Kyla Calvert Mason

Part one of a series on San Diego Unified's growing homeless students population. — It’s 5:40 in the morning, and 16-year-old Courtney Medlin steps out the door of the group home where she lives in downtown San Diego to go to school. It’s likely she’s already been awake for two hours. “If I’m going to wash my hair in the morning, I’ll wake up at like 3:45 a.m. and I’ll wash my hair and then afterward I’ll get ready for school,” she says. The city bus stop is about four blocks away.

Students, parents and educators will have a new way of finding out how their neighborhood school is performing beginning Wednesday, when the California Department of Education rolls out its new School Dashboard Report. San Diego Unified School District officials said the new way of evaluating schools will be a big improvement over the previous method, in which only student test scores were used.

Fifth-, seventh- and ninth-graders in San Diego County scored similar results on the California Physical Fitness Test as the previous year's classes, defying a trend of drops among students statewide, according to figures released Monday. More than 1.3 million students statewide took the fitness test, which measures their health in six categories — aerobic capacity, body composition, abdominal strength, trunk strength, upper body strength and flexibility.