The Progress Report: San Diego Unified Is Trying to Measure Student Wellness

Each year, California school districts are required to adopt Local Control Accountability Plans, often referred to as LCAP’s. These three-year spending plans are submitted to the California Department of Education and lay out each district’s goals and how they comport with state educational priorities. Districts are required to work with community stakeholders, like parents, to develop these plans. 

Post-pandemic, San Diego Unified’s LCAP priorities got a revamp. Atop the list of goals – above increasing performance on test scores or graduation rates – sat softer ones like social emotional learning. 

San Diego Unified’s latest LCAP was no different. Its top priority was “student wellness.” 

District leaders have explained this new focus as being necessary to lay the foundation for student success.  

“When students feel good, feel engaged, feel motivated, feel like they have what it takes to succeed, then all of our targeted literacy and math instruction and support becomes even more productive and powerful,” Trustee Shana Hazan told me. 

But the shift also presents a unique dilemma.  

California’s Department of Education requires LCAP goals be measurable, and there isn’t a single figure that shows how “well,” a student is.  

That’s not lost on Superintendent Fabi Bagula. 

“Student Wellness is not easy to measure, and few districts have chosen to prioritize it like us,” Bagula wrote in a statement. “We have worked with our students, staff and community to define student wellness, establish goals to strive for, and plan how to incorporate it into the culture of our school communities.” 

That leaves leaders at San Diego Unified grappling with a tricky question: How do you measure a feeling? 

They aren’t sure yet. 

Where did ‘Wellness’ Come From? 

The pandemic hit students hard. Student achievement took a massive hit when officials shut down schools in the wake of Covid’s spread. Kids’ mental health was also badly impacted.  

The pandemic was traumatic, and the number of kids suffering from depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts skyrocketed. When schools re-opened, poor behavior often stemming from those mental health struggles also skyrocketed.  

That led many districts, San Diego Unified included, to focus on improving social-emotional health as a bedrock to improving student achievement.  

San Diego Unified’s focus on wellness, though, came a little later. As part of trustees’ work with the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of the largest districts in the country, they tried to figure out what the most impactful goals could be.  

Things like English and math performance were obvious, they said, but student wellbeing kept coming up. This felt like the Rosetta Stone that undergirds all student achievement, Board President Cody Petterson said.  

But is this all just fluff that distracts from more concrete metrics of student achievement? Absolutely not, Petterson said. 

“If I have a fourth grader, and I’ve taught that child to do fractions, but I’ve not kept them safe from bullying, or I’ve not kept them safe at a physical level from gun violence, or made them feel welcome, or have been biased or racist towards them – if they are not happy in their life and they’re not engaged, I failed,” Petterson said. “It doesn’t matter that I’ve taught them fractions, I have made their life measurably worse.” 

A TBD Yardstick for TBD Wellness 

With this new focus, district staff brought the goal to stakeholders to figure out exactly what they meant when they said “wellness.” They ultimately developed four components: 

Body: Taking care of our physical health through exercise, nutrition, and rest. 

Mind: Cultivating mental and emotional well-being through mindfulness and learning. 

Relationships: Nurturing connections with family and friends for mutual support and love. 

Community: Engaging with our community to foster a sense of belonging and purpose. 

But exactly what data points will play into each of the pillars? 

For some of the pillars, the district has ideas. “Body,” for example, will likely be based on how many students are consuming district meals, health office visits and results of physical fitness measurements already conducted at schools. 

One of the key data points they will use as a proxy for wellness is chronic absenteeism rates. Chronic absenteeism is when a student misses at least 10 percent of days in a school year, and it exploded after the pandemic. In the years since schools reopened for in-person instruction rates have gradually decreased.  

There are a whole slew of other possibilities too, from discipline rates to participation in extracurriculars and athletics, even assessments of how sound district facilities are. Student surveys will also likely play a significant role in the metric. 

San Diego Unified leaders have partnered with officials at the San Diego County Office of Education and a San Diego State University researcher to whittle things down. They also plan to pilot the index at schools in the Canyon Hills, Mira Mesa, Mission Bay, Morse and San Diego clusters to figure out exactly what will be included. 

“We really want this index to measure what we want it to measure, ‘are our students well?’ And it’s such a kind of ambiguous target, ‘are our students well,’ so we’re really going to lean on the expertise of those out there that are doing the work,” said Roman del Rosario, San Diego Unified’s director of data insights and systems support. 

And what exactly will the index look like? According to del Rosario, it won’t be so simple as a single number, like chronic absenteeism rates or the percentage of kids at a school proficient in English. 

“I envision, more of a dashboard that’s going to look at multiple data points. Then when we see those moving in the right direction, that’s what we’re going to count as an improvement on wellness. It’s tricky and will take a while to develop,” del Rosario said. 

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