Because of its deep budget crisis, the Santa Rosa City Schools District is restricting students from transferring outside the district, which is a change in policy and practice around interdistrict transfers. This decision will impact the ability of Santa Rosa parents to choose a school that best fits their child’s needs. It will also impact the West County schools that have welcomed students from outside their district, in part to bolster their own enrollment. The change is catching parents unawares, as it is not widely publicized, but some parents are already fighting to place their children in the school of their choice.

One parent not taking ‘no’ for an answer

Angie Hendrix lives in Santa Rosa off Piner Road. She has three sons, one of whom is an eighth grader at Willowside. Angie expected that he would go to Analy High School next year. “I intentionally applied to go to Oak Grove eight years ago, knowing that’s how it’s always been; if you’re in West County, you go to Analy.” Her son would be following the same path as her elder son, who is now 26. “Analy was where I wanted my kids to go,” she said. ”We are part of the community in West County, and we have family out there. We just can’t afford to live out there.” Her husband went to Analy and her in-laws live in Sebastopol.

The high school of residence for the Hendrix family is Piner High School. “We pay our taxes for that school, and I’ve said yes to every bond measure. I support my local school, but I just could never picture my kid going there.”

In October 2025, she started the process to apply for an interdistrict transfer for her 8th grade son. She went to the SRCS district office in person and handed in the form. She thought the transfer form would be signed right away, as it was in the past. She even recognized Yolanda Silva, the same person who had signed the transfer form in a previous year. Angie was totally surprised when Ms. Silva said that she could not sign the transfer form.

“What do you mean you can’t sign it? You’ve signed my paper before. What’s different today?” asked Angie.

Yolanda explained that there was a hold on interdistrict transfers.

Angie asked why.

Yolanda said she would get Stacy. “When Stacy came out, she didn’t want to tell me about this new policy. I asked ‘What policy? Since when is this new policy?’ You need to give me a reason why you’re not signing it. They didn’t want to tell me and I thought, this is weird.”

Stacy told her that on Tuesday, the day prior, there was a board meeting. “Santa Rosa’s decided that we’re going to hold on releasing transfers; we’re only gonna allow 3% of students to transfer. We will be holding these until January.”

“I am mad. I leave,” said Angie. On her way out, she called her friend who told her that she was on the way to district office to get the transfer papers signed for her son, also a student at Willowside. Angie waited for her friend and together they went into the district office. They were told the same story – the district won’t sign any transfers.

“I’m very pushy,” said Angie. “I don’t take no for an answer very easily. Especially when I feel like you’re messing with my kid.”

Later she called Analy and talked to someone in the district office. “Do you know that Santa Rosa is not allowing kids to transfer to your school?” Apparently, Analy didn’t know about the change. She called Windsor. They didn’t know about it either.

Interdistricts transfers have been common, and easy in West County

For many years, parents from Santa Rosa City Schools as well as other districts have been able to transfer to West County school districts without any obstacles. Years ago, some of the K-8 districts such as Twin Hills, Gravenstein and Oak Grove became a type of charter school, known as a dependent charter, that does not require incoming students outside the district to have an interdistrict transfer. The expectation of parents like Angie Hendrix was that their children would move through K-8 schools in Sebastopol and West County and then move on to Analy. Now parents are being told by Santa Rosa City Schools that they have no choice; their student must attend their school of residence.

The leadership of the Santa Rosa City Schools has made a number of poor decisions in recent years, leading to a large budget deficit. When Santa Rosa moved middle schools on to high school campuses last Spring, they assumed that parents would go along with the decision. Some refused to go along. Parents, looking for options, explored private schools, charter schools and homeschooling, which includes online schooling. One of those options was to transfer their student out of their home district to a public school in a different district.

At a public meeting held in the fall by the Santa Rosa Teachers Association (SRTA), a union official reported that over 500 families left the district. Others have said that this number is low. That loss of revenue from those students leaving the district means that the projected deficit for SRCS grew worse.

Not everyone in the education system likes to see parents exploring their options. Roxanne McNally, herself a teacher, and board president for 2025 for Santa Rosa City Schools, said this in her message to district in December:

For the sake of students now and students in the future, keep your child enrolled in this district, remain in your job in this district, stay with us. We cannot give in to the idea that school choice, charter schools and private schools, will save us, because they will not. They will leave our marginalized students and families behind. Charter and private schools are not held to the same laws, the same standards of equity, as public schools. Free and public education is the basis of a free and democratic society.

