Bring this meeting to order. Please stand for the pledge. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Welcome, everyone, and I will turn it over to mister Mapes. Board, this evening, we've kind of got a presentation that's going to be a celebration of all of our teachers' and administrators' work and our students' work for the 'twenty four-'twenty five school year. And I say it's a celebration, as you'll see, as Doctor. Kegley makes this presentation of all the academic gains that this district had last year.
And we've talked about it in bits and pieces, but most of it is has not been available for us to do until the state unembargoed all of it. And we're still not done because graduation rates come in another month or so, and so we'll follow-up with that. But since it is a lot of information, if you have questions, let's hold them till the end. And then if you have questions after you get the document in your hands and look through it, if you'll just e mail everybody and Doctor. Cagle will get some of those answers to you as well. So I'll turn it over to Doctor. Cagle. Thank you, Mr.
Mave. Good evening, Board. As Mr. Mave said, before I get too deep into things, some of this data you've seen before in the last month or so, two months as we release some things as we were able to. But once it is nice to be able to see everything in context to understand, okay, what are these assessments do for us again. So, I'll review a little bit of that as we go along as well as see how we compare, to neighboring districts, to other peers, so that we can kind of get a perspective of where do we land compared
to everybody else. I would echo the sentiments that, mister Mapes said. Me and my team have had the opportunity to witness over the last year, the hard work and dedication that our teachers have done, sat in numerous meetings for countless hours to for them to work on professional development plans to chart a course of how we're gonna better support and serve the teachers in the classroom. They're they're they're where the rubber meets the road. And so, I'm just a conduit tonight to share a lot of the good news, but, the kudos go to those folks.
So we're gonna jump in. I think. You good, Jeff? Yeah. I appreciate the packed house, Larry. Thanks for being here tonight. Too nice to not to, you know, come to this, I guess, to outside. Okay. I'm gonna jump in with the the big splash headlines and then talk about some of this in a little more detail as we as we get down the road here with each of these, standardized exams. We know that standardized assessments from the state do not tell the whole picture of our of our children, of our schools, of our entire district, but they are a moment in time where we can take a picture and say,
how are we doing? And so, in reflection of that, looking at our IREED three, the big takeaways there, we increased from a 2% increase as a district from 94% to 96%. That's our highest passing rate in five years. 10 of our 13 schools of our Elkridge Elementary Schools reached 95%, which is kind of the state goal. That's what they want us to target and shoot for. They were 95% or higher. That's a doubling of the number of schools, up from five last year. All of our elementary schools,
were 90% or higher. We were close to that mark last year, but we got there this year. And, our demographic groups, which we keep an eye on, all demonstrated really strong achievement. Just some examples, our Black students had the highest passing rate in four years. Our free and reduced lunch students had their highest passing rate in four years. Our E and L students, the same. And we had a 14% increase in achievement for our special education students in IRE3 over last year, so a lot to celebrate there.
In iLearn, our English and math combined were up 1.4 points. We've been up over 10 points in the five test administrations. Four of our six tested grade levels plus the district showed increases in Language Arts and five of the six plus the district in Math. We'll dive into those numbers in a little more detail in a minute. Nine of our 12 demographic groups that we keep an eye on increased in Language Arts and 10 of the 12 increased in Math.
At our upper grades, two big, assessments that we keep an eye on, SAT and AP. We remain third in comparison to similar schools with our SAT data, for the writing and the math combined. We did have a 2.8% increase in the writing portion and 4.2% in math over last year. Both schools, demonstrated their highest percent of passing, which is considered a three plus in AP for the last five years of both of our high schools. We had an increase of over 200 exams that were taken from 2024,
and we still increased by 3%. So that's a and we'll look at an example of that as we get down the road here. And once again, over 50% of our graduating seniors in 2024 from 2025 class graduated having gotten a three or higher on at least one AP exam during their high school year. That's I think it's pretty outstanding achievement. So fifty percent of the ones that took the test, not just anybody in AP, you're saying? No. 50% of our graduating seniors. All of our all of our seniors in 2025.
Okay. Thank you. And they were up it was up slightly from just a little bit from the previous year. That's another mark that we've achieved before, but it's great consistency for our students. So let's look a little bit deeper into, our I read three scores. This is a school by school comparison, as well as you have the district at the bottom. The red indicates 95% or higher so that you can see specifically, where each school landed, since 2022 historically up to this past year and, again, the 96% increase or 2% increase for the district.
