A new report on the Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) so-called acceleration days shows that while thousands of students attended the bonus days over winter break, the numbers were lower than initially reported by the district.
The district’s first of several such days, held on Dec. 19 and Dec. 20, are a part of LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho’s plan to help its 420,000 students recover from pandemic-induced learning loss.
However, Chief of School Operations Andres Chait told the board that “close to 40,000 students participated in one or both acceleration days” in a Jan. 17 presentation.
A spokesperson for the school district wasn’t available by press time for comment on the discrepancy between the reported numbers.
In the presentation, Chait also discussed the “glows and grows”—or the highs and lows—of LAUSD’s first acceleration days.
Among the “glows” was that the program targeted the students who needed it the most, he said.
More than 80 percent of students who attended the bonus school days were “those who would most benefit from additional time in instruction,” including students learning English as their second language and those performing below standards, according to Chait.
Under “grow,” Chait said the district could have refined the information it provided to families about the benefits of participating earlier to give teachers more time to plan targeted lessons.
He said LAUSD needed to investigate why some students who registered for the acceleration days didn’t show up.
One of those reasons could be because it was hosted over winter break, and some families could have been out of town, according to Chait. He pointed to the district’s unusually high student absence rate—20 percent—on the Friday before winter break.
Another potential reason was that not every school campus participated in the acceleration days, and some may have found transporting students to an unfamiliar campus difficult, he said.
Despite this, Carvalho said he felt confident that the acceleration days reached the students who needed to be there.
“Acceleration days were the second-best option to what was originally envisioned for these students,” Carvalho said during the meeting. “They were never meant to be universal schooling for all students. They were meant to be an optional opportunity for students who struggle the most. So on the basis of that declaration, I can assuredly tell the board and community we hit the mark.”
Initially, the accelerated days were originally to take place during the school year and not over breaks.
However, that changed when the district’s teachers union—United Teachers Los Angeles—called for its members to boycott the extra days in August 2022, saying they were added to the school year without labor negotiation.
As a compromise, LAUSD rescheduled the extra days to take place over the winter and spring breaks.
The next acceleration days will take place over spring break on April 3 and April 4.
