By Carlos Avalos
A former teacher is alleging that the Etiwanda School District’s administration in recent years compromised its educational mission in favor of maximizing funding it receives from the state, destroying the district’s once cutting-edge preschool program in the process, and is now disadvantaging the district’s youngest and most vulnerable students.
Antoinette Jensen taught for seven years in the Creating Learning Opportunities Utilizing Diverse Strategies (CLOUDS ) program within the Etiwanda School District. , initially as a permitted early child education preschool teacher at Grapeland Elementary, then at Golden Elementary for the 2022-2023 school year, followed by a position at Terra Vista Elementary for the 2023-2024 school year.
After more than a decade of building the CLOUDs program into what many considered to be a model program for integrating preschool students into a learning environment and bring them up to speed with regard to basic academic skills so they take full advantage of the educational opportunities awaiting them in first grade, second grade and beyond, the district’s administrators became thoroughly familiarized with and took full stock of how the State of California funds in public school system. Having learned how to tap into that generosity to be able to run legitimate programs aimed at targeting students of varying socioeconomic means and across the entire cognitive spectrum, those running the district eventually fell to manipulating the funding protocols to prioritize not furthering the education of the students the district was entrusted with but to bring substantial amounts of money into the district by enrolling more and more students into programs for which the state would provide augmentation funding whether or not the amalgam of students placed into those classes were benefiting the students or not.
In the case of the district’s CLOUDS program, according to Jensen, the teachers found themselves being overburdened with students across too wide of an age span being intermixed in the classes, resulting in their focus and span of control being tested beyond the breaking point. This, Jensen says, resulted in the once successful educational atmosphere within the classes being ruined and student academic achievement plummeting.
As a consequence, according to Jensen, the Etiwanda School District disserves the special education students in its preschool program, exploits their special-needs status, and even tolerates the abuse of special education students in its pre-kindergarten programs.
CLOUDS is a preschool program originally designed to allow Special Education preschool students 3-4 years of age to attend classes alongside General Education preschool students of the same age range. Each preschool class in the CLOUDS program is supervised by two professionals: a certificated early childhood special education teacher and a permitted early childhood education preschool teacher. Initially, CLOUDS program students attended either morning or afternoon sessions, but not both.
Over time, the district’s CLOUDS program, which began with a single class in 2005, enlarged, as the number of school sites offering CLOUDS classes gradually increased. By 2021, according to the district’s spokesman, David Oates, the district had 10 preschool cluster sites, three at Falcon Ridge, three at Grapeland and four at East Heritage. In 2022 the district increased the number of preschool classes to 13. In 2022, the district made what Jensen said was a significant change to the CLOUDS program when it welcomed transitional kindergarten (TK) students – students who are too old to be admitted to preschool but too young to be admitted to kindergarten.
Proponents of the expansion claimed that their aim was to enrich the preschool learning environment. Jensen, however, alleges that the expansion predictably had the opposite effect in the classroom and that the district’s real motive in expanding the program was simply to draw more funding from various local and state resources.
According to Jensen, through its expansion of the CLOUDS program the district sought to enroll TK students who are classified as “unduplicated.” An unduplicated student is one who is either an English learner, a foster child, or eligible for free or reduced-price meals. For each unduplicated student enrolled, according to Jensen, the district receives supplemental and concentration grants through the Local Control Funding Formula, known within educational circles by its acronym, LCFF.
There were two reasons Jensen took issue with what occurred, and is continuing to take place, in the Etiwanda School District. As originally conceived, the CLOUDS program classes brought together young students within the limited three to four year age range, ones of differing socioeconomic backgrounds to be sure, but whose experiential and developmental bases were similar enough to allow their attention to be captured and essentially maintained by the classroom’s certificated early childhood special education teacher and a permitted early childhood education preschool teacher using a variety of methodologies calculated to instill basic skills and expand the comprehension level of post-toddlers in the 3-year-old to 4-year-old age range.
