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Discussions about proposed reforms to the San Ramon Valley Unified School District’s grading and assessment practices continued at this week’s Board of Education meeting, in which staff presented an update focused on data from ongoing community outreach efforts and proposed next steps.
While the district had initially planned for the reforms to be finalized and go into effect by the 2026 spring semester, staff concluded their presentation at the end of the board’s Feb. 17 meeting with a recommendation that further work be done through the next school year to address community concerns.
Some of the proposed changes highlighted by the district include the removal of plus and minus grading, grading based solely on academic achievement (with other factors including behavior and work habits reported separately), district-wide definitions for each letter grade, and revisions to the add and drop timelines. Grading and assessment revisions are only being proposed for grades six through 12.
Overall, community members surveyed across a range of groups had mixed feelings about the proposed changes that were introduced last fall, according to the data presented Tuesday evening. Just 34.3% of survey participants reported feeling positively about the revisions.
While a significant portion – 17.9% – ranked the proposal as negative, a majority of survey participants fell into the mixed/conditional category for a wide range of reasons.
Many of those reasons, however, centered on questions about the implementation and feasibility of the proposal, despite “broad alignment” with the intended purpose of the revisions, as well as calls for transparency and clarity prior to rollout.
The top concerns raised by certificated staff surveyed were the “feasibility, sustainability and consistency” of implementation, with parents and caregivers calling for clarity and predictability in the process, as well as consideration of impacts on transcripts and college applications. Students overall called for stress reduction, fairness, and clear expectations.
Despite the concerns, district staff said they remained optimistic about the reform process and community responses, which reflected overall support for the goals of the proposal and an understanding of the reasons for it.
“There’s definitely support for the ideas behind the draft policy,” said Annabel Hurlburt, who was appointed by the district as its new executive director of curriculum and instruction last month after her predecessor Debra Petish moved to a different cabinet position.
Nonetheless, she emphasized that more work needed to be done.
“We need to gather more input from multiple sources,” Hurlburt said. “There were particular areas like CTE, VAPA, and PE that felt like they hadn’t had a voice in the original draft policy, and that they had very specific situations that aren’t necessarily the case in a math or English classroom that we needed to take into account.”
While the presentation was informational only, with no resolution proposed for a board vote, Hurlburt and executive director of secondary instruction Jon Campopiano concluded by suggesting their proposed next steps. Those include the formation of a working group to refine implementation details, additional feedback and discussions with the district’s labor groups, with a revised draft policy proposed to be presented during the next school year.
That work is also set to include efforts to address concerns raised during an earlier discussion that evening ahead of the board’s initial vote to approve cutting teaching staff by more than 16 full-time equivalent positions – the use of personalized learning initiatives (PLIs) to supplement course offerings not available within the district – following a suggestion by Area 3 Trustee Laura Bratt.
“There’s a lot of crossover there, and it sounds like we’ll be having many discussions around PLIs moving forward, and we can certainly incorporate that into the work as we go ahead,” Hurlburt said.
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