May 16, 2023
Kern County sits at the southern tip of California’s Central Valley, nestled amongst almond orchard and framed by rolling foothills. The area of West Kern County is primarily an unincorporated, rural, farm and oil community, serving a mix of farmworker and landowner families. The three districts featured in this story – Lost Hills Union Elementary, Semitropic Elementary, and Maple Elementary – serve 920 preschool-8th grade students across 650 square miles. Semitropic and Maple are single-school districts, administered by a Superintendent-Principal; Lost Hills Union includes two schools. In 2018, all three districts were joint recipients of the highly competitive federal Full-Service Community Schools Grant Program.
Since then, the consortium has established the Children’s Cabinet of West Kern County, hired parent liaisons and community school coordinators, created a regional preschool program and Expanded and Summer Learning Program, hired a shared math coach to increase instructional effectiveness, created an attendance campaign to address chronic absence, and secured regional social workers and other mental health resources. In August 2022 – in spite of the vast challenges facing the district and communities because of the Covid-19 pandemic – Lost Hills Union was recognized as among the most improved districts in the state in both English Language Arts (ELA) and Math.
These Kern County districts are pioneering a unique kind of community school partnership in low-resourced, geographically spread out, rural communities: a cross-district community school strategy. District leaders Julie Boesch, Bethany Ferguson, and Fidelina Saso share how they built this work.