Where students go

All districts lose students and they also gain some, too. In a board presentation in December, Analy principal Chuck Wade had two slides showing the percentage of students leaving the district for the current school year. Forty percent of the students who leave the district go to Windsor High School and almost 22% go to Tech High.

A second slide ranked the reasons for leaving, identifying specialized programs that other schools are not offered in their own district school.

In the district, which has about 1,500 students with 1,400 at Analy, one-third of the students come from Sebastopol; one-third come from West County; and another third are transfers from outside the district. This has been both an opportunity and a challenge. Transfer students have created an opportunity to mitigate the overall trend of declining enrollment in West County and Sebastopol. It’s also been a challenge to handle a more diverse student body, something that administrators have recognized as a benefit to the school. (The 9th grade teams proposal presented at that meeting was largely designed to help integrate 9th grade students from different backgrounds and schools into Analy.)

The numbers of transfer students coming to Analy from SRCS has steady increased over the last three years.

New freshman transferring from SRCS

25-26: 118
24-25: 114
23-24: 96

At the most recent board meeting, the presentation of a demographic study showed a spatial or geographic analysis of where WSCUHSD students come from. The cluster of black dots west of the district (in purple) is Santa Rosa and 396 from there are coming to Analy.

The demographic study showed that projected enrollment in the district would remain somewhat steady in future years. However, removing the 300-400 students from SRCS would bring enrollment down near 1,000 in a few years.

To be clear, Analy is not selective about which students from Santa Rosa it accepts; it is not cherry-picking high achievers, for instance. For some transfer students, coming to Analy is an opportunity to get a better education but also build new friendships. The influx of students from Santa Rosa to Sebastopol has turned Analy into a multicultural campus and brought greater diversity to West County.

Working the system

One of the things that bothered Angie Hendrix is that she could find nothing in writing about the new interdistrict transfer policy. The district’s web page did not say anything about it at the time. She watched the video recording for November 12th board meeting where she heard it was discussed. “It was a four-and-a-half hour meeting,” she said. “When they brought up the topic of student transfers, I kid you not, it was less than 30 seconds of conversation. They said “transfers are going to be processed as usual.” (A request to the district transfer office for a written policy didn’t not get a reply. There’s a link on the Interdistrict Transfer page to the board policy, but it returned a 404 error.)

She began to work the system. She learned that she could identify a specialized program that was not offered in the home district as a way to get the transfer approved. She asked Yolanda to tell her “exactly what specialized program means to you and what documents I need to provide, indicating this reason for me to send my child to the school.” Angie thought that Yolanda “sympathized with the people coming in because she recognizes a lot of them.” She didn’t like being the bad guy. She gave Angie some guidance about looking for programs and then comparing it to schools withing the district.

Angie talked to Superintendent Chris Meredith and asked him about specialized programs that are unique to Analy. “We went to the open house at Analy with my son. We looked at specific programs and we liked two of them.” One was AP Capstone. She got a letter from Analy describing the AP Capstone program, and she dropped off the letter to SRCS district office. A few weeks later she got an email saying that the transfer was denied. “The note said that AP Capstone was available in other Santa Rosa schools,” she said. “It didn’t tell me what school or provide any information.” Her emails to the district office were not responded to. “I then proceeded to call every single school and asked ‘Do you have AP Capstone?’ No. Piner, Montgomery, Elsie Allen, Maria Carillo, all of ‘em. I called all of them. The only school that ended up calling me back with a ‘yes’ was Maria Carillo. The person said it’s not the same exact program, but it is very similar.”

Even if Maria Carrilo was an option, the word was that intra district transfers (to other schools in SRCS) were also limited. However, Maria Carillo wasn’t a realistic option because it was 30 minutes away in the opposite direction, and she had to drive her young son to Oak Grove.

The other program that Angie and her son identified was called Globally Proficient Scholars (GPS). She got a letter from Analy describing the GPS program and dropped it off at the district office.

Angie waited three weeks for a reply, which didn’t come until early January from Yolanda. The GPS program wasn’t available in any of the Santa Rosa schools, and they could not deny the transfer. “Yolanda said to me: ‘You were very strategic; you did not let go of this fight. you were determined to get a yes.’”

Angie recognized that “there are parents that don’t have the bandwidth to put in the fight.” Indeed, a contested process for interdistrict transfers does impact families without the time and resources to engage in this process.

