Long Beach Unified School District To Hold Its First Annual "Students of Color Town Hall"; See Letter To Parents, Link to District Website; LBUSD Spokesman Says Event Will Be Open To All

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(Feb. 6, 2015.) -- The Long Beach Unified School District, California's third largest public school district, has announced that on Sat. Feb. 28, it will hold its first annual "Students of Color Town Hall."

LBREPORT.com publishes below the letter emailed to parents via their child's school email system.

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Long Beach Unified School District "Students of Color Town Hall" letter

The text of the correspondence also appears on LBUSD's publicly accessible website at this link.

LBUSD spokesman Chris Eftychiou told LBREPORT.com that the event will be open to everyone, regardless of color. Anyone can attend? "Absolutely," he said.

So...what about the event's title? Mr. Eftychiou said LBUSD has been candid in seeking to address an achievement gap in which young people of color as a whole tend to lag behind their peers academically. He said LBUSD representatives had traveled to the White House and discussed ways to address the issue with representatives of other urban school districts and the Obama administration. Mr. Eftychiou said LBUSD's approach is consistent those approved by the Obama administration.

The "Students of Color Town Hall" will be held at Cabrillo High School, a gleaming, state of the art campus with computer facilities and other amenities, built in 1996 on the site of former Navy housing in a working class area of West Long Beach not far from the Port of Long Beach and other industrial uses.

The school's "Academic Performance Index" in 2013 (the last year California's public schools publicly released their students' performance on statewide standardized tests) ranked in decile 2 (the lowest 20% among schools statewide,) In 2013, Cabrillo had a schoolwide API score of 657 (below the state's "target" performance of 800 out of 1,000.) To view the 2013 details, click here.

Ten years earlier in 2003, Cabrillo's schoolwide API score was 502.