Downey Unified shines light on student achievement at State of the Schools breakfast
Downey Unified School District superintendent Dr. John Garcia speaks at the 10th annual State of the Schools breakfast on Friday. Photo by Alex Dominguez
DOWNEY — Downey Unified School District is actively working to become the first ever Apple Distinguished school district, Superintendent Dr. John Garcia announced at the 10th annual State of the Schools address on Friday.
Eleven of Downey’s 13 elementary schools have been named Apple Distinguished Schools, which recognizes them for using technology to connect students to the world, fuel creativity, deepen collaboration and make learning personal for each student.
There are 889 Apple Distinguished Schools world-wide, 338 of which nationally, and 37 in the state of California.
At his annual address, Garcia said that work was being done to bring the remainder of its schools “on board” in the next few years.
“Our middle schools are working to come on board; we’ve got our last two elementary schools, they’re working to come on board in the next couple of years,” said Garcia. “We rolled up iPads into the freshmen class, and so we continue to roll those out into the high schools.”
“Where we’re going is to be the first Apple Distinguished School District in the world.”
Garcia also emphasized the district’s continually growing roster of Career Technical Education (CTE) pathways, which allow students to explore different careers through hands-on curriculum.
“We have 25 different Career Technical Education pathways that our students can pursue,” said Garcia. “We don’t have a choice. We’ve got 22,000 TK through 12 students; we’ve got all of our thousands of adult learners. We have to be the cheesecake factory; we cannot afford to be In-n-Out as much as we would love to, and just have a defined set-up menu and just do it cheap and economically. We have to be the cheesecake factory because we have 22,000 unique students, and we’ve got to offer one thing, we’ve got to have one thing that gets them motivated to be at school and be engaged in their education every single day.”
Starting in August next school year, Downey will offer a brand-new Fire Science pathway in collaboration with Downey Fire Department. Though details are few, Garcia would later say that the district anticipates “robust interest.”
“Some of our staff and the fire department staff have gone out to visit other fire science programs,” said Garcia. “There aren’t too many of them out there, but regionally we’re looking at kind of being the place where kids who are interested in fire science want to come to learn more about that particular pathway.
“We feel like it’s a great opportunity for our students who want to potentially look into fire service.”
Downey Unified will host a two-night CTE Expo in February to help further familiarize the community with all the District’s CTE pathways.