From the start, Angie knew that she not going to accept the decision of SRCS and remain in the district. “My son is my job,” she said. “My kids are what I do every day. If I had to find a charter high school and take them to Rohnert Park, that’s exactly what I would’ve done. There would be no way in hell that they’re gonna tell me that he has to go to a Santa Rosa school if I choose not to send him there. He’s my child.” Parents will find a way.

Appealing transfer decisions

Meredith and West Sonoma County Union High School district administrators have helped a number of parents navigate the this process. Parents can appeal a denial of an interdistrict transfer to the Sonoma County Office of Education. Two weeks ago, all three appeals for Analy were successful. The week following one more family won their appeal.

Certainly, WSCHUD has their own self-interest in growing enrollment at the expense of Santa Rosa City Schools. Yet Analy is considered one of the best schools in the county and will attract families that want that kind of school. Not all schools are the same, as evidenced by the CAASPP test scores, discussed in Part 2. But there is more to know about a school than looking at test scores and deciding whether it is a good fit for your child. Some families transfer because of sports or art programs. Tech High in Cotati is one of the best schools in the county, one that Angie would have considered. Half of its students come from outside the district.

As one administrators said, “Do you really want to punish schools that do a better job? Do you want to hold students back from schools that have more innovative programs and approaches?” One might add, do you want to force parents to send their children to schools with a record of a poor achievement and inadequate leadership?

At a board meeting for Santa Rosa City Schools this week that presented the drastic cuts within the district for next year’s budget, Kathryn Howell, President of the Santa Rosa Teachers Association asked the board:

What in the world is going to attract families to Santa Rosa City Schools? Can we actually sustain a school district by forcing the families to stay? With declining enrollment constantly threatening this house of cards, what is the plan to fight the loss of families and students? Is there one?

For transparency's sake, the author, Dale Dougherty, a co-owner of this news site, is a donor and volunteer at the Academy of Innovative Arts in Forestville, which includes interdistrict and intradistrict transfer students.

In Part 1 of SoCo Schools, we looked at Statewide and Countywide results from standardized testing, but these averages don’t tell us how students at any particular school are doing. In Part 2 of this report, we will examine Sonoma County high schools and their test results. To be honest, this article is just a plain look at the data itself without much exploration of what the results mean. In Part 3, we will begin to look more in-depth at three high schools.

The State’s standardized tests for ELA (English Language Arts) and Math are administered for high school students near the end of the 11th grade. CAASPP or Smarter Balanced standardized tests were explained in Part 1.

The CAASPP results for an individual school are shown in the graphic below:

The number in the center combines the percentages for blue and green segments on the circle — 51.79% for ELA and 12.40% for Math for this school. What should also draw your attention are the percentages for orange and yellow — those who did not meet the standard. When they are combined and rounded for this school, we get 48% in ELA and 88% in Math not meeting the requirements. We’ll be using “% met / % not met” as a simplified view of these results, such as 52/48 for ELA and 12/88 in this example. In addition, the large, orange segment is the most concerning, as it represents students with “minimal knowledge and skills” in that area. For Math at this particular school, two-thirds of the students are at this lowest level.

We will also be using the California School Dashboard, which provides a graphic representation of the scores but doesn’t provide the actual met/not met percentages. Here’s a portion of the dashboard representing the same school’s scores as shown above — yellow for ELA and red for Math.

The dashboard does indicate whether the scores were up or down compared to the previous year. It also tells indicate how different student groups are doing. There is more information on the school such as its graduation rate and enrollment.

Both the CAASPP site and the California School Dashboard are useful to learn about a school or schools within a district. It’s hard, however, to compare test scores of schools across the county using these tools and that’s what the information in this report allows you to do.

Comprehensive High Schools

There are 13 comprehensive high schools in Sonoma County. These are schools that take everyone regardless of ability or background, which create a variety of challenges. They typically have an academic program and AP classes that prepare students for college along with Career & Technical education programs that prepare students for the world of work. They usually have robust athletic, music and art programs.

These schools are the largest by enrollment in the K-12 system. Cloverdale High and Healdsburg High are the smallest with 500 students or less. The largest are Rancho Cotate High and Windsor High with over 1,700 students each.

Here is a listing of the schools ranked by the size of enrollment. Each high school listing states the percentage of students who are Socioeconomically Disadvantaged (defined here) as well as the percentage of students graduating, both rounded. (These three pieces of information come from the School Dashboard.)

With the exception of Elsie Allen High School, all of these high schools graduate over 90 per cent of their students, the one measurement that the State tracks closely. Schools with a higher percentage of students who are classified as Socioeconomically Disadvantaged generally have lower scores on standardized tests but we will dig more deeply into that correlation in a future installment.

