It might only be the second week of August, but school is back in session, with kids beginning classes today, Aug. 9.

Wednesday was the first day of the 2023-24 school year in the Mountain View Whisman School District, as well as the Mountain View Los Altos Union High School District.

"We're excited. We're ready to get kids back," Mountain View Whisman Superintendent Ayindé Rudolph said in an interview on Tuesday. "It's an exciting time. It's almost like Christmas – the most wonderful time of the year."

Amid the excitement, Mountain View Whisman is also looking to spend the upcoming school year addressing the lasting effects that the pandemic had on students. One major focus will be trying to make progress in closing the achievement gap, Rudolph said.

Mountain View Whisman, like many districts throughout the country, have long had substantial disparities in academic achievement between student groups, including based on race and family income. Those gaps, in many cases, worsened during the pandemic.

One way the district is trying to tackle the problem is by creating a new early literacy team that will support students learning to read, with a focus on four elementary schools that have lower literacy rates for students entering kindergarten than the district overall: Castro, Gabriela Mistral, Monta Loma and Theuerkauf.

Over the summer, the district distributed book bags to incoming kindergartners who the district identified as potentially needing more support, including those from low-income families, those who are learning English and those who will be in special education classes, Rudolph said.

The district has also assigned two teachers to help support kids who recently moved to the United States, Rudolph said.

Transitional kindergarten is expanding this year, as more students are eligible to participate. A state law passed in 2021 will ultimately require school districts to serve all four-year-olds by the 2025-26 school year. Transitional kindergarten was previously only offered at Theuerkauf, but is now also available at Monta Loma, Castro, Mistral and Amy Imai.

On a more structural level, the district is working on implementing what's known as a Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS). It's an attempt to standardize the ways that the district supports students' needs.

According to Rudolph, schools currently have differing practices and the goal is to create more standardization. The district plans to start off by focusing on its interventions when a student is struggling academically, but will then expand to look at areas like mental health and discipline.

While much of the focus is on ways to improve, Rudolph said he also wants to take time to recognize the work the district's been doing, especially coming out of the pandemic.

"Just to recognize, look, we survived a very traumatic time," Rudolph said. "Now that we've made it through and people are sort of back to normal, let's celebrate some of the things that we're doing."