Even After Costly Rebuild, Logan Memorial’s Suspension Issues Persist

A whole lot has changed at the site of what used to be San Diego Unified’s most avoided school – Memorial Prep in Logan Heights. It was the oldest middle school in the district and for years was beset by performance issues and perceptions it was unsafe. Those reputational blemishes manifested as persistently low enrollment.  

For years, administrators struggled to come up with a fix, converting Memorial into a charter and then back again. But none of that seemed to draw parents back to the school. Then, in 2015, the district announced the school would be done away with altogether and replaced with a shiny new school. Over the years, the plans ballooned into a massive “cradle to career” campus set to serve students from preschool through high school. The rebuild, which ultimately cost nearly $200 million, became the district’s most expensive construction project. 

When the school opened its doors to its first class of ninth graders in 2022, San Diego Unified leaders like Trustee Richard Barrera said the community had one of the highest concentrations of students anywhere in the district. Still, he said, the district had long underinvested in the community, and students had paid the price. This new school was a monument to the district’s renewed commitment to the community. 

Years after its opening: Logan Memorial is struggling with some of the same issues that plagued its predecessor. The school’s low test scores come with the requisite asterisk about educational outcomes being inextricably linked with socioeconomic factors like income. The community Logan Memorial serves is almost exclusively low income.  

Logan Memorial, however, also has a suspension problem.  

Memorial Prep, the middle school that once sat on the site of the sprawling complex, long had one of the highest suspension rates in the district. It reached a startling high of 25 percent in the 2012-13 school year, but gradually decreased over the years. By the 2018-19 school year, it was about 14 percent. That was an improvement, but it was still well over three times the district’s average.  

In the years since, San Diego Unified has had some success driving down suspension rates, even as familiar racial disparities remain. That’s been part of a broader push to reduce suspensions statewide. Research has shown suspensions can make it more likely kids get arrested in the future, a phenomenon often dubbed the school-to-prison pipeline. Suspensions also negatively affect student performance. 

But even with the opening of the new campus, Logan Memorial’s overall suspension rate in the 2022-23 school year, which sat at about 14 percent, is nearly identical to Memorial Prep’s 2018-19 rate. That’s not the most accurate comparison, though, since Logan Memorial now serves many more grades than its predecessor. When you narrow down the comparison to just seventh and eighth, which is how California breaks out suspension rates, Logan Memorial actually has a four-percentage point higher suspension rate than Memorial Prep did for the same age group in the 2018-19 school year.  

District officials did not return requests for comment.  

Opening a new school isn’t easy: As Lincoln High School’s rebuild has shown, shiny new buildings don’t immediately solve all lingering issues. Though some parents seem to be willing to give Logan Memorial a chance, according to district data, only 28 percent of grade-appropriate neighborhood residents attended the school last year. That’s the lowest percentage of neighborhood high schoolers attending of any San Diego Unified school.

That may simply be a function of how new the school is, and the fact that students matriculating through middle school are still given the option of attending the high schools that used to be their neighborhood schools. There’s confidence on the part of people like Barrera that in the coming years, Logan Memorial will reach full enrollment. 

But, as Barrera told me last year, the district, and Logan Memorial, can’t coast on the new buildings alone. They’ve got to show parents that something’s changed on the academic side as well. 

“If we don’t deliver on the programmatic side then … word will get out in the community as well … and, I think we’ll go back to a situation where people say, ‘well, it’s a beautiful set of buildings, but we don’t think our kids are getting what they need there,’” Barrera said.    

California’s School Dashboard Finally Active Again 

After a yearslong absence, California rebooted its School Dashboard tool. The dashboard, which assigns color-coded ratings to districts and schools on a variety of metrics, is designed to be schools’ primary accountability tool. Kristen Taketa at The San Diego Union-Tribune wrote a nice overview of what the ratings mean and how San Diego districts are performing. It is, however, always important to remember that while cold, hard data can help give stakeholders an idea of how schools are performing, ratings can only account for so much.  

Head here if you’re curious how your child’s school or district is performing.