77 percent of Dos Pueblos High School seniors graduated as A-G eligible last year, meaning they were able to apply to California State University and University of California colleges. This was the highest number of A-G eligible graduates that DPHS has seen.
Principal Bill Woodard shared this information on Thursday at the State of Our Schools presentation, and attributed this large percentage to the DPHS counseling team.
“Our counseling staff has worked really hard on this,” Woodard said. “One of their goals that they have … [is] to really improve those rates, and so starting all the way back in freshman year, they’ve been really working with students to make sure that they stay on track for A-G eligibility. They’re awesome.”
Also on Thursday, the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress score averages became available to the public. They revealed that DPHS had significantly higher scores in comparison to the rest of the Santa Barbara Unified School District high schools, and California as a whole. The data showed that the class of 2025 had 62.65 percent of students meeting or exceeding standards in overall performance. In comparison, this was about 16.7 percent higher than SBUnified’s overall performance, and 15.3 percent higher than the state of California.
What makes DPHS different from other high schools, according to Woodard, is the school’s culture.
“It’s cool to be smart here,” Woodard said. “We try to create a culture where we take these tests seriously, it’s the only … measure that the public gets to see. The better we do as a school, the better it looks when you’re applying to colleges and all these other things.”
The class of 2025 had higher average math scores, but lower average ELA scores than the class of 2024.
“Our current seniors improved math overall, and then for English, we were a little bit under our school record, which was set the year before, at 72 percent,” Woodard said. “We were at 69 percent this year, which is still very good, still well above the state and district averages. We know that there’s still a lot of work to do with … getting this year’s juniors ready to take the tests in April.”
Moving forward, Woodard is waiting to see the data regarding college and career readiness, which is meant to show how many students from the class of 2024 left DPHS college and career ready. It takes into account many factors besides CAASPP scores.
“That’s the metric that I care about the most,” Woodard said. “Because there are students that may not be great test takers, but they can take a dual enrollment class, or they can complete a Career Tech pathway and show that they are ready for the next level, even if they didn’t test well on CAASPP. So that’s the data that we’re looking for that’ll be out in a month.”
