SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Sacramento parents are upset by a school district policy they say is disrupting their kids’ learning.
Every year, Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD) implements something called Contract Capping, also known as “concapping.”
It’s when the district moves a student several weeks into the school year from one school to another, to avoid exceeding the maximum class size.
“It's a common practice for us in Sac City,” district spokesperson Brian Heap told ABC10. “It's common for other school districts; they may not refer to it as ‘concapping,’ but the process is the same. It's a way of leveling out your enrollment.”
Per the district’s contract with the Sacramento City Teachers Association, the max class size for grades K-3 is 24 students. The limit in grades 4-6 is 33 students.
The district tries anticipating elementary school class sizes and making adjustments before the beginning of the school year to avoid disruptions. However, every year a certain amount of concapping has to happen based on how many students actually show up, Heap said.
This year, about 175 students are being concapped. Concapping only happens at the elementary school level; “Open enrollment-only” schools like Phoebe Hearst and Leonardo da Vinci K-8 School are not subject to concapping. The full district student population is nearly 38,700, as of this week. Less than 17,000 of those are eligible for concapping, in other words about 1% of those students are being concapped this year.
“We don't want to do this. We just have to do this,” Heap said. “It is the way that we can serve the greatest number of students with the resources that we have district-wide.”
One of those students is Margee Burch’s fourth-grade daughter Angelyna, who – up until a few days ago - attended and loved Tahoe Elementary School in Sacramento, a close-knit neighborhood school.
Tahoe Elementary was Angelyna’s fifth school. As a former foster kid, she moved around a lot until Burch and her wife adopted Angelyna two years ago.
Now, less than a month into the school year, Angelyna is having to move to her sixth school.
“This is so disruptive for Angelyna,” Burch said.
The district informed the family last Thursday that Friday – the very next day - would be Angelyna’s final day at Tahoe. Starting Monday, she’d have to attend Oak Ridge Elementary, about two and a half miles away.
“We were told that we had to leave and we did not have a choice about where we went,” Burch said. “She was up ‘til 2 a.m. crying in my bed, telling me how sad she was to lose her friends, how sad she was to lose her teacher and how unsafe - that was the word she used - how unsafe she felt that this was happening again to her.”
At Tahoe Elementary this school year, the district anticipated needing two fourth-grade classrooms. When it wound up with one class of 17 and another of 18, the district decided to combine them into a class of 35. To avoid exceeding the max of 33, two students – including Angelyna – had to be concapped out. All other grade levels at Tahoe still have seats available, the district said.
Tahoe Elementary Parent-Teacher Association president Becky Wiegand wants to know why the district isn’t keeping those two fourth-grade classes intact.
“Smaller class sizes equal better outcomes for our kids, better learning, better social-emotional development. So having a class with 18 kids? Wonderful,” she said.
ABC10 took this question to the district.
“We could, but it's also not going to be the best way to utilize our resources,” Heap said.
Amid a teacher shortage, with 26 full-time teaching vacancies across the district’s elementary schools, Heap said concapping is a last resort that ensures a sharing of resources.
The district also moved that now-extra fourth grade teacher from Tahoe to another school, which has lead to some other shuffling within the school.
"Due to the staffing assignments made at the school site level, additional students will be moved," the district said. "The site is reducing down from 2 split classes into just 1. The students are moving as a cohort meaning that as much as possible they will remain with their classmates but with a new teacher."
“It's just a yo-yo game almost every school year, where we have kids admitted, teacher and staff bonding and developing content and curricula together. And then we get somebody (saying), ‘Sorry, we've got to move you to another school site.’ And it's all in the name of efficiency. It's all in the name of cost-cutting. And it's not the best for our kids,” Wiegand said
She believes the policy is unfair to some of the most vulnerable students, since the last ones to register at a school are first on the list to be concapped out, if needed.
“The families that are impacted tend to be our refugee families, new English language learners, new immigrant families - the ones that don't come in early because they can't or they don't know where they're going to be,” Wiegand said. “For a district that has been saying that they prioritize student equity and looking through all of their decisions with an equity lens, this is really an inequitable policy.”
There are some students who are exempt from being concapped, Heap said.
“For example, our homeless and foster youth. I mean, obviously, these are students who have experienced a lot of trauma in their lives, and they need some stability. And it only makes sense that we would not concap students like that,” he said. “We go out of our way - in fact, we're obligated by the state law - to make sure that we don't concap those kinds of students just for that reason: they need the stability.”
The district said there are no concappping exemptions for students based on immigration or refugee status.
While Angelyna is a former foster youth and therefore no longer shielded from concapping, Burch said stability is still crucial for her.
“Moving children after they've started is not the best thing for our children!” she said. “Stability is critical to childhood growth and attachment.”
Burch shared those words with the SCUSD Board of Education at last week’s meeting, just hours after learning her daughter was being concapped.
The fourth grade teacher being moved - Scholastica Schatz or “Miss S,” as Tahoe Elementary families call her - also spoke.
“Just to know that the work we put into building this classroom community is going to be torn out from under us,” she said tearfully. “We are not okay with being pawns in a twisted game of numbers.”
Tahoe’s principal, Heather Bennett, also addressed the board.
“Moving students from one class to another after three weeks of building relationships and rapport with classmates and trusted adults causes trauma,” she said.
Heap pointed out that parents sign an acknowledgement during the registration process that says — due to over-enrollment, your student might not be guaranteed a spot at their neighborhood school. He said the district makes an effort to move a concapped student to the next-nearest school that can offer them a seat. If a spot does open back up at the first school, he said those concapped students are offered the chance to return.
The district said concapped students are not offered alternative transportation. They point out that students attending their neighborhood schools also do not have the option of transportation.
Affected families and school communities call the whole process disruptive. So does the district plan on doing something about this?
According to Heap, the district and board members are interested in reviewing the concapping process and seeing if there are improvements that can be made. Those might include changing the way parents are notified and how soon that notification comes before their kid has to move schools. However, no specifics are available yet— but district leaders are interested in exploring possible changes.
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