Schools not on the list:

• Geyserville New Tech Academy has around 100 students in grades 6-12 but too few students take the 11th grade test to report on the results.

• The listing does not include continuation schools that consist of 11th and 12th graders.

• These are public high schools not private schools, which do not have to take these tests.

• We will look at charters and other public options separately below.

Comprehensive High School Test Scores

Here are the comprehensive high schools ranked by ELA scores followed by Math scores. The number in blue represents the percentage of students who met the requirements and the number in orange represents the percentage of students who did not. The two charts allow us to compare relative performance among the high schools.

Healdsburg High is at the top of the ELA results; it’s a school that is one-half to one-third the size of the larger comprehensive high schools. Analy is second. Casa Grande and Maria Carrillo are separated by only a point or two from the others at the top with Windsor to follow. Santa Rosa City schools (Santa Rosa High, Montgomery, Piner and Elsie Allen) occupy 4 of the bottom five slots.

For Math, we see a lot more orange than blue. Santa Rosa City Schools District have Maria Carrillo High with the highest score, but also Elsie Allen with the lowest score. Three other high schools in the SRCS district (Santa Rosa High, Montgomery and Piner) are in the bottom half, joined by Elsie Allen. The two Petaluma schools (Petaluma and Casa Grande) are separated by only a point.

Public Charters and Other Options

This group of high schools are as different from each another as they are from comprehensive public high schools. Several are independent public charters, including Credo, Pathways, and Northwest Prep Charter. Technology High in Rohnert Park is like a charter but it’s technically a magnet school. Roseland Prep operates as a dependent charter within the Roseland District but its size makes it look like a comprehensive high school.

In addition, homeschooling and/or online schools are a big part of Sonoma County’s educational landscape. Some of the Charters aim at supporting students who are homeschooled and many work with students in all K-12 grades. Pathways in Rohnert Park and Orchard View provide independent study and some on-site instruction and guidance. California Virtual Academy is an online school, supposedly a non-profit but owned by Stride, Inc, formerly K12.com. California Pacific Charter is also a non-profit organization with three schools in California. Pivot Charter is part of a chain of schools that combine some on-site counseling with online courses.

The State doesn’t report on the number of homeschoolers, if it even keeps track, but some think that 8.5% of students in California are homeschooled.

Here are nine charter high schools, listed by enrollment. Some districts hold the charter for schools that operate outside their district, such as Pathways Charter in Rohnert Park, which is under the Harmony Area School District in Occidental, and Pivot Charter in Santa Rosa, which is under Oak Grove School District in Graton.

Note that with the exception of Roseland, these schools have a much smaller student body, another reason some students and families are attracted to them.

Here are the schools ranked by ELA and Math percentages.

Technology High has the highest scores in ELA and Math in the county, not just among charters and online schools. The two low performing schools in Math are Pivot and Pathways. Some charters do well on standardized tests and others do not but one could say that charters generally have higher scores than the larger high schools.

The one thing to keep in mind about charters and online schools is that their student body is a product of choice. Students and their families make a choice to attend these schools and these schools may use a lottery to determine who is accepted.

Parents often choose these schools for a variety of reasons, including its reputation, interest in a specialized program or dissatisfaction with a current school. Charters, online schools and homeschooling have introduced a broader set of options for parents to choose from while also contributing to declining enrollment in traditional schools.

Parents might also choose a public high school outside the district where they live for the same reason that others choose charter schools or private schools. One district’s loss is another district’s gain. We’ll be looking at inter district transfers in a future installment.

50/50

The CAASPP scores might be considered a report card for the State’s public education system and its schools. The State sets the standards, the rules and the requirements; controls most of the funding, collects and distributes it; develops the testing regimen and reports on the quality of the products of its system. The scores say less about the students who are being tested and more about the system itself and its effectiveness.

One might assume that 50/50 — where 50% of the students at a school are meeting the standard and 50% are below the standard — would be a minimum level for schools in Sonoma County. The Statewide and Countywide averages, shown in Part 1, were below 50/50. Overall, there are more students are performing at a low level rather than a high level.

In Sonoma County high schools, nine out of thirteen comprehensive high schools and six out of nine charter high schools in Sonoma County are at or above 50/50 for ELA but there are no comprehensive high schools at 50/50 or above in Math. Three out of nine charter high schools are above the 50/50 threshold in Math. The low bar of 50/50 is high for a lot of public high schools in Sonoma County.