We had Deer Creek 94.9. The state doesn't let us round up unfortunately, so they were right there, or we would have had one more school in that mix of 10. This is a look at and I use the same, comparison schools throughout all of the different assessments. So when you see this group, all we have all of our conference, our athletic conference schools included in here as well as a few other high performing districts. And so you can see where we compared to
that comparison group. Mister Mapes has also shared that when you look at schools with an enrollment of a thousand or more students, we were number one, in I read three for 2025. Can you remind me please where Penn Harris is? By South Bend. Oh, okay. Thank you. Penn High School would be their high school, but that's the school corporation name. Thank you. Yes. Before we leave iREED, I wanna I wanna show you an example of the effect of how, our students taking the the the iREED three exam as a second grader helped us
really hone in on the skills that they needed. So in 2024, fifty eight point four percent of our second graders going into third grade had already passed I Read three. This current year, our current sitting third graders, already eighty one point one percent of them have passed. That's the same class? No. It's two different classes. Two different classes. So our our this is our sitting third graders and the sitting third graders from a year ago. I think that really speaks to, a,
our teachers' understanding, how what, you know, what's involved in the test and what it's about and how but really honing into those skills so that as even as second graders, we know that we can start to prepare our students for what that exam calls for and get them prepped and ready to go, so that they can do the best that they can. And, we'll see as if this pattern continues for us. We I mean, the fact that we are have sitting third graders, and 19.9% of them still need to get across the finish line,
and they will have two test administrations to do that. There'll be an early spring and then a summer. Really helps our teachers be able to focus in on making sure that those students, because that number is obviously whittled down from the from a class of probably 1,500, whittled down to really focus on those skills and make sure they have what they need so that they're ready to go by the end of the third grade year. Can I just ask or maybe you can remind me, when did we start focusing on second grade for IRE to help boost third grade third grade scores?
So the state allowed us to opt in, two years ago, I believe. When was it? In '24. We opted in in '24. Okay. Now everybody does it. Okay. Got it. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Shifting to the iLearn exam that we've had for for many years for grade for students in grades three through eight in English language arts and math. For the the fifth year running now, we've increased our passing rate for both. These are students who passed both, in test administration for the district at fifty three point nine percent.
And then when we look at it grade by grade, this is kind of reflective of the takeaway I gave you at the beginning, but you can see in red, the number of schools that were in 2025 that were higher than last year. But more importantly, I also want you to draw your attention to the five year change because what this demonstrates is that over the course of time, we have continued to kind of see that stair step. And you can see that in our primary grades, mostly up to grade six,
we've got double digit increases over the last five years. So, this isn't an issue. We know that sometimes we'll have classes come through and we might have a valley and then a peak in terms of performance. So when we look at the total over a longer span, it helps us see is our program really sound, are we really working towards the things we need to work towards. And I think these all of these scores are evident of that. And if and looking at that then, so interpreting it, we would be going on an angle then, correct?
Because for '21, it's third grade, but in '22, that would be that fourth grade class. If you were following cohorts, correct. Okay. They would go diagonally down to the corner. And it looks like on the majority of them, they've all were improved, which is pretty high. Even this year, breaking down the data, we noticed that we had, maybe some individual schools who had a drop in performance, maybe in language arts or math from the previous year. But when we follow their cohort through, they actually grew. So, those those are pieces. We we try to keep your eye on both.
We do wanna see how kids grow as they go along, but it's also important to look at the grade level data at this point in time because it helps us know is the programming that we have in place, is the instructional is the instructional practices that we have in place at this grade benefiting all students year after year, and that help these these sports help us to see that. So in other words, you watch that, let's say, three year span, is it always at 55 or did it go 55, 58, 59, then you know that they've improved in that grade level for those?
And then you do it even more so, do you break down the schools also? Yes. So like it says fifth grade, so then would you also have data for yourselves? Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely. Excellent. And most importantly, those buildings are are taking that data Mhmm. And, you know, refining their practices as well if it calls for it. Okay. Great. Thank you. For math, again, all but third grade was an increase over previous, 2024. But some when you look at the five year change, some really great improvements there. Particularly wanna highlight the work of our junior high junior high folks over the last
five years, 16 and over 20 gains in that time period, speaks to the work that they're doing. Again, it's not just a point in time, but we're seeing over time that, we're doing the right things to raise for us. This is really, really encouraging for us. This is looking at that same comparison group of schools. English language arts is in the blue. Math is in red. We're right there in the middle of the chart, but near the top in comparison schools, with our district. These are district comparison numbers.