Jensen’s most immediate observation was that by opening the age range too broadly, the district made it difficult or even impossible to effectively teach students of different cognitive levels. The more diverse your students are cognitively and developmentally, the harder it is to teach the same curriculum, according to Jensen. She felt this expansion of the CLOUDS program, although intended to be an adjustment that would enrich students through their involvement with others students, impacted the education atmosphere negatively.
A second related complaint is that she is bothered by the way the district used a pretext of enrichment that would benefit the students involved in the program when she feels it was actually to bring more state funds into the district.
It is Jensen’s contention that the district inappropriately exploited unduplicated students. The State of California, through its Local Control Funding Formula provides funding to school districts for each unduplicated student enrolled in a district educational program.
It is Jensen’s contention that the Etiwanda School District has cynically enrolled all of its unduplicated students in certain programs to get these state funds provided in support of unduplicated students.
The Expanded Learning Opportunities Program, known by its acronym ELOP, is a program that provides districts funds for after school activities. The district has recruited students into this program who are going to some sort of regular preschool. Prschools have separate morning and afternoon sessions. The district has allowed students who attend the morning sessions to also attend the afternoon sessions, and the district is then filing for state reimbursement through the ELO Program on the contention that it is entitled to that money because the students are involved in an after-school program, according to Jensen. Jensen feels the district has impermissibly stretched the definition of an after-school program and this is not only wrong but illegal and another example of the district trying to get funds.
Medi-Cal offers school districts funding for students classified as having special needs. Jensen claims that the district has asserted it is entitled to Medi-Cal funding it is not entitled to by lumping unduplicated students in the CLOUDS program with special education students – mixing prekindergarten students with special education students interchangeably so the district can bring in added revenue.
The disservice to these students is taking place as a consequence of creating an incompatible hybrid of preschool and traditional kindergarten that has diminished the educational atmosphere of scholastic setting, Jensen contends.
According to Jensen, as a consequence of the district’s mercenary effort to obtain state funding, students regressed – meaning they stopped performing at the expected grade level and became less able to perform academically – as a result. Put another way, according to Jensen, based upon her observations in a classroom setting over the time she has worked as an educator, the students in the CLOUDS program have, since 2022 gone backwards in their educational development. This conclusion is supported by achievement measurement criteria the district has employed in the CLOUDS setting, she pointed out.
Jensen said she was a believer in the soundness and value of the CLOUDS program as originally conceived and put into practice, and reiterated that the goal of providing positive, supportive, responsive and individualized instruction and relationships for preschool students was a legitimated supplemental education undertaking. In this way, she indicated, she previously had no problem with the district receiving revenue beyond the traditional general purpose funding it was receiving to institute the CLOUDS program and keep it running.
Prior to 2022, the program was achieving more than a modicum of success in fulfilling its stated purpose. It was when the district expanded the CLOUDS program to allow the younger special education students in the program to be joined by slightly older transitional kindergarten students, who under the previous guidelines would have been too old to be admitted to the program, that she detected problems which ultimately, she maintains, have greatly undercut the value of the program.
While an age differential of one, two or even five, ten and twenty years among adults can be of little consequence in the balance and functionality of a professional workplace in the business world, Jensen pointed out that an age difference of one year or even six-months among children of preschool age can represent a gap – and sometimes a virtually unbridgeable gap in cognitive and functional levels within a classroom setting.
She objected to the expansion of the CLOUDS program, her contention being that when slightly older kindergarten students were added to the CLOUDS environment things went awry. As a result of the change, according to Jensen, there was no longer a uniform classroom environment, whereupon teachers were being called upon to direct simultaneously a differing set of teaching lessons to three and four different educational/maturation/attention levels, resulting in one or more of those subgroups momentarily or for several minutes at a time being unfocused on or unattended to. This resulted in some students becoming bored and some of those or others acting up as they lost the attention of the teachers.
