Amid pandemic, Sonoma County’s high school graduation rate increased, but disparities also widened

Racial and socioeconomic disparities reflected in graduation rates among Sonoma County high school students widened during the pandemic, reversing several years of gains that educators and advocates touted as key to improving opportunities for all students.

The disparities have tempered enthusiasm among Sonoma County education officials over a countywide graduation rate that has climbed across the past five years, reaching 83.9% in 2021. The statewide rate, which fell in the last two years, was 83.6%.

But three groups of students — those from lower income households, students of color and students with disabilities — graduated at lower rates in 2021 than their classmates as a whole across most local high schools, state data shows.

The troubling trend includes the six main public high schools in Santa Rosa, the county’s largest district, with more than 10,000 secondary students, more than half of whom are Latino and nearly half of whom are considered socioeconomically disadvantaged.

Countywide, the racial gap grew between the more than 2,300 white students, 87.7% of whom graduated in 2021, and Latino students. Their graduation rate was 80.5%, according to data from the state Department of Education.

The pronounced impact of the pandemic on students from lower income and minority households is already well known in school circles. They have experienced greater learning loss, higher rates of COVID in their households and report feeling less connected to their schools, according to student surveys, school officials and public health data.

The latest snapshot of graduation rates — one of several measures of student achievement and well-being outcomes provides another picture of the divergent academic outcomes, educators say.

“A high school diploma is the first step towards a positive financial future,” said Gabriel Albavera, principal of Elsie Allen High School in Santa Rosa. “For our students who choose to continue their education at a college or university or even a vocational school, they would be there based on the foundation that they have built while at Elsie Allen High School. This is the main reason why it is imperative to close the achievement gap.”

The new picture of disparities is more than just a data set. It reflects educational and economic opportunities lost for hundreds, if not thousands, of local students. It also lays bare the difficulties schools face in tackling deepening inequities amid an historically strained moment. As they work to keep schools open, administrators and teachers are just now grappling with the new data and how they will respond.

Those choices will shape the outcomes of school children who are next to graduate and others who are not yet in high school.

Losing ground on equity

The achievement gaps reflected in 2021 graduation data are not new. Most existed before the onset of the pandemic.

But the past two years of at-home instruction, COVID-19 illness and quarantines, and economic turmoil hit some groups of students much harder than others, according to county public health data and student surveys.

Countywide, the gap in graduation rates between white students and Latino students was larger in 2021 than in any of the past four years: a 7.2 percentage-point difference.

Sonoma County’s Latino residents have suffered some of the greatest losses during the pandemic, including a disproportionate shortening of life expectancy.

Between Black and white students, the gap deepened more severely during the pandemic: from a 9.9 percentage-difference in 2019 to 17.9 percentage points in 2020. In 2021, Black students’ graduation rate was 64.5% — 23.2 percentage points below white students’ graduation rate of 87.7%.

Data from the YouthTruth survey of students in 2021 showed that Latino and Black students were more likely to report difficulties accessing distance learning compared to their white peers.

Education officials said it’s important to look at all those factors to understand graduation disparities and future graduating classes’ needs.

“We have this one number at the end of 13 years of school, but nothing about how two families are living together in an apartment, wages that don’t support a family, families who have no health care,” said Laurie Fong, trustee on the Santa Rosa City Schools board.

Across Santa Rosa’s six main high schools, graduation rates varied widely, and, in most cases, fell along socioeconomic and racial lines.

Maria Carrillo, which has had the smallest percentage of lower-income students in its graduating class, had the highest four-year rate, at 91.5%.

At Montgomery, 84.1% of seniors graduated. Santa Rosa High had an 80.8% graduation rate, and Piner’s was 80.4.

Elsie Allen High School, the neighborhood school for areas of Santa Rosa that saw the highest numbers of COVID cases, had a graduation rate of 70.4%.

Albavera, principal, shared some of the struggles his students faced during the pandemic, from exposure to illness to difficulty accessing reliable internet and even feeling pressure to work in order to help support their families.

“A lot were ... hit hard,” he said. "(They) were concerned with their health, both physical and mental.”

Heading into hybrid learning in the spring, and especially during the current school year, Albavera said, his staff have strived to provide a sense of normalcy, even as the pandemic continues to exact an uneven toll on students and school communities.

“I don’t think we’re there yet,” he said.

Districtwide data

The crisis was far from over when the California Department of Education released data in early January on graduation rates, chronic absenteeism and assessments from last spring.

School officials are dealing with a deluge of demands in the new academic term amid a surge of COVID cases linked to the omicron variant.

Keeping schools open and functional has been the top priority, more than diving into last year’s data, officials said.

“We’ve had to move quickly on data that we need in order to make immediate decisions,” said Anna Trunnell, superintendent of Santa Rosa City Schools, such as student and staff absences.

By mid-January, she said, her district was “gearing up to begin those discussions” about academic indicators.

Educators typically point out that graduation is a “lagging” indicator — as it conveys information about the end of a student’s public school career, offering the district no further chances to change the outcome.

“I think what people have come to in the last couple of years is really seeing the need for data that’s closer to the student experience, the lived experience day-to-day, rather than waiting for the graduation rates to be released,” said Jennie Snyder, assistant superintendent of educational services for the Sonoma County Office of Education.

