TUSD is considering tapping into its desegregation money to cover the $3.6 million needed to cover the cost of retaining its learning recovery interventionists, who currently are paid through federal funds instituted during the pandemic.
With the federal COVID-19 funding set to end in September, the Tucson Unified School District has been searching for ways to keep staffers tasked with helping students who’ve fallen behind in subjects like reading.
TUSD recently regained more control over desegregation money and its administration says reallocating desegregation money would be a viable solution to keep its interventionists.
The district has gone to bat with a few different proposals, arguably the least popular being dismantling the department of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. That governing board meeting drew a crowd of hundreds, most in ardent support of keeping the department intact.
Wednesday, the district came back from the drawing board with a plan to re-allocate desegregation funds. Those departments that would lose the most funding under the plan revealed during a meeting Wednesday night are: transportation, $1.5 million; technology services, $800,000; and human resources, $462,000.
But are the pandemic relief-funded positions in question worth saving? The district presented an emphatic “yes,” contending a TUSD study shows marked improvement in performance for low-proficiency students with help from learning recovery professionals.
Still, the validity of TUSD’s study was called into question. District officials have called the study “exploratory.”
Sylvia Campoy took to the podium twice. Campoy, a former TUSD governing board member and teacher, is the Mendoza Plaintiffs' Representative in the district’s years-long desegregation case.
“An exploratory study is not scientific. It is not seeped in statistics. It is not research based,” she said at the forum. “It’s the beginning of those processes. And yet that exploratory study is being used to move all the money out.”
Former TUSD teacher Lillian Fox questioned the need for a study at all. The information has been there for years, she said.
“We need interventionists, but there’s a lot more (to it) than that,” Fox said. “It is astonishing to me that TUSD is doing a study to figure out why our kids can’t read. As a high school teacher I taught a lot of kids who couldn’t read. It was a crime.”
Tucson Unified School District Superintendent Gabriel Trujillo said Wednesday night that the plan presented would be on the governing board’s agenda as a discussion item at its next meeting, March 26.