This just demonstrates, if you look at that comparison group, just the difference in year over year change. This is for Language Arts. So we grew 1.3% as a district in Language Arts. You can see who else grew, who maybe stayed the same, who went down. And then we do the same thing for Math, and we grew two percentage points in Math overall. And you can kind of see how that shook out for for everyone in that group. As I mentioned, our work, and how our students performed, We do a breakdown of the demographic groups and we look at 12 different groups,
ethnicity and then we also look at free and reduced, we look at our special education students and we look at, our E and L students. What we want to see is what you see most like in the American Indian column, is we would love a sharp stair step up, but a gradual stair step will show that that demographic group is making strides over the year, and we do have some really nice increases here. Our Black students increased 4.4% in the English language arts.
Our American Indian students were up 9.7%. In looking at this group, we've got, again, some decent stair steps, a little bit more of a flat line for a lot of the groups. But our big focus here is how do we make sure we're trying to close the gaps between, the highest performing groups and our lowest performing groups. And that's a part of all of our, many of our school goals as they work for their school improvement plan as well. And then to see the same thing in math, little bit more of a clearly defined,
not as much of an up and down as it relates to math, a little more of that gradual increase as we look at various groups. Okay. We're gonna shift to the high school now. SAT data. So just as a reminder, every March, the state requires our juniors to sit for one free test administration for them of the SAT, and that is their accountability measure for high school. So all of our eleventh graders sat for one day in March this past year. The important thing to keep in mind is we know as we sit here and
we tailor curriculum and we tailor programming to all the needs of our students, we know that not every child wants to go to a four year university, and the SAT is often the metric that many universities use for admissions. But having said that, I think we've still shown ourselves to produce some really strong scores. So again, we're kind of in the middle of this chart with that comparison group, achieved our highest in the last four years. So this is the four years that the state has been requiring that we sit,
for that exam in March. So 78.1 in the evidence based reading and writing. So for clarification, a student can sit there and just write CC, CC, CC, CC, CC because they didn't want to go to college and they were already accepted into a trade school or something and they chose not to do this, that is unfortunately figured into our data, correct? It would be in that scenario. I'm not saying that there are several. But technically, when not every student has to sit there and do their very best. Right. Okay. Thank you. I had kind of a similar question that you asked.
Do we have any data on how our kids are performing that are going to a four year school? Do we survey them or anything and say, are you going to a four year school and how those kids did? Well, we have, senior surveys that our classes typically do every year in the spring before they graduate that they will do some kind of indication of what their future plans are. I'm not sure, Jason, if we've ever tied that directly back to this administration. As we know, students can sit multiple times for an for the SAT,
and some start as early as their sophomore year. This is just the administration that we tend to focus on because the state requires it of us and we know that every kid in that class is sitting for this particular exam. Okay. So this one is only the results from the SAT, the first one that we offer? The one that they take as juniors in March. So they If they go and retake them, that's not in this. Right. You will have kids sitting in this administration that maybe have taken it twice already and many that it's their first time.
This is an example of that comparison group and our 2.8 percentage increase compared to, again, those other districts. And then as we turn our attention to math, you can see as a whole, the composite scores are a little bit lower than the writing scores, as a whole for everyone. But we did show a nice increase up from last year where we had kind of dipped a little bit. That's the green the far right green bar for us. And then this looks at that group in terms of percent change. Am I reading that correctly that we had the highest change?
That you would be reading that correctly. Excellent. Thank you. So when we look at both scores, the writing and the math together, we have a composite score of 56.5, which of these comparison schools, again, as I mentioned at the outset, we remain third among this group. We're going to shift our attention to Advanced Placement. So, as you may know, but if not, I'll just provide a little tutorial for you. So we offer many advanced placement courses at our high schools. Those are those are open to students,
throughout their high school journey. So there are even courses that are accessible as freshmen, but we consider all these courses to be college level. And we strongly encourage every student that takes an AP course to sit for the exam because they've they put in the work, throughout an entire year, and we want them to have an opportunity to possibly reap the benefits of doing well on that exam because that can translate depending on what their major is going to be. If they go on to a four year school,
it's an opportunity potentially for them to earn some college credit. So what we like to think of passing on an advanced placement is a student that scores at least a three or higher out of five on the exam. This is broken down by our two high schools, and then you see a district total. So of students who took any AP course last year and sat for the exam, at Fishers High School, eighty seven percent of those students got a three year higher, and at HSE, eighty five percent of those students got a three year higher.