Still, the data offers insight into school districts’ abilities to usher students to an important academic benchmark that can have lifelong implications for their earning ability, health and well-being.

While the statewide rate of four-year graduation fell slightly throughout both years of the pandemic — from 84.5% in 2019 to 83.6% last year — Sonoma County has seen an increase, from 81.9% before the pandemic to an 83.9% graduation rate in 2021. In 2020, the rate had dipped slightly, to 81.1%.

Districtwide, 80.4% of Santa Rosa’s seniors graduated in 2021. The rate is below that of the county and state, and several other local school districts also achieved higher rates.

“Certainly we would like to see our grad rates higher,” Trunnell said. “That is always our goal.”

In West Sonoma County Union High School District, 94.8% of seniors graduated in 2021. In Windsor Unified School District, 92.2% of seniors graduated. Cotati-Rohnert Park had a graduation rate of 91.8%, while Petaluma City Schools saw 88% of its seniors graduate in 2021.

Mayra Perez, superintendent of Cotati-Rohnert Park Unified, said she was both pleased with the district’s numbers but wanted to see more growth.

“We can do better,” she said. “I always want to do better.”

She and other officials in the district touted a decision they made at Rancho Cotate High School last year to switch to a new schedule during distance learning. Instead of six periods, the school reduced to four periods per day each semester. Students reported they felt they could focus more with fewer periods per day, enough that the school decided to stick with the schedule change this year.

“We didn’t have to modify our graduation requirements in any way,” Perez said. “The schedule was one that supported students.”

‘A very unique year’

Santa Rosa was one of a small handful of local school districts that modified their graduation requirements last school year, reducing needed credits to the state minimum. Administrators and board members who approved the change said the move was necessary amid a sharp uptick of failing grades among seniors.

The California Legislature also provided some leniency for students through Assembly Bill 104, which, among other things, allowed them to petition their school districts to change low grades to pass/no pass grades. The aim of that bill was to help more students meet graduation and college admissions requirements, as well as retain financial aid that may have a GPA requirement.

For Sonoma County students, the pandemic came on the heels of a four-year period marked by repeated disruptions — fires, power shut-offs and floods — that led many seniors to miss, on average, 18 days of school over their time in high school.

“Our seniors for the past few years have not had a typical school year due to fires, floods and smoke days,” Trunnell said. “And now, COVID … I don’t think that this past year’s seniors are different from others, (but) we’re looking at, comparatively speaking, a very unique year of how we’ve done school.”

For all but the final weeks of the school year, classes were conducted online, over Zoom and other platform, Sports seasons were canceled, electives were upended and opportunities for extracurricular activities were severely limited.

Jaida Davis, a senior who graduated from Piner High School in 2021, said it was a struggle at times to find the motivation to tune into classes when she could log on from bed, and zone out.

“Midway, I did slack off, a lot because just being at home, I got into the senior slump of not really wanting to do anything,” she said.

Still, she said, remote work wasn’t all bad. She got into the habit of creating a set schedule for herself to stay on task.

“I set it for myself because I knew if I kept myself busy in a strict schedule … I would trick myself into thinking, ‘You’re going to school today, you’re going to pay attention and do your work,’” Davis said.

Looking ahead

Officials at the school, district and county level all discussed plans to keep making progress narrowing achievement gaps and boosting overall rates.

Santa Rosa, for example, is crafting a vision for Elsie Allen High School, both to recruit more students to enroll, and to keep more of them on track to graduate and move on to college and career.

That includes moving to a new “world school” model, which will emphasize language and cultural studies, as well as career and technical courses.

“We certainly are looking at ways to promote the beauty and uniqueness of each of our schools based on what their programs offer,” Trunnell said.

Part of that work involves strengthening Elsie Allen’s relationship with Cesar Chavez Language Academy, the Spanish dual immersion school that now occupies the former Lawrence Cook Middle School campus.

A working group of staff, administrators and families from both campuses are meeting to create a vision for an immersive language program more robust than any of the other comprehensive high schools.

Albavera also highlighted a growing roster of career technical education courses, and the possibility of expanding to a seven-period day so that English language learners are able to take two electives.

"I think (district leaders) are trying to do things that are going to move the needle,” he said. “It’s courageous work. And we want that to happen.”

The county Office of Education is planning to roll out a new system that will give schools more insight into how well they’ve been able to prepare their graduates for college and career, Snyder said.

A new partnership with the National Student Clearinghouse will enable districts to track whether their graduates go on to college, the military, trade school or into the workforce. High schools can get information on whether alumni in college graduate or drop out.

“Our ultimate aim is that kids are pursuing their own paths, whether college or career, and certainly taking that notion seriously of readiness,” Snyder said.

Officials also talked about the importance of continuing to boost the use of interim assessments throughout the year to understand how students are struggling, and provide interventions while they are still in school.

“If we wait until we see what that (graduation) number is, we’ve waited for too long,” said Dan Blake, managing director for educational support services. “Each piece of a student’s academic life builds upon the previous one. If that number moves significantly, it’s because of work done many years prior.”

You can reach Staff Writer Kaylee Tornay at 707-521-5250 or kaylee.tornay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @ka_tornay.