Exacerbating this situation, according to Jensen, is that at the time the CLOUDS program made this age-inclusion change, 2022, the number of CLOUDS classrooms expanded to 13. This entailed the CLOUDS classrooms experiencing a lack or shortage of supplies, including changing tables, as well as the hiring of new and inexperienced teachers who were rushed into service without adequate training. Some of these inexperienced teachers, according to Jensen, did not handle having to function in a classroom environment where there were multiple subgroups of students competing for what turned out to be an inadequate amount of attention from the teachers and the misbehavior of some to the students and chaotic atmosphere that followed as a result.
In at least some of those situations, including one in which Jensen said she was directly involved, this led to abuse of some of the students.
In essence, according to Jensen, this expansion of the CLOUDS program, which was cynically done by the district for mercenary motives, predictably diminished the capacity of teachers to effectively teach the students under their care and the quality of the classroom structure.
It is Jensen’s contention that by having 13 school’s worth of CLOUDS students enrolled in both morning and afternoon sessions, the district had militated to entitle itself to a substantial influx of Expanded Learning Opportunities Program funding from the State of California. Nevertheless, mainstream or normal or families that are not financially-challenged or English language-challenged or are not foster families must pay the district fees to enroll their children in the CLOUDS program. This has resulted in relatively light use of the program by paying families, according to Jensen, and the district has sought, perhaps unethically and maybe even illegally, to make up for this by manipulating the unduplicated status of certain students and fudging the true numbers. Simultaneously, some of the less affluent parents, foster parents and language-challenged parents are using an educational program for daycare at no cost to them, which is an abuse of the intent of the program and is likely having an impact on its overall effectiveness, she maintains.
Upon making her views known, encapsulating what she believed to be the program’s shortcomings in frank assessments to district higher-ups and/or questioned or protested certain of its aspects of the changes that had been made to the program or suggested that the state should apply some scrutiny to whether the district was adhering to the rules pertaining to both ELOP and LCFF funding, she experience mean-spirited resistance and retaliation, Jensen told the Sentinel. In her back and forth with district employees and the district’s administrative staff, she aired personal grievances against multiple district personnel, based in part on their willingness to go along with the district’s transgressions, when, she said, those staff members clearly recognized the district policy was inappropriate.
Ultimately, Jensen left the employment of the district.
The Etiwanda School District’s spokesman, David Oates told the Sentinel that Jensen’s suggestion that the 2022 expansion of the CLOUDS program to include in its classes transitional kindergarten students and from a venue of 10 classrooms to 13 classrooms was driven by financial considerations and specifically to bring more money into the district were untrue.
“Ms. Jensen’s accounts are incorrect,” Oates said. “In fact, no funding for the program changed.”
Jensen’s contention that the district used the ploy of enrolling transitional kindergarten students who are classified as “unduplicated” into the CLOUDS program to receive supplemental and concentration grants through the Local Control Funding Formula, Oates once again said was “incorrect. Etiwanda School District does not receive any concentration grant money.”
The district’s expansion of the number of CLOUDS classes in 2022 did not represent an overtaxing of the district’s resources or unacceptable, unmanageable of counterproductive change in the program, Oates insisted.
“We had a net increase of three classes districtwide, because we already had 10 classes at our preschool cluster sites – three at Falcon Ridge, three at Grapeland, and four at East Heritage.”
The 2022 transformation of the CLOUDS program to include transitional kindergarten-aged students in the program did not have a deleterious impact on the educational atmosphere in the preschool classrooms as Jensen claimed, Oates said. Her criticisms were based on opinion, he said, which did not qualify as sound educational policy or theory.
“Ms. Jensen’s opinion is not supported,” Oates said. “In fact, the district’s state performance plan indicator for preschool outcomes increased significantly during this timeframe, indicating that the impact on the educational atmosphere was overwhelmingly positive.”
