By Brittany Hanson/Garden Grove Journal
Not only did the Garden Grove Unified School District survive its first summer of modernization projects, it has also been picked to be the first school district in the area to work on a new project with Stanford University.
At Tuesday’s school board meeting the participation with Stanford got the go-ahead and the progress of the district wide modernization project was updated.
The project with Stanford is through the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities and the Youth Data Archive that collects and compares data of students to track success and what attributes, activities and habits that those successful students have.
It seeks to focus specifically on college readiness and then college success.
“We were approached by Stanford because they are impressed by how we [GGUSD] already use data and data analysis to track student achievement,” said Alan Trudell, GGUSD’s public information officer.
According to Trudell, Stanford will “crunch” the numbers to help identify post secondary success and what characteristics makes those students successful.
“It will also help identify the challenges if they weren’t successful,” said Trudell, “We can use that data to help us indentify predictors.”
The district may disclose some, if not all information about students such as student identifiers and demographics, school enrollment and attendance, academic achievement, after school program participation, disciplinary data and physical fitness test information.
Stuart Moe, GGUSD’s director of facilities, said jokingly that the schools undergoing phase one modernization had “survived.”
“This summer, we had eight contracts [for school modernization],” said Moe, “A challenge we had was dealing with existing utilities.”
The projects spanned the course of the summer with trenches being dug and new conduit piping and connections being created under existing schools.
“Whenever we’re doing a modernization, it’s a lot harder than a new construction because we have to work around what is already there,” said Moe.
Even with schools being relocated to other campuses, Moe said that all the work has gone smoothly, much of that thanks to the cooperation of the community.
