Don’t let our children lose their classroom family.

One week into the new school year, families in the Learning Through Literature (LTL) Multi-Age K-3 program at Rolling Hills Elementary were blindsided by an email: the K/1 classroom was being dismantled and students reassigned. This happened after hours on a Friday night, with no consultation, no warning, and no chance for families to be heard.

Why This Matters

According to its web-site, “Fullerton School District is proud to offer the Multi-Age Program as a district and state-approved Alternative Program of Choice. We are one of five districts in California offering this unique and innovative classroom learning environment. Multi-Age classrooms contain a mixed-age group of children who stay with the same teacher for several years. The children, teachers, and parents become a unique “family” of learners.”

Learning Through Literature (LTL) is the only district-promoted, literature-based multi-age program (K,1, 2, and 3) in Fullerton School District. LTL is more than a classroom. It is a community. Using books as the foundation for every subject—math, science, social studies, and art—this program cultivates empathy, critical thinking, creativity, and a lifelong love of reading. Families from across the district (and beyond) choose Rolling Hills specifically for this program.

Multi-age classrooms are designed to keep children with the same teachers for several years, building a close-knit learning family where older students mentor younger ones and continuity drives success.

Dismantling LTL:

• Directly affects the entire K-3 LTL classroom - 18 children in K/1 and 32 in 2/3 - their parents and teachers
  • Students in grades K/1 lose their classroom and community. 
  • Students in grades 2/3 lose the continuity of their lower-grade partners; being the “bigger buddy” is a highly anticipated role as children move from K/1 to 2/3
  • These students spent the summer preparing for this program and are now being uprooted just days into the school year.
  • These children, already shaped by the instability of the Covid years, are being asked to endure another unnecessary disruption
  • Teachers who spent years building this curriculum are being reassigned to roles they did not plan for
• Disrupts the other Multi-Age classrooms at Rolling Hills (MP3 and ABC) as the displaced LTL students are randomly assigned to their classrooms. The seeming ease with which the school and district made the decision to dismantle a specialized, district-promoted program with continuity from K-3 at its core, should make parents in our broader Multi-Age community very concerned
• Impacts Rolling Hills Elementary school and Fullerton School District 
  • A large portion of the LTL K/1 are inter and intra-district transfers, enrolling in Rolling Hills specifically because of program K-3 continuity, community of parents and children, and education through literature offered by LTL
  • Discontinuing a program based on continuity from K-3 due to low enrollment one year will devastate parents’ trust in such specialized programs, likely reducing inter-district transfers in the future

In an era where access to literature is increasingly restricted in many places, LTL actively nurtures critical thinking, diversity of thought, and respectful discourse making in our next generation.

What’s being presented as a “temporary change” is, in practice, the permanent dismantling of the program. Multi-age programs depend on continuity—once broken, they cannot simply be rebuilt.

Our Demands

• Pause the closure immediately.
  • Halt reassignment of LTL students until the Board of Trustees hears directly from families.
• Ensure transparency.
  • Release actual enrollment numbers, class size targets, and district policies on mid-year program changes.
• Protect family choice.
  • Honor Fullerton’s commitment to district-promoted alternative programs of choice like LTL. Decisions of this magnitude must include public input.

How You Can Help

• Sign this petition and share why LTL matters to you in the comments.
• Attend the Fullerton School District Board Meeting on Tuesday, August 19 at 6 pm at District Administration Offices, ELC Room, 1401 W. Valencia Drive, Fullerton, CA.
• Contact district leaders to voice your concerns:

Fullerton School Board Members 

Vanessa Estrella – vanesa_estrella@myfsd.org

James Cho – james_cho@myfsd.org

Beverly Berryman – beverly_berryman@myfsd.org

Ruthi Hanchett – ruthi_hanchett@myfsd.org

Aaruni Thakur – aaruni_thakur@myfsd.org

Deputy Superintendent of Human Resources

Dr. Chad Hammitt - chad_hammitt@myfsd.org

Superintendent

Dr. Robert Pletka – bob_pletka@myfsd.org, suptoffice@myfsd.org

(714) 447-7410

Our children walked into class one week, only to be told it would be gone the next.

Families were blindsided, students heartbroken, teachers undermined. We must act now to save the LTL program — for our kids, for our community, and for the future of literacy of our next generation.