SB City Unified's number of poor kids ranks at top
SAN BERNARDINO - The school district has more poor students than any other large school district in California, a fact that academics and district leaders say is at least partly responsible for the district's chronic low performance.
But with existing resources, it's not clear what more the San Bernardino City Unified School District can do to ease the problems poverty creates, raise student test scores and put poor students on an even playing field with their more affluent peers.
"Poverty is at least one of the components that affects how well students do in school," said Superintendent Arturo Delgado. "But that's not an indicator that kids can't learn."
Last school year, more than 45,000 students - nearly 83percent of the district's 54,727 total students - qualified for free or reduced-price lunches. The statistic is commonly used by public schools to measure poverty.
That percentage puts San Bernardino City Unified, the eighth largest school district in the state, above any other district in the Top 10, including the Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Ana and Fresno districts.
At the same time, San Bernardino City Unified also has more students attending low-performing schools than any of those districts. More than 1-in-4 San Bernardino City Unified students attends one of what the California Department of Education has ranked as the lowest-performing 188 schools in California.
Delgado said he believes those two facts are related
and that San Bernardino City Unified's poverty is partly behind its troubles.But poverty, Delgado and others said, is a predictor of more than just financial problems.
"The poverty in the home oftentimes determines how much support a student will get at home," Delgado said. "Are there books in the home? What kind of experiences do children have in their off-time? ... The lack of resources makes a big difference."
Poor students are more likely to do poorly on standardized tests and more likely to start school with fewer skills