School News

Starting January 2016, new incoming students or those students transitioning from elementary to middle school will no longer be able to provide a personal belief statement or religious exemption for immunizations.

Under the 2015 Senate Bill 277, there is provision for “grandfathering” students who currently have a statement of belief or religious exemption until they reach their next vaccination checkpoint – kindergarten or 7th grade.  A licensed physician can exempt students from immunizations.

For more information about immunization requirements, contact the California Department of Public Health (916) 558-1784 or ask your health care provider.

Officials from the State of California will be releasing scores from the State’s new testing system in September, not August, as originally planned.

“We are taking an abundance of caution to ensure that the substantial amount of data we are receiving is properly collected and placed in new files on a new site,” said Department of Education spokeswoman Pam Slater. “Additionally, the department will be launching a new website to display the results and needs sufficient time to test the new site.”

Campbell Union School District (CUSD) students participated in the new testing system, known as Smarter Balanced, last spring. The assessments are computer-based tests that measure student knowledge of California’s English Language Arts and Mathematics standards for grades 3-8.

“We’re glad they want everything to be accurate and complete before sending out the official reports,” said CUSD Superintendent Eric Andrew. “This year’s scores are a new baseline for measuring student progress, and we all want them to be reliable.”

Andrew said teachers have multiple ways to measure student achievement, so they can still tailor instruction to the student’s needs and talk to parents about how to continue progress on meeting standards.  When the assessment data comes in, it will be added to the mix, he said.

State officials plan to release scores to schools in early September, and if all goes according to plan, parents would see official student score reports in the fall. They also caution against comparing scores from the new tests with those from old tests. The new tests are too fundamentally different from the old ones to make any reliable comparisons between the two, they said.