So it's really some outstanding work. On one or more concept? One or more. More, yes. So for clarification, if looking at Fishers only, 2,679 tests were taken by the thirteen sixty students. Yeah. And the percentage is the percentage of students that got a three year higher, not the percentage of exams that those students took that got a three year higher. Okay. Good clarity. Thank you. So this is a detailed look at just Fishers High School. And what I want to see on this and what we can see from this
graph is that we've steadily increased over the years in the percent that they're achieving at three or higher. This is a great example of what I talked about at the outset where, you'll look for the 2025 year. Fishers went from 2,370 students or or I'm sorry. Ten sixty seven students that took 2,370 exams in '24. We increased our exam total, by over 300 and still went up in the achievement side.
So that's that's great work. Stop me if you're I might be getting ahead of you. But do we have any metrics for as far as I can tell so far, all these are geared towards kids who would be going to a four year school, SATs, AP exams. Do we have anything for kids who may be on a different track? There's the military exam, I can't remember the name of it. Hazbabs. There you go. Or trade school certifications, that kinda any of those things. We're kind of in the that needs to become a part of this yearly report. And so that as students are on the new diploma path and as they're earning
the different seals and whatnot, those are things that we need to be including in this so that we have a picture of all of our kids. Yeah. Absolutely. Because there would be many kids who are not stepping into an AP classroom. The same information for H and C High School. Sometimes you will see, a varying difference in the number of students that are taking an AP course or sitting for AP exams. Also remember that AP is just one potential dual credit opportunity for our kids. So we we have many kids that are sitting in an ACP course,
which is IU's dual credit course option that are also doing quite well. They're paying for their tuition upfront in that course, and then whatever grade becomes part of their transcript on the back end. So when our see our kids are going through our their counselors and they're working on their plans and whatever, what what, and this could be a simple answer, I don't know, what institutes them to that our numbers went up? Like we went up at Fishers, for example, 300 students. What helps that to happen? Is it just introduction to it from their counselors or different programs?
I mean, what do you feel or what does the school do? I mean, I'm glad to see. Yeah. But what are the reasons of why that would go up? A variety. Our our both of our high schools have, evenings where they will have, like, a course fair type of thing before students sign up so that they can get an understanding and idea of something that they might wanna take. So if they've not, you know, if they might have an interest in an AP course, they can talk to instructors firsthand and and not in a classroom setting to kinda
understand, tell me about this course, and would I be a good candidate? Here's what I've done in the past. I think the other thing is, when you look over time, is we've done a really good job of bringing on AP courses at varying levels in the in the, high school years. And so there are some courses, for example, computer science came on a few years ago as an AP course. That's a really accessible course for freshmen to come in and take who may be really apprehensive about diving into an advanced placement type of course.
And so I think it's a combination of things, but, certainly having an understanding of what's required of them if it's going to be their first AP class. And then we have kids certainly who get on a track because they love science or math, for example, and they max out and they want to take as many of those high level courses as they do. So basically providing those resources at the two high schools. And I'm assuming our CCA buildings or those programs there are really helping with promoting that. So that's I just kind of want to point that out that
it's not just one thing. We're we have those two great college and prep programs. Is it career and college? Yes. College and career. Yes. So I just want to point out that that's pretty amazing, the work they do. Well and as students go through their high school career and they start to hone in a little bit more, particularly if they want to go to college, they start honing in a little bit more about where I might want to do that and understanding what requirements or what would make me a what would make me stand out as a potential student for that school to pick me.
And that might mean taking certain AP courses that I otherwise might not have thought about. And so that can also play a hand. That the reason why we give the PSAT is that it generates a report as well, AP potential report based on that score on the AP exam. Then it kind of calculates a list of courses, AP courses that may be based on that score that you'll be qualified to take. So we use a diagnostic as well. The results and data, Mr. Urban, who's speaking, for people who can't hear, you're stating that the PSATs,
those results are taken into consideration and it helps to, like, flag or mark some possibilities for students. Excellent. Thank you. That's a great tool. Thank you for adding that. It's a great tool for our counselors to be able to, before they even meet with the student, come in and say, hey. We noticed you scored at this level on the PSAT. You'd be a good candidate for these three courses, for example. So some great opportunities to celebrate, some achievement. Let's talk about what's ahead for us this year because, we never want to stop moving forward. This is that time of year where our schools are finalizing they're in the process
of finalizing their school improvement plans. We will, as a team, be meeting with every school, for a presentation of those, here in just we start right after Labor Day, and those are all due to the state, in early October. And it really gives us a chance to see holistically with every building, what your school goals are, what you're trying to really focus on, and your plan for doing that throughout the for the next upcoming year. Really, our teaching and learning team has been working really closely with our buildings, both in the NIET structure and with their PLC work.
