Newport-Mesa school district drops plan to drop accelerated math classes

A Newport-Mesa Unified School District plan to eliminate some accelerated math classes that met with parent backlash has been postponed, but a new curriculum for teaching math will still be instituted.

The district considered dropping the intermediate school math courses that consolidate two school years of math into one out of a desire to provide “more appropriately balanced academics and social and emotional health” for students, said Annette Franco, a spokeswoman for the district.

The students would have been able to bulk up on their math learning in their sophomore and junior years of high school, district officials said.

Also, staff suggested the removal of enhanced math instruction to focus on the development of foundational skills for greater success later in higher-level math classes, Franco said. A presentation given to parents during a June 18 meeting said acceleration at a junior high level was not needed to access classes such as AP Calculus or AP Statistics by a student’s senior year in high school.

But parents raised concerns at recent school board meetings, asking district leaders to leave in place the option for getting a jump on higher level skills while in seventh and eighth grade.

Parents said they worried the high school years were already a busy time and they were concerned students with a good grasp of math skills would be bored and those needing more help would get left behind.

“I came from the Irvine district. It’s completely foreign to take away anything advanced. Those are the keys to the Irvine school district that I think served them well and I’m surprised by this,” Newport Beach resident Kim Chavez said. “I firmly believe students need to be met where they’re at.”

She said parents were “blindsided” by the recommendation made by district staff. Parents said the district announced the proposal toward the end of the school year instead of including them in the conversation earlier.

“They told us they have been studying this for two years and then we’re notified at the last week of school. So, I felt the process was not transparent,” said Gialisa Gaffaney, who lives Corona del Mar. “We don’t know who’s on the committee. We don’t know what degrees they have.”

Laurie Smith, a retired teacher who taught in the district and member of the local school advocacy group, Newport-Mesa Community for Students, said concerns from parents likely stem from past experiences with the school board and a previous math program that was implemented in 2013 and changed after parent and teacher complaints about the quality of the materials.

“There’s been a lot of problems with math, so it’s a trigger for this group of parents and community,” Smith said. “It’s a real hot button.”

District officials said a new math curriculum, Illustrative Mathematics, was piloted the previous school year and will be rolled out in the fall in sixth- through eighth-grade classrooms. The school board approved the program as the core instructional material for intermediate schools on June 12.

“I remain concerned,” Gaffaney said. “Last year, they canceled honors English. This year, they proposed cancelling all differentiated math. To me, that says they’re trending toward a trajectory of making everybody the same.”