Sausalito Marin City School District hires math specialist

A new consultant will be working with 85 middle school students at the Sausalito Marin City School District to help them boost their state test scores in math.

The district’s board of trustees voted unanimously Thursday in favor of a $30,000 contract for the consultant, Koy Hill. Hill, whose contract runs from Dec. 1 through May 31, will join English language specialists and other support staff already in place to aid students at the district’s K-8 school, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Academy in Sausalito.

“This contract is to provide additional support in mathematics, specifically for our middle school students, as well as embedded coaching support for our teachers,” said Elizabeth Henry, the district’s director of instruction.

“The contractor will be on site for three days a week, coming into math class to provide collaborative instructional planning support as well as co-teaching, small group intervention for students and one-on-one student support as needed,” Henry said.

Hill has more than 20 years of experience as a teacher, administrator, math specialist and math coach, Henry said.

“The contractor will be providing and building capacity and support for all students, but will particularly focus on students that are below and far below” their grade level standards in the state tests, Henry said.

The hiring follows the second installment of a districtwide “data summit” presentation on Thursday. It focused on the results of the 2023-24 CAASPP, short for California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress.

The test scores indicate that students from third to fifth grades showed continued improvement in both English and math. The trend reversed into a decline in both subjects at some point from sixth grade on to seventh and eighth grades. The dropoff in some instances approached 70% of students who did not meet or exceed standards for their grade levels.

“I’d like to see where it actually drops off,” trustee Alena Maunder said after the presentation. “I would like to hear more on what countermeasures we’re putting in place.”

David Finnane, principal for the K-8 school, said the middle school in particular has been in turmoil for some time, likely affecting academic performance and achievement. Declining enrollment and the loss of a history and an English teacher in October of last year were especially hard, he said.

“It’s important to name the distress that the middle school has been under for the last three years,” Finnane told trustees. “Their scores represent the challenges that they all have been facing.”

When the history and English teachers left last October, Byron Delcomb, then the middle school principal, stepped in to teach both classes while also handling his principal duties.

In the spring, trustees voted to move the middle school from Marin City to Sausalito to consolidate resources and provide more stability. Delcomb and his administrative assistant were laid off to minimize the overhead of running two campuses.

“A lot of the kids in seventh and eighth grade now need to be backfilled with the content they didn’t get before,” Finnane said. “We have to start re-norming or re-engineering what it looks like for them to be in seventh and eighth grade in a middle school.”

Part of that, he said, was for the students “to engage and be responsible,” he said.

Superintendent LaResha Huffman said that while the previous struggles “were not an excuse” for the low scores, there “may be a culture of not taking the tests seriously” among some middle school students.

“I also know we have to create resiliency and stamina in the students around test-taking,” she said.

Board president Lisa Bennett said the school has had good academic results before and could do it again.

“In the past, we have held our students to the highest of standards, and they have met those standards,” she said. “What is it we could do now to change the culture?”

According to the contract for Hill, of the 85 middle school students, 12 sixth-graders were either far below or below the average for their grade level in math. Fourteen seventh-graders were either far below or below average, and 15 eighth-graders were far below or below average.

Finnane said he will work with the teachers and consultants to help students build their test-taking “muscles.” The next set of CAASPP exams will be in the spring. The test is administered in grades three through eight and in 11th grade.

“We can’t wait until February or March,” Finanne said. “We have to start now. My sense is that we have the resources, we just need to be more focused on how to use them.”