Stockton Unified School District’s 14th superintendent in 19 years may finally be steadying the ship.
Michelle Rodriguez joined the district last summer in the wake of a scathing state audit, substantial budget woes and years of dysfunction in the district’s Board of Education — not to mention the job of educating almost 40,000 students whose academic performance has lagged behind behind state standards for years.
“I noticed that we needed quite a bit of work in order to be able to get up and running,” Rodriguez told Stocktonia about her first days as superintendent.
After a year of Rodriguez in the top role, district measures show Stockton Unified has addressed some of its fiscal and operational issues by hiring new staff, implementing recommendations from several civil grand juries and county and state agencies, and successfully passing a budget. But student achievement problems remain, reflected in state test scores, college and career readiness metrics, and chronic absenteeism rates.
Rodriguez says the district is moving in the right direction.
‘“Before, it was a lot about, ‘where’s my bus,’ basic problems,” she said. Now, “communication is more deep than that.”
Rodriguez came to the district last summer from Pajaro Valley Unified School District (PVUSD) in Watsonville and recently had her contract renewed through the 2027–2028 school year. She has been more publicly visible than many of her predecessors, holding town halls with parents and teachers and launching a website in Spanish and English to track the district’s progress. One teacher at a recent school board meeting called her a “breath of fresh air.”
Under Rodriguez, the district has straightened out some of its previous financial issues. The approval of the district’s budget in June went smoothly compared to last year, when the county implemented additional oversight. Rodriguez also took aim at external consultant costs and helped the district reallocate its one-time Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding, a pandemic-era grant.
Staffing levels, another issue as schools nationwide struggle with teacher shortages, are also improving, Rodriguez said. At the beginning of last school year, the district was still scrambling to fill around 100 teaching positions; this time around, the district hired 22 teachers at a recent job fair, she said, although about 30 positions still remain open online.
Other changes have been even more rudimentary. The district recently completed its transition to the financial software ESCAPE after a 2022 grand jury report and 2023 state audit found numerous internal deficiencies and accounting difficulties. Rodriguez said many of the district’s internal operations were done with “paper and pencil” prior to the new software.
Even then, errors have occurred during the transition. A group of staff members — Rodriguez said about 40 — had not been paid for working additional hours during the summer due to a mixup with payroll paperwork. The unions representing the employees have since filed two grievances against the district, according to a representative at the July 23 board meeting, because the employees had not been paid within the time frame specified in their contract after they informed the district of the error.
Amidst the changes with the district’s day-to-day operations, however, many Stockton Unified students are still struggling academically. Only 35% of students met course requirements for applying to the University of California/California State University system in the 2022–23 school year, compared to more than half of students statewide. That same year, only 28% of district students met or exceeded state standards in English, and only 17% were considered proficient in math.
Rodriguez said that Stockton Unified is doing a “complete rehaul” of math instruction for ninth graders by instituting pre-Advanced Placement (AP) classes through the College Board, which runs the AP curriculum. She also said the district is focused on early literacy by implementing the phonics-based curriculum SIPPS.
Other measures to improve academic achievement, however, are still in the planning stage. Rodriguez said that the district will conduct an “equity audit” of its 55 schools to develop priorities and, eventually, a three-year action plan.
“Frequently, you look at the symptoms of what is happening, so you see this underachievement, but we really need to get to the root of what’s actually happening,” she said.
Another significant issue for Stockton Unified is chronic absenteeism, which has spiked nationwide since the pandemic. Five years ago, only 18% of district students were considered chronically absent, defined as missing at least 10% of instructional days. Last school year, about a third of students were chronically absent, down from 38% the year before.
Rodriguez admitted that instability in the district may have exacerbated the problem.
“I think it happened more in Stockton than in some school districts, and it probably was because of the disequilibrium of having a lot of superintendents, of having a lot of different district administration,” she said. “When we came back from Covid and all the restrictions came off, we didn’t necessarily attack it the way that we should.”
The district’s plan to address chronic absenteeism, unveiled at a July board meeting, includes restarting School Attendance Review Boards (SARBs), which can redirect students to alternative programs or resources, but are also potentially punitive; according to the district’s plan, the board can help “students understand the importance of school and the consequences for failure to comply with the law.”
Rodriguez said that a SARB was a “last rung” for when “nothing else is working.”
“The most important is changing instructional programs so that kids want to come to school,” she said. “How do we have something in the school day for all children that makes them want to come to school?”
Rodriguez added that the district is well-staffed to tackle these problems, with around 60 people in the Child Welfare and Attendance department dedicated to tackling attendance issues. Additionally, most Stockton Unified high schools have reached the recommended 250-1 ratio of students to counselors.
“We will have our best graduation rate in the history of the district this year, and that is through the strong work of teachers assisting with credit recovery, counselors, ensuring that they’re working not only with students, but their parents,” she predicted.
In the meantime, some external oversight measures have been lifted. In April, the California Department of Justice ended five years of monitoring of the district and its police department, instituted after a 2019 investigation found that district police had discriminated against Black, Latino, and disabled students. Other recommendations from the state and other agencies, such as permanently hiring a chief business officer, have yet to be resolved.
Stockton Unified welcomed students back into classrooms on Thursday, and Rodriguez says trust in the district is growing, if slowly.
“There’s a subset of people who it will take some time because they feel like they’ve seen this before,” she said. “As we continue to do better for their children, then that trust will grow.”