As Santa Barbara High School prepares to enter its fourth year as a “Program Improvement” school under the federal government’s No Child Left Behind Act, the Santa Barbara School Board recently approved a restructuring plan for the district’s flagship school. The development of the plan—which is mandated under the controversial federal law for all schools that find themselves, due to inadequate standardized test scores, in a fourth year of “Program Improvement”—not only calls for an overhauled approach to the handling of at-risk students and English learners, but also calls for the hiring of a “intervention specialist.” The new job, which will be funded by a combination of district dough and school site money, will focus exclusively on helping meet the specific needs of the most at-risk pupils.