More specifically, for the 4400 juniors that were tested in spring of 2025, more than half of those students were not meeting basic requirements and yet 90% on average will graduate in the spring of 2026. No matter what value you place on standardized testing, the combination of low test scores and high graduation rates seems hard to reconcile, especially as these results are related to outcomes for the young people growing up in our community.

While the mission statements for public schools contain language such as: “We empower all students to thrive academically,” solving for “all” is really hard, maybe unrealistic, maybe impossible. These standardized test scores show that the education system is unable to deliver on that promise and perhaps it’s time to face reality.

In Part 3, we’ll look more deeply into a set of three different high schools in Sonoma County. After publishing Part 1, I’ve heard from people who have worked in the system and wanted to share their experiences. Email me if you’d like to share your experience as a parent, teacher or administrator: dale.dougherty@gmail.com.

This is part one of a multi-part series examining the data on local public schools—and what it tells us about the quality of public schools in our county and how well students are learning. These articles will be available under the “SoCo Schools” section on the Sebastopol Times website.

If a friend asked you, “How are the public schools in Sonoma County?” what would you say? For many families, this question shapes where they choose to live, how they plan for their children’s education, and how they feel about their community as a whole.

Parents today face a very different landscape than even 10 years ago. Sonoma County now offers traditional public schools, magnets, charters, dual-language programs, independent study, and private options—a mix that can feel overwhelming without clear information.

This report aims to give parents a straightforward look at how students in public schools are doing academically, using the State’s own scorecard: CAASPP “Smarter Balanced” standardized tests. Testing doesn’t tell the whole story—but it reveals important trends that families should understand.

What Test Scores Can—and Cannot—Tell You

At a Starbucks in West Santa Rosa, I met with Gabe Albavera, the former principal of Elsie Allen High School and now principal at Roseland University Prep, a charter school. We talked through the county’s test score rankings.

As we talked, a teenager walked up, tapped him gently on the shoulder, and nodded, saying “hey” without actually saying it in words. Mr. Albavera responded, smiling back at the young man and asking him how he was doing. “Good,” said the young man, hanging for a minute until his drink was ready at the counter.

“He’s one of my students,” Mr. Albavera said, proudly. The trust and warmth between them were obvious. Mr. Albavera said that working with kids was why he went into education. He said that this kind of relationship—an adult who knows your child, listens, and intervenes when needed—is very important. And it isn’t measured on any test.

Still, basic academic skills matter—reading, writing, and math.

For more than 20 years, California has relied on standardized tests to measure how well students are learning. These tests are called Smarter Balanced Summative Assessments and go by the acronym CAASPP (pronounced CASP). The State of California Department of Education has spent hundreds of millions of dollars with Educational Testing Service (ETS) on testing students each year.

• Students take the “Smarter Balanced” test each spring in grades 3–8 and 11.

• Scores fall into four categories:

  • Exceeded Standard

  • Met Standard

  • Nearly Met

  • Not Met

The top two can be combined into one group, Met, while the bottom two can be grouped into “Not Met.”

The scores for public schools in Sonoma County show most students not meeting the basic requirements in English Language Arts (ELA) and Math. That’s also true across the state. Education officials say that the scores are marginally better than the previous year, but the scores are actually pretty low. They are not only low; they are stagnant and not changing very much.

California Statewide CAASPP Results (2025)

There are 5.8 million students in California public schools at all levels from TK through 12th grade. Here are the statewide results for all grades and all schools for English Language Arts (ELA) and Math.

Look at the bottom half of the segmented circle in the graphic, not just the top half. If 49% of the students are meeting the standard in English, there are 51% of students who are not. In Math, it’s 37/63. We’ll use this Met/Not Met breakdown for individual schools as a shorthand using rounded numbers. Here are two takeaways:

• Half of all California students are not reading or writing at grade level.

• Nearly two-thirds are behind in math.

In the press release from the Department of Education announcing the results, the State’s educational leaders say that the test results:

“…show continued progress made by K–12 students in California, including further movement to close equity gaps for socioeconomically disadvantaged students, Black/African American students, and Hispanic/Latino students.”

It added that student scores “showed modest increases at a higher rate than the year prior, suggesting growing momentum.”

Momentum is hard to see in this chart (from EdSource) of the ELA scores over ten years.

The ten-year view clearly shows the same pattern before and after Covid. Here are the statewide results for Math over ten years.

Not much has changed for ten years or longer. These stagnant levels are the status quo. Yet the state education administration thinks they are making “good progress” on equity and “closing gaps.” They are not.