Jensen’s assertion that the district’s adding of transitional kindergarten students into the mix of students in CLOUDS classrooms using the justification that doing so would enrich the learning environments was actually a pretext to obscure the district’s true motive of bringing in more state funds is a misreading of reality, Oates told the Sentinel. He further dismissed her contention that the district inappropriately exploited unduplicated students by enrolling many of them in the Clouds classes merely to get the state funds available for the money provided for placing them in a district educational program.
“This fundamentally misunderstands education policy,” Oates said of Jensen’s accusations. “Early education has been a major initiative of federal, state and local educational leaders. The Head Start Program, the Kindergarten Readiness Act of 2010, the California Department of Education’s Transitional Kindergarten Guide [and] the Universal Transitional Kindergarten Expansion Program all stress the urgency of including these students at exactly the ages we have implemented. Special education laws also stress the importance of inclusive programming. Pre-kindergarten and transitional kindergarten admissions are not, as Ms. Jensen suggests, a fundraiser. It is the essence of the urgent drive to set students up for success by their early integration into the classroom learning environment. We ensured all students who qualified under the unduplicated students program received the services and care for which they are entitled.”
Oates explained that “the purpose of transitional kindergarten students participating in the CLOUDS Preschool class was to provide them with additional support in foundational preschool skills. The enrollment process clearly outlined this, detailing the following: ‘Preschool focuses on foundational preschool skills. Children will work on pre-academic skills such as colors, shapes, letters and numbers, and social-emotional skills in an inclusive environment using developmentally appropriate activities that guide students to be actively involved in exploration, discovery, and play.’”
There was a degree of inexactitude, or perhaps a semantical dispute without any practical distinction, relating to the district’s reaction to Jensen’s charge that the district had widened, inappropriately and perhaps illegally, the admission criteria into the state’s Expanded Learning Opportunities Program, commonly referred to by its acronym ELOP, and welcomed students into dual courses that by, some interpretations, are mutually exclusive. Preschools have separate morning and afternoon sessions. According to Jensen, the district has allowed students who attend the morning sessions to also attend the afternoon sessions, which was historically not done.
“This is incorrect,” Oates said. “Students only attended one CLOUDS session, either morning or afternoon. These students attended their half-day transitional kindergarten class during the remaining portion of the school day. Etiwanda School District assigns students to either the morning or afternoon, not both. Even if they were to attend both sessions, the district doesn’t get reimbursed any additional money for it.”
Jensen is misinterpreting the California Educational Code by implying or stating that the district is stretching the definition of an after-school program or obtaining Expanded Learning Opportunities Program reimbursement to which it is not entitled by having students who are attending both transitional kindergarten and CLOUDS sessions.
“We disagree,” Oates said. He referenced a California Department of Education posting with regard to universal PreKindergarten which stated, “California launched UPK in the 2021–22 state budget by putting into action recommendations laid out in the California Master Plan for Early Learning and Care through a dramatic expansion of TK with universal access to transitional kindergarten for all four-year-old children by the 2025–26 school year and expanded access to the California State Preschool Program for income-eligible three-year-old children and children with disabilities. While universal PreKindergarten relies heavily on universal transitional kindergarten and California State Preschool Programs, it also includes other early learning programs serving three-and four-year-old children, including the federal Head Start Program, subsidized programs that operate a preschool learning experience and are operated by community-based organizations (including family child care), and private preschool programs. Families with four-year-old children can choose which pre-K program to enroll them in, but transitional kindergarten is the only option that will be universally available, and free of cost, for all four-year-old children as part of California’s public education system. Part of universal PreKindergarten is also the ELOP, which includes before school, after school, summer or intersession learning programs that develop the academic, social, emotional and physical needs of students and provides access to a full-day of programming that meets the needs of California’s working families.”
California launched UPK in the 2021–22 state budget by putting into action
recommendations laid out in the California Master Plan for Early Learning and Care through
a dramatic expansion of TK with universal access to TK for all four-year-old children by the
2025–26 school year and expanded access to the California State Preschool Program for
income-eligible three-year-old children and children with disabilities.
