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El Rancho Unified says it met most local indicators but trustees press for action on 9th-grade safety and outreach
Summary
District staff reported the California School Dashboard local indicators are largely "met," citing high credentialing rates and broad parent engagement while showing lower academic percentages in some assessments and safety perceptions among 9th graders; trustees pushed for middle-school outreach, disaggregated school-level data and improved communications.
Gisela Castanon, the district presenter on local indicators, told the board on June 29 that El Rancho Unified met most local indicators used in the California School Dashboard and LCAP process and summarized the district's metrics for 2025-26.
"For the 25-26 school year, 98% of our educators are fully credentialed and 99.6 are properly assigned," Castanon said, adding that 100% of students have access to curriculum-aligned instructional materials and that facilities assessments rated one site exemplary, eight in good repair and four in fair repair.
The presentation also included test-performance and other outcome metrics: roughly 39.99% of students met or exceeded the standard in English language arts, about 29.35% met or exceeded math standards, and about 23.31% met or exceeded science standards. Castanon reported English-learner outcomes and reclassification rates (about 17.4% reclassified as fluent). She described local measures of parent and staff engagement (about 84% of parents and 83.9% of staff reported feeling engaged) and highlighted school-climate data from the California Healthy Kids Survey showing varied perceptions of safety by grade: "72 percent of our 5th graders feel that their school is safe;" by contrast 51 percent of 9th graders reported feeling safe.
Board response and requested follow-ups Trustees said the results showed areas of strength but also actionable gaps. Trustee Saavedra said the low safety perception among freshmen is concerning and pushed the district for interventions timed to the middle-to-high school transition. "How can we find a way to act? Because I feel like, 9th grade is such a crucial year," Saavedra said.
Trustee Mejia asked for school-level disaggregation so the board can see whether some campuses lag others and for clearer communications about what bond dollars or LCAP investments have already produced. Trustees and staff discussed steps taken this year to increase middle-school outreach: middle-school nights, bringing high-school teachers to middle-school cohorts, dual-enrollment promotion at the 8th-grade level, and posting integrated-math credits to 8th-grade transcripts to encourage acceleration.
Implementation and communications District staff described efforts to expand parent nights, create targeted communications (including Spanish-language materials), and use the communications team to highlight programs. Trustees urged the district to explore paid social advertising and other ways to ensure the community sees successful programs and outcomes.
What comes next Board members said they want timelines and clearer materials on how the district will act on the dashboard findings; staff agreed to follow up with details and to make school-site data available for trustees to review.
