the district should draw further on its reserve. “The reserve is for a rainy day, and right now it’s flooding. Our most vulnerable students are the ones receiving the blunt end of this. Cutting classroom teachers is not the answer.”
But FCMAT’s Fine argues that has to be part of the equation. “Lots of school boards say cut as far away from the classroom as you can, but when you have declining enrollment, you cut at the classroom level. But it’s really tough. It’s difficult as heck. It is horrendous.”
Fine argues that the issue of teacher vacancies is a nuanced one, and that there may be possible solutions. There may, for example, may be too many English teachers and not enough math teachers, or too many PE teachers and not enough special education teachers. He suggests that districts consider offering programs to re-credential teachers, even though this is not a short-term strategy.
“The solution doesn’t work for everyone, but why don’t we pay, say English teachers, to get credentialed to teach the sixth grade? Or invest in someone to get a special ed credential?”
Before his departure, outgoing superintendent Hurst outlined several of the district’s recent accomplishments in his State of Our District report — a reminder that putting all the attention on finances can obscure progress in other areas.
Among those is the return to 100% in-person learning in the district after the pandemic. Another is “improved staff recruitment, development and retention,” with teacher vacancies declining from 143 two years ago to 64 in the current school year.
Test scores have also improved somewhat in the district, according to results of the Smarter Balanced assessments students took last spring, though they still lag statewide averages, and, like almost all districts in the state, are not yet up to pre-pandemic levels.
The board recently hired David Hart as chief business manager, at least through the remainder of the school year. He’s the highly regarded former chief financial officer of the massive Los Angeles Unified, a district 20 times the size of West Contra Costa. Fine is hopeful Hart’s experience with a vastly more complex district will accelerate the district’s path to recovery.
“They are hiring a very skilled interim CBO,” he said. “I hope they listen to him.”