While UPK relies heavily on Universal Transitional Kindergarten (UTK) and CSPP, it also
includes other early learning programs serving three-and four-year-old children, including
the federal Head Start Program, subsidized programs that operate a preschool learning
experience and are operated by community-based organizations (including family child
care), and private preschool programs.
Families with four-year-old children can choose which pre-K program to enroll them in, but
TK is the only option that will be universally available, and free of cost, for all four-year-old
children as part of California’s public education system.
Oates said the Etiwanda School District is ahead of the curve among school districts statewide in seeking to get both preschoolers, transitional kindergarten-aged and kindergarten-aged children into a welcoming learning environment.
“In California, kindergarten is currently optional, not mandatory, for children,” Oates said. “The state mandates school enrollment at age six, typically for first grade. That said, AB 2226 was recently passed by the California Assembly to make kindergarten mandatory, starting with the 2026-27 school year. This bill would require children to complete one year of kindergarten before entering first grade in a public school.”
Oates responded to Jensen’s charge that the district is engaged in what is tantamount to Medi-Cal fraud by Oates addressed Jensen’s accusation that the district was tapping into money intended to redress medical issues, using bureaucratic sleight-of-hand by lumping unduplicated students in the CLOUDS program with special education students. This mixing of prekindergarten students with special education students interchangeably crossed the line from creative billing practices to an outright criminal abuse of the federal government’s generosity to the state, she said.
“The Etiwanda School District only bills Medi-Cal for students who receive its billable services, whose parents have given us written permission to do so,” said Oates.
Initially, Oates offered a relatively terse response to Jensen’s contention that the district is doing a disservice to its preschool students by having created – with the addition of transitional kindergarten students to the CLOUDS classes – an incompatible hybrid of preschool and traditional kindergarten that has diminished the educational atmosphere and scholastic setting.
“The Etiwanda School District hired three new teachers for three new classrooms, with some of the new teachers bringing experience from other local school districts,” Oates said. “As with any teacher new to the district, those teachers were provided with training and teacher induction support from the district’s professional development department.”
The district endeavored to preserve a teachable environment in the CLOUDS classrooms, Oates said, stating, “behavioral expectations were provided. Any student who was unable to meet those expectations was dismissed from the program. In doing so, we created a positive, inclusive, and effective learning environment.”
He continued, “Ms. Jensen’s opinion is flatly wrong, is contradicted by test scores, and fundamentally misunderstands federal, state and local educational policies,” Oates said. “These initiatives have improved the learning environment and are improving our children’s opportunities to be college and career ready. The data clearly supports that these strategies are working.”
The Sentinel thereafter pressed Oates with regard to the essence of Jensen’s contention that the expansion of the program had a deleterious effect on the CLOUDS classrooms by loading them with not only special education preschool students 3-4 years of age and general education preschool students 3-4 years of age but students who are at or nearly at traditional kindergarten age. The Sentinel emphasized that it was Jensen’s sincerely held belief that this change created a hodgepodge of cognitively and developmentally diverse students that proved simply too challenging for the CLOUDS instructors to handle. The Sentinel asked for refutation of Jensen’s assertion that in undertaking this expansion, that district officials were more focused on bringing money into the district than in the scholastic advancement of the students in the CLOUDS program.
Jensen, the Sentinel pointed out, appeared convinced that the district officials’ mercenary instincts had gotten the better of them and that as a consequence of the district’s effort to obtain more and more state funding, the CLOUDS teachers found themselves beset with multiple categories of students with different learning abilities, maturity levels and cognitive levels. This created classrooms – learning environments – that were too chaotic for truly productive teaching/learning to take place, according to Jensen and, resultingly, students regressed – meaning they stopped performing at the expected grade level and became less academically proficient.
Documentation showed, the Sentinel told Oates, that Jensen objected to the expansion of the CLOUDS program in 2022, her contention being that when slightly older kindergarten students were added to the CLOUDS environment things went awry. The Sentinel noted that as a consequence of what Jensen felt was a principled pursuit insistence on standards she believed to be appropriate, she was ignominiously relieved of her teaching position.
