UPDATE: Three more Santa Ana schools have been added the list of the worst of the worst schools in California (details below) . . .
Valley High, Century High and Willard Intermediate schools, which are all within the Santa Ana Unified School District, are among the worst schools in California, according to the state Department of Education.
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UPDATE: Santa Ana High School, Saddleback High School and Sierra Intermediate School have been added to the list, reports the Orange County Register.
The three six SAUSD schools are among 188
public schools statewide that rank among the lowest 5 percent in the state, particularly when it came to math and English proficiency over the past three years and overall academic performance over the past five years.
On the bright side, each “persistently low-performing” campus is now eligible to apply for between $50,000 and $2
million in School Improvement Grants that are part of the federal government's American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act.
However, there is a catch: those funds would have to be used to implement drastic reforms by the beginning of the 2010-2011 school year.
These include: replace the principal, rehire no more than 50 percent of the staff and change the instructional program; close and reopen as a charter school; close and reassign students to other higher-achieving schools in the district; or replace the principal, increase instructional time and make other changes.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.