If students in your school district were organizing to gain a better education, asking for more core classes, attempting to raise their grade point averages, lower their dropout rates, and increase graduation and college matriculation rates, wouldn’t you think those worthy endeavors?
That’s exactly what students in the Santa Barbara Unified School District (SBUSD) are doing. Since 2015 district students have been working with several organizations and nonprofits, along with the Santa Barbara Unified School District. Their goal is the institution of ethnic studies (ES) courses throughout the curriculum.
Their idea is to modify SBUSD’s existing graduation requirements to include a UC/CSU transferrable, ES course of five units, that’s one semester. The ES classes to be developed would be aligned to the current educational standards and A-G subject category approved. Students are proposing classes from women’s studies to indigenous people’s studies with everything in between. The reasoning behind the proposal is based in scholastic findings.