Oates responded.
“Ms. Jensen may believe that requiring teachers to integrate children with learning disabilities into the classroom is challenging for the teachers,” Oates said. “However, the reality is that many children have learning disabilities, and our first priority should be the child, not the adult who prefers a classroom where all children, including those with learning disabilities, can fully participate. Until the 1970s, children with learning disabilities had few, if any, rights to equal access to education, and even then, they were often placed in separate classrooms. Since the 1980s, the law mandates that children with learning disabilities are to be educated in integrated classrooms in the least restrictive environment. Isolating them for the convenience of adults who would rather not teach children with special needs is clearly against the law, our policy, and our mission to empower every child. Ms. Jensen’s criticism fundamentally misunderstands the law and the policies that support it.”
Oates continued, “Similarly, Ms. Jensen may believe that requiring teachers to instruct 4-year-olds is challenging, but the education policies of the United States, California, and this district acknowledge that it is even more difficult for a child to wait until they are 6 or even 5. Children benefit from a head start in education.
“Ms. Jensen’s criticism seems to stem from the belief that integrating students with learning disabilities and 4-year-old children is unique to Etiwanda,” Oates continued. “These practices are not exclusive to our district. Integrating children with disabilities is a legal requirement. While educating 4-year-olds is not mandated by law, it is strongly encouraged. When a parent enrolls a 4-year-old child who has a disability, the district is legally prohibited from denying access to 4-year-olds with disabilities. Furthermore, it is against the law to segregate all 4-year-old students with learning disabilities into a separate classroom, even if an adult prefers not to educate them.
She argues that four-year-olds with learning disabilities should not be integrated into the classroom. We fundamentally disagree. Four-year-olds with disabilities deserve to be in the classroom and benefit from the opportunities that early access to education provides.”
Oates was misstating her position entirely, Jensen said. She had no objection whatsoever to the inclusion of 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds in the CLOUDS classroom settings, she said. It was the inclusion of older transitional kindergarten students – ones nearly old enough to be in Kindergarten – into the CLOUDS classroom setting that was detracting from the education of those special needs students, she said.
“Let’s stop dancing around it,” Jensen said. “From 2022 to 2024, the Etiwanda School District placed transitional Kindergarten students into preschool classrooms during the school day, claimed they weren’t preschoolers, collected state transitional Kindergarten and enrichment funding, and called it legal. That’s false. This wasn’t ‘interpretation’ or ‘innovation.’ It was a direct violation of California education law.”
She continued, “Here are the facts: FACT 1 – Preschool programs cannot generate transitional Kindergarten funding.”
She reference a direct statement from the California Department of Education’s fiscal briefing, which says, “Preschool programs are not eligible to generate funding for transitional Kindergarten programs. Transitional Kindergarten funding is based on average daily attendance.”
Jensen intoned, “Yet, the district placed transitional Kindergarten students into CLOUDS preschool classrooms and still claimed TK attendance.”
She went on, “FACT 2: Expanded Learning Program funding cannot be used during the school day. She cited the California Education Code § 46120(b)(1), “Expanded Learning Program funding shall be expended… before or after school—not during the school day.”
Jensen said, “Yet, the district openly stated in its own program overview (CLOUDS TK+Preschool PDF) that these students were placed in preschool during the school day using a so-called “mixed delivery” model.”
She next quoted Nicholas Newman, of the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, in citing what she called “FACT 3: Transitional Kindergarten must be taught by a fully credentialed teacher.” She offered Newman’s quote, which reads, “Transitional Kindergarten is not considered a preschool program and any teacher in a transitional Kindergarten teaching position must have a full teaching credential.”
— Nicholas Newman, Commission on Teacher Credentialing
“All CLOUDS classrooms were staffed with permit-only early childhood educators, and early childhood special education teachers, not the multi subject credentialed teachers the law requires.”
