On last Friday’s Up Close Show, our own Gary Daigneault spoke with Yucca Valley High School Principal Justin Monical across a variety of positive developments, including Yucca Valley High’s high education scores and graduation rates.
On the subject of academics, Daigneault remarked “I don’t think a lot of people realize what a remarkable record our local schools have with graduation rates, quality of education… exceeding even state standards.”
Prompting Monical to “blow that up a bit,” Monical replied: “I think it’s something that gets under-celebrated. Our graduation rate have steadily crept back up to where we were pre-pandemic. Pre-pandemic we were having 90% of our students making it to graduation successfully which was far and above state average. Obviously, everybody struggled during the pandemic, but we’ve crept back up to that 85-90% mark which is, again, at or above that state average. Which we are always targeting—we want our kids to be at the tip of the spear with things. Last year we had a great year with standardized testing where our students showed what they know, and we had an average rate of improvement on language arts test at 20 points per student, which was 7 times more than our target was supposed to be. In mathematics we had our students improve 28 points on the state assessment—that’s 9 times what our projection was supposed to be.”
Monical went on to praise Yucca Valley High teachers, calling them a “tremendous group of leaders who are academically driven and want to be successful.”
