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two years, both of them struggled to get out of bed each morning.
“I didn’t know where our next dollar was going to come from for groceries or gas for the car,” said Wendy, who is now her mother’s caregiver.
In April, a local hospital told the Fryes about Avenidas Care Partners, an elder care and case management program, one of many run by Avenidas, a Palo Alto nonprofit. The free case management service helped get them back on track and able to stay in their longtime home.
Avenidas offers a variety of low-cost and free services for older residents, including emergency funds of up to $300 to residents living on fixed incomes like the Fryes who suffer financial setbacks.
Avenidas’ emergency fund, which was created in 2012 with a $10,000 gift from the family of a former client, is nearly depleted and in need of new donors to continue. The agency supports Mid-Peninsula residents age 50 and older. Unforeseen occurrences, such as no longer being able to drive or clean one’s home or having to pay for a dental procedure out of pocket, can be devastating for older, lowincome residents who often no longer have spouses or family members to support them.
“Life is becoming so expensive for most people in our area, except for the very wealthy,” said Paula Wolfson, Avenidas’ manager of social work services. “We’re going to have people in the next year or two with a lot of need, whether it be dental Kathy Lierle and Terry Galonoy live in Lierle’s Palo Alto home. She says Avenidas helped them stay in the home.
care, co-pays (that) tend to be higher than anywhere else in the area. … The cost of rent, people getting eviction notices, rents being raised, the cost of food — eyeglasses, hearing aids, dental work are not covered by (Medicare); it’s all private pay.”
The emergency assistance was a godsend for the Fryes, but they say Avenidas’ case management services are what got them back on track. The nonprofit offers case management services to 50 residents.
About 50 clients benefit from the emergency fund, all of whom receive inhome consultations to find out how well they are eating, how mobile they are, the state of their mental health and their financial situation. These clients receive free home visits from caseworkers on a regular basis for years, if necessary. Hospitals and physicians also refer low-income, elderly patients to Avenidas, knowing that its caregivers have a more intimate relationship with clients.
“We get contacted by doctors because they can’t see the clients in the home, but we can pick up where they hand off,” elder care
consultant Emily Farber said. “There’s often one identifying problem, you know, I need someone to clean my home or I got this medical bill, but the reason for this ongoing case management rather than just a one-time phone call or onetime meeting is because, yes, there’s this whole crop of other issues that come about that we work with and we prioritize.”
Farber helped the Fryes qualify for a 25 percent utility discount, grocery assistance from CalFresh that amounts to $72 in savings each month on average, and supplemental health insurance from Medi-Cal that saves Martha $300 a month. With Farber’s help, they are now renting out rooms to long- and shortterm renters for additional income. Martha’s eyesight has improved, and she is undergoing physical therapy to improve her balance so she can go visit a sister who lives in Minnesota and is unable to travel.
“There is hope now,” Wendy said. “The weight of getting better and not having to fall behind on our house payments, that’s so major.
“Emily just came in and
that more than 10 percent of their students missed 18 days or more out of the school year. Officials say this statistic is important because it helps indicate a student’s engagement and whether they’re likely to drop out of school.
School suspensions: More than 5,000 schools, or roughly 53 percent, received green or blue ratings in this indicator. About 30 percent were rated red or orange. While school officials are generally optimistic about the state’s direction in this category, many schools continue to have disparities in school suspensions that negatively impact black and Hispanic students.
Graduation rates: One of schools’ overall top-performing indicators, more than 1,000 high schools, or about 58 percent, were rated green or blue for their graduation rates. This backs the state’s record graduation rate touted by many school officials. But there’s the aforementioned credit recovery asterisk.
On college and career readiness, schools are faring worse. One of the new indicators on the dashboard measures how well California’s high schools prepare students for postsecondary careers. About 675 schools, or 38 percent, were rated green or blue in this category. The state gave nearly half, 47 percent, of high schools a red or orange rating.
And a closer look underscored the diversity of California, where more than 6.2 million students are enrolled in some of the most elite and most challenged public schools in the nation.
West Contra Costa Unified, where 72 percent of students are socioeconomically said, ‘We can do this.’ Suddenly, there was a list of things to work on, not just our wheels spinning. None of these things would have happened without Emily.”
It’s not just older residents living on fixed incomes that benefit from Avenidas’ case management services.
Kathy Lierle and Terry Galonoy, who live as companions in the Palo Alto home Lierle bought in 1975, have good finances, but both in the past year developed complex health issues. Lierle, who is in her 70s, until recently expected to take care of Galonoy,
disadvantaged and one-third are English language learners — and where California’s new Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond was once on the school board — rated orange in reading and math and orange in student suspensions.
Meanwhile, in Kentfield Elementary, an affluent Marin County district of 1,200 kids whose residents include Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom, the dashboard scores were an upbeat mosaic of blues and greens. Only about 10 percent of Kentfield Elementary kids come from lowincome households.
Los Angeles Unified, the nation’s second-largest school district and California’s largest, ranked yellow in both reading and math, with a blue for its low suspension rate of 0.5 percent.
And at all three districts, their wildly different academic performance ratings notwithstanding, the rating for chronic absenteeism was a glaring orange.
Michael Kirst, president of the California State Board of Education that developed the school accountability system, said in a statement that the dashboard “shows us which students have the greatest needs and which areas of our educational system need the most attention, which is exactly what it was designed to do.”
“Challenges that once may have been hidden, such as how poverty, homelessness and disability affect student learning, are now in sharp focus,” Kirst said. “Conversely, it also shows us which school districts are succeeding so they can serve as models for others as we build professional sharing networks throughout 91, at her home until the end, but she now realizes she may not have much time left herself. They both have children, but none who live in the area, and before Avenidas intervened, Galonoy didn’t have a living will and Lierle didn’t know how his care would be managed if she was out of the picture.
“Literally, it’s made our lives possible,” Lierle said. “It’s helped us stay in our home instead of going to a home. Avenidas is supportive of independent living.” the state.”
Hahnel of EdTrust-West said the new dashboard is “a big facelift” from its first version, but that “there are still issues with accessibility.”
“There’s a lot of data to explore, and that’s great,” Hahnel said, “but it’s not always intuitive and it does take some digging and deciphering to make sense of it all.”
And while this year’s dashboard measures more data than it did the year before, it’s drawn some criticism for what it’s left out. The dashboard now measures schools’ performance in addressing chronic absenteeism, but not at the high school level, where data is more likely to show higher rates of absences among older students.
Samantha Tran, senior managing director for education policy at Children Now, an Oakland-based nonprofit, nonpartisan advocacy group, said it’s “really unfortunate” that the dashboard lacks chronic absenteeism for high schools. The metric, Tran said, helps you find “kids who are not engaged fundamentally” in school and who would be less likely to graduate.
“You really should have it on the dashboard, color code it and make sure districts are looking at it,” Tran said. “(Chronic absenteeism) is one of those leading indicators where you can really turn around what’s happening for a kid, a whole subgroup of kids at a high school if you knew they weren’t coming and you were attentive to that.”