One measure that State officials openly applaud instead of test scores is the graduation rate, which is up to 87.5% on average. If you want one takeaway from this series, it’s this: test scores show more students are not meeting the State’s basic standards, yet the graduation rate is up. I heard the phrase “get a ‘D’ and you get a degree.” Graduation is a certificate of completion, not achievement. Add in grade inflation and many say that GPA can no longer be trusted as an indicator of student performance.

Also, students who are meeting or exceeding standards, many of them college-bound, may not be doing as well as it seems. A November 2025 report from UC San Diego’s Faculty Senate points out the academic deficiencies in first-year students:

Over the past five years, UC San Diego has experienced a steep decline in the academic preparation of its entering first-year students—particularly in mathematics, but also in writing and language skills. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of students whose math skills fall below high school level increased nearly thirtyfold; moreover, 70% of those students fall below middle school levels, reaching roughly one in twelve members of the entering cohort.

In elementary grades, many students are promoted from the elementary school without having achieved grade level proficiency in English and Math, and then they are promoted in eighth grade with a larger deficit. These students enter high school, burdened with this extra baggage.

• How are so many students graduating without meeting academic standards?

• Does GPA still mean what parents think it means?

• What are the outcomes for students who graduate without these skills?

Sonoma County: How Do Local Students Perform?

Sonoma County has 64,798 public school students. When we look at their test results, the picture is concerning.

Sonoma County performs below the statewide average in both subjects.

This might surprise many parents who assume that Sonoma County—wealthy, well-resourced, and known for community involvement—would outperform the state. It does not. Look at how large the orange segment is — 31% of the students are not close to meeting the English requirements and 41% of the students are not close to meeting the Math requirement. These are students who, according to the State, show “minimal grade-level knowledge and skills.”

An old business school maxim, attributed to Peter Drucker, is “what gets measured gets improved” but that hasn’t proven true in California.

Talking to educators, many cite problems with what gets measured. The test for 11th graders in the spring covers material from three years of math courses. A principal told me that his high school only requires two years of math and most students take those courses in their first two years, so they are being tested on a subject they haven’t taken for a year. At other schools, students who struggle with math take remedial math, and none of them will cover all the material in school that’s on the test. So, there’s a mismatch between what students are taught and what they are tested on.

I also heard from teachers that students are not motivated to take the standardized tests. Students don’t “get” anything by taking the test, so why try? The results don’t count against their grade or graduation. Some schools make the effort to provide rewards for students to try harder and improve the school’s results. Nonetheless, that the State does not consider student motivation as a factor tells you a lot about the education system.

California’s Democrat politicians seem satisfied with the status quo. “We’re working to provide students with the resources they need to succeed. And California’s increasing test scores show our efforts are paying off,” said Governor Gavin Newsom upon the release of the CAASPP scores.

Standardized testing goes back to No Child Left Behind, the federal program for “accountability” that started under President George W. Bush and continued through President Obama and lives on in one form or another to this day, even as President Trump works to dismantle the Federal Department of Education. The promise was that standardized testing would identify poor performing schools and then those schools could be fixed or shut down. It would also provide justification for bipartisan education funding if the tests showed that money spent on education was achieving its intended results. The promise of accountability seems forgotten today but schools, including teachers and students, must follow this annual ritual of standardized testing.

Mr. Albavera said that when test scores came out at Elsie Allen High School at the beginning of the new school year, the teachers and staff felt discouraged. The low academic performance of the school hurt morale of the faculty and students. He knew that test scores didn’t tell the whole story but what is the story? He remained focused on the positive relationships he forged with his students, based in trust and mutual respect. He saw this as an essential support for student success, no matter how hard it was to measure.

In the next article in this series, we will look at the data for high schools in Sonoma County.

Sources

The sources listed below can be used to research any school or district and learn more about the academic performance of students. However, it’s harder to compare one school against another or on a countywide level. That’s the goal of this report.

• CAASPP (standardized tests in ELA and Math and Science). In early October, the standardized test scores for the state were released HERE. Students were tested in the spring of 2025 in grades 3-8 and 11th grade.

• EdSource publishes a useful view of the same CAASPP results HERE.

• The State School Dashboard was released HERE in November. Its color-coded graphics look like those that rate fire danger.

• DataQuest provides detailed reports on schools such as enrollment by school.

If you have experience working in Sonoma County Schools or ideas on how to improve them, please write me - dale.dougherty@gmail.com.