TUSD sets goal of 40% of students taking advanced learning classes

Tucson Unified School District aims to increase student participation in advanced learning experiences, such as the Gifted and Talented Education program, to at least 40% within five years.

About 35% of TUSD students were participating in advanced learning experiences as of the 40th day of the 2021-22 school year, which is being used as the baseline for this goal, according to data presented to the district governing board.

That means the district will have to increase student participation by 1% each year over the next five years to meet the goal, said Sky Saczko, director of TUSD’s advanced learning experiences, which the district calls ALE.

“We’re shooting for 1% per year, which is really pretty ambitious considering we’re looking at the whole district of over 40,000 students. That means we want to grow (participation numbers by) about 400 students a year,” Saczko told the board at its March 28 meeting.

The district’s advanced learning experiences include:

Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) and Advanced Via Individual Determination (AVID) opportunities in grades K-12;

Honors and accelerated courses for middle and high schools, as well as middle school courses for high school credit;

Advanced placement, dual credit, and International Baccalaureate courses for high school students.

AVID is a college and career readiness program, while International Baccalaureate is an international program with an emphasis on intercultural understanding, district materials say.

Saczko said her team is working with school administrators to identify potential areas of growth for specific sites.

Responding to a question from board member Natalie Luna Rose about efforts for racial equity in the GATE program, Saczko said the district is focusing on outreach to families.

For example, if an African American student is invited to participate in GATE, their family may be contacted by the GATE office, the student’s school and the district’s African American Student Services to ensure the student and their family have all the information about the program, she said.

Currently, Saczko said, there are more than 14,400 students enrolled in an advanced learning experience, with advanced placement (AP) and honors courses having the highest participation.

She said TUSD is in line to surpass the 400-student increase by the end of the 2022-23 school year and she expects those numbers will continue to rise from the lower participation in pandemic years.

“We’re going to have a bounce back from our COVID years because we had students that were just burned out from school and students that would have taken AP or dual credit or honors classes in the past, we kind of saw a dip,” she said.

Staffing issues

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Saczko said some factors TUSD needs to consider when working to increase participation in advanced learning experiences are teacher qualifications and availability, student demand, school capacity, curriculum planning and related costs.

“The teachers have to have specific certifications to be able to teach those classes, so we have to take that into consideration as we’re looking at growth,” she said.

Board President Ravi Shah said he had heard the teacher hiring process was particularly difficult for the two-way dual language program, which provides both Spanish and English instruction for students to become fully bilingual and biliterate.

Anna Manzano, the two-way dual language program coordinator, said the program was affected by the decline in teachers throughout the state following the pandemic. Since then, she said, the district has focused on its recruitment strategies and partnership with the University of Arizona to rebuild its capacity for dual language instruction.

Still, she said, TUSD has the largest dual language immersion program in the state, offering it in 11 schools. Next school year, that number will increase to 12 schools. Mesa and Chandler unified school districts are behind that, each with a total of three schools offering the program.

As of the 40th day of the 2021-22 school year, there were more than 2,200 or approximately 5% of TUSD students participating in the dual language immersion program. But rather than focusing on increasing participation in that program, district administrators said, the big push is to recruit highly qualified teachers for it.

Career and Technical Education

As for the separate Career and Technical Education (CTE) program, about 45% of high school students were participating in it on the 40th day of the 2021-22 school year.

TUSD staffers said they hope to bring that percentage up to 50% within five years — a goal that CTE Program Manager Chuck McCollum said is very manageable.

“We’re sitting at 47% right now,” McCollum said. Over the next four years, the district would need to see about a 1% increase each year, meaning 150 additional students taking part, to achieve its five-year goal.

He said the opportunity for students to explore career paths is highly effective in helping them find jobs when they graduate from high school and giving students a better idea of what to pursue as they transition to post-secondary education.

Board member Sadie Shaw asked how manageable it would be to make CTE courses part of students’ graduation requirements, a practice that the Peoria Unified School District already has in place.

TUSD Superintendent Gabriel Trujillo said he would support adding CTE to high school graduation requirements, but the obstacle would be funding. McCollum noted that all equipment and fees for CTE courses are now covered by the district to ensure the program is available to all students.

“That’s kind of always been a dream and hopefully the funding aspect comes through, and we can have those conversations with our high schools,” Trujillo said.