FAIRFIELD — One of the great influencing factors for choosing a place to live, particularly for families with young children, is the quality of education available.
As far as Solano County is concerned, the quality of education at all levels is generally strong. Most of the schools in the Fairfield-Suisun School District, for example, are at or above statewide targets for school with a similar makeup of student bodies.
The same holds true for the school districts in Vacaville and Travis, with each of these having a particularly strong collection of elementary schools.
The Benicia district and Dixon district, each representing smaller communities, have high-performing schools throughout different levels.
The Vallejo school district has a number of different socio-economic challenges that are recognized within the statewide ranking system. Nevertheless, many of the Vallejo schools are on par or above similar schools throughout the state.
A lot of area schools are also implementing transitional kindergarten programs, which is a lengthier kindergarten day aimed at expanding the fundamental skills that can be taught to students in a kindergarten setting.
Six Solano County schools earned the state’s Gold Ribbon award for 2016-17, just two short of the eight earned by schools in Sacramento County, a county with three times the population of Solano.
A major issue facing districts throughout the state is a teacher shortage. Budget cutbacks stalled the ability to hire new teachers for a number of years. On top of that, due to budget cutbacks, many districts were forced to layoff teachers just starting out in their careers.
With these cuts and hiring freezes, the teacher pool throughout the state continued to age. As many as 1 out of every 3 teachers in California is over the age of 50, according to learningpolicyinstitute.org. There have been nearly 22,000 new teachers hired since 2015, which is just around 60-percent of the total needed to fill the vacant positions.
Solano school districts have done a better job than most throughout the state of filling this void. Solano school districts have hired over 200 new teachers since 2015, which is nearly twice the number hired by districts in Merced County, for instance, a county with roughly the same number of enrolled students.
