22 Dec WCCUSD Renews Another School Charter Despite Poor Performance

(Image courtesy of West Contra Costa Unified School District via Bay City News)

By Samantha Kennedy

West Contra Costa Unified renewed another school’s charter Wednesday, despite years of underperformance. Like another renewal earlier in the year, the renewal comes with conditions.

Board members approved Voices West Contra Costa’s renewal on the condition that the school make “appropriate increases” in academic performance, identify recruitment strategies to bring in underrepresented groups — Voices, a dual language immersion school, was over 97% Latino last year — and a plan that outlines how the school will address low performance.

The board approved the petition in a 4-1 vote, with board member Jamela Smith-Folds against.

“I was really close to voting to close the school…You’ve been open as a school for over six years [and] academic achievement, reclassification rates, and teacher turnover should be much better than it is now,” said board member Demetrio Gonzalez-Hoy. “It’s pretty bad now.”

But Gonzalez-Hoy said the school deserves time to make improvements before being shut down. This renewal gives it two years.

Testing results for the charter school show that students have fallen below both district and state results in almost every measure, a report from district staff found. Since the 2021-22 school year, scores in math and English have steadily dropped as those in WCCUSD and California grew.

In 2024-25, only 18.38% of students at Voices were at or above grade level for English. That’s compared to 33.39% of students in WCCUSD.

Voices outpaced WCCUSD in 2021-22 when 34.48% of the charter school’s students met or exceeded grade level in English but then dropped by almost 5% the following year.

Results in math outcomes are similar to those in English. Voices performed higher between the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years, before WCCUSD began outperforming the following two years.

English language learners and Latino students also consistently underperform when compared to state standards, according to state data in 2024 and 2025.

Staff said that Voices is “justifiably proud” of gains in English language performance indicators, after increasing the number of students who maintained performance levels.

Ellyn Magaña, chief innovation and strategy officer of Voices, said that the latest data from this year shows that there’s been improvement in “every single category.”

“Which is something very few schools accomplish in one academic cycle,” said Magaña. She said that’s thanks to a “coherent instructional system.”

Test scores are not the only things board members took into consideration. Gonzalez-Hoy and board members Cinthia Hernandez and Leslie Reckler also raised questions over the lack of credentialed teachers at the school.

According to a report from the district, 9.3% of educators at the site are credentialed. One special education educator and two general education educators are credentialed, according to Magaña. Another four have preliminary credentials.

“What is going on there?” asked Reckler.

Magaña said the school is growing its group of educators rather than relying on recruiting its way out of the shortage.

Though Magaña also noted the school outperforming the nearby Washington Elementary School, a dual-language program in WCCUSD, in some metrics, Gonzalez-Hoy raised concern over reclassification rates for English learners being “so low.”

Students at Voices reclassified as English proficient at a rate of 5.2%, almost 10% less than WCCUSD’s reclassification rate last school year.

“You’re a dual immersion school, the whole school. Your reclassification rate should be the best in West Contra Costa,” said Gonzalez-Hoy before voicing his support.