Reacting to the school board’s dismay with plans to create a new, separate school for students who had failed multiple classes in the eighth grade, San Diego Unified is now planning to provide extra services to the students at programs scattered among five different schools. The services include extra counseling, intensive lessons in English and math, and more supervision from an administrator specifically tasked with monitoring the struggling students.
Kids from other middle schools could get transportation to the selected schools that house the program, selected because they had relatively high numbers of failed students. The schools were tentatively named as Bell, Roosevelt, Clark, Mann and Wilson middle schools.
The school district also scrapped plans to pay an outside vendor nearly $700,000 to provide computers, software, furniture and other materials for the program. The expenditure and the potential stigma of housing the struggling students in their own school had aggravated school board members who discussed the original plan earlier this week.