Parents demand North Monterey County Unified superintendent’s resignation.

Amid routine business at a North Monterey County Unified School District board meeting on Thursday, June 8, five people spoke up with an unusual request – demanding the resignation of Superintendent Kari Yeater, who has been the district’s leader since 2012.

The demands are new—when the board renewed Yeater's contract in 2022 "I don’t recall receiving a single letter calling for her resignation, and no complaints from community members,” says NMCUSD President Elizabeth Gamez Samuels, who has served on the board for eight years.

A group of parents called NMC Parents4Change are challenging that decade-long narrative. On June 2, the group started a petition on change.org requesting the board not renew Yeater’s contract; as of June 13, the petition has gathered 794 signatures. Once they knew her contract wasn’t up for renewal this year, they shifted to demanding her resignation.

They cite poor academic performance and lack of maintenance of school athletic facilities.

“I have significant concerns with the leadership of the district,” parent Sara Ruiz says. “They’re failing our kids academically when you look at our math and language scores.”

Math scores for 11th-graders are low compared to other school districts across Monterey County. Only 3.6 percent of students at NMCUSD met or exceeded their math requirements during the 2021-2022 school year. The second-lowest-performing district was Soledad Union High School District, with 9 percent. Gonzales, Salinas and Monterey Peninsula high school districts saw between 12 and 21 percent of students meeting the requirement, while over 50 percent of students in Carmel and Pacific Grove did.

The pandemic had a negative impact on academic performance in North Monterey County. On average, sixth-graders’ passing math scores plummeted from 24.7 to 9.8 percent from pre – to post-pandemic.

State testing isn’t the only way schools measure student progress. They base students’ learning on what they learned in a year. For example, suppose a sixth-grader has the math proficiency of a third-grader and ends sixth grade with the math proficiency of a fifth-grader. It’s considered a success, even if he isn’t at his grade level, because he keeps progressing.

The district says low math scores have been a concern because of different factors including changes in math standards, difficulty recruiting qualified math teachers and language barriers, since a high percentage of the student body are English learners.

Fernando Munoz, a parent of two kids who graduated from North Monterey County High, says his son struggled with math in college and fears his daughter may face the same.

Desiree Alvarado, who graduated last year, is now at Monterey Peninsula College where she says she failed her Introduction to Algebra class and will retake it this summer. “I never really learned it in high school,” she says.

The district says it is working to address low math proficiency by providing training to English learner teacher specialists and developing new curriculums.