Board renews Edmentum agreement; trustees press for oversight on credit recovery and academic integrity

The Tehachapi Unified School District board approved a renewal with Edmentum for virtual course delivery and credit recovery on May 12 after a presentation on program offerings and safeguards.

Dr. Porter outlined the program's features, saying Edmentum provides standards-based content, teacher-graded activities and virtual teachers for courses where district staff lack subject-area credentials. She reported the program includes dozens of courses at secondary levels; slides and the transcript cited 34 courses at the district's secondary sites with 482 enrollments and a credit-recovery component described as 40 courses with 640 enrollments (figures presented in the meeting slides and read aloud during discussion).

Trustees raised concerns about oversight, course alignment with local industry needs (raised earlier in connection with dual enrollment/CTE), and the risk of academic dishonesty and AI-assisted cheating. Dr. Porter said Edmentum offers assessment access controls, item randomization, mastery sequencing, plagiarism-detection add-ons and monitoring features that can be enabled to mitigate cheating; she noted some add-on protections would require additional vendor fees. The district agreed to keep monitoring program use and to report back on enrollments and integrity safeguards.

Board members said the scale of credit-recovery enrollments merits regular reporting so trustees can evaluate academic outcomes, the impact on graduation rates and whether additional local course development or credentialing is warranted to reduce reliance on virtual platforms.