We do have PLC at our secondary level. NIET is K through four last year. I have on here that we're also adding that structure for our intermediate schools this year. And at HIJH, the entire building is working on the NIET structure. ILearn checkpoints. So last year, we piloted iLearn checkpoints in grades seven and eight. We wanted to get some idea of what would be ahead for us because this year, iLearn checkpoints are required for every school at all testing grades.
So we will have three separate small iLearn tests that will take place throughout the course of the year and then the summative exam as we have traditionally in in later in the spring. Summative test is a little smaller because of the three along the way, but the summative test is the one that still counts in terms of the data that I shared with you. But the three along the way help us understand what does the student learn? What do they know now? What do they not know now?
So it's not really an accountability measure from a school perspective, but more of a full what we call a formative assessment for our students to understand where we're at in their learning process, what they still might need to work on before they move along through the year. So those are coming for grades three through eight. Does is that happening for every school district, or is that just something we're implementing? No. Every school district is required this year to do that. Okay. Thank you. Mhmm. We got a new tool that we're we're rolling out to our buildings,
called Otis, which is really, a program a software program that that is web based that really allows us to take all the data, educational data available to us, and very succinctly run reports so that throughout the school year, we can make sure data gets into that system so that we can better understand what students are on track, what students aren't, and what and then allows teams in our buildings to put in the right interventions to make sure that they're getting the students,
you know, getting them if they need the reteaching moment, then that's happening. If they may need that for an extended period of time. So we're really excited about that, program. We rolled it out to principals last month at a principals meeting and just gave them enough to really get them excited about the opportunity because as you can imagine, it is it is pretty time consuming to, you know, pull iLearn data from this place, go find the, you know, the DIBELS data from over here or the NWEA data from here,
and be able to piece that all together when you have 500 students in your elementary school. So that can be quite a chore, and this this does this for us really quickly. And we think it's gonna make our our process of evaluating our students along the way and not just waiting till the end to see how they do, much more succinct. Mentioned the structure of NIET at the intermediate level. And then our junior highs did some great work last year, our junior high teachers in English, composition, and math, about making sure that our curriculum maps as they piloted the checkpoints,
once they got through those, that they were really clearly defined about the the sequence and scope of of our curriculum so that they can do everything they can to make sure that we have taught students information that they need before they take that checkpoint. And that we're not it's not a situation where we're, oh, we don't really do that till December, but the checkpoint already happened. And we haven't had an opportunity to really assess if the student even knew that information or not because they might not have been taught it yet.
And so they did some deep dive into that work, and and the junior highs will be using that as well as some formative assessments along the way now to be able to know with the checkpoints, hey, our kids are on mark. They're achieving where we want them to before we get to the end. And so that's an experience looking ahead that our lower grades will also start to experience as we take checkpoints and teachers get a chance to see, okay. Here's what's here's what's tested at the first checkpoint. That's something I usually don't do until February,
but maybe I need to move it over here so that we can get a good assessment of of where our students are. So that's that's new or we did some of that last year? We did that work into junior high this past year. Yeah. And into the summer. Yes. Was that all okay. Yeah. And then we're just continuing that on now. And And then are we and but we haven't added that to intermediate or Well, they're going to do that work as they go through the checkpoints this year. Okay. Thank you. And we also, have some, formative assessments that are common across our junior highs. So those teachers will be also be able to see not just what is my
seventh grade math student doing in at Fishers Junior High, but how is that stacking up with the other junior highs so that it brings more uniformity to what we're teaching in our curriculum across the district so that it doesn't matter what school you're sitting at and what school your child attends, they're getting the same high quality education in all of them. Other questions? I just have one more through the whole presentation. The percentage and numbers of students that graduated, do we have, like do we is there a breakdown anywhere that tells us how many of our
students, let's say there's 700 in a class, how many of that just the percentage have had college credits going into college? Do we have a percentage of that? Like if I had 700 students, 500 of them had credits or 200 of them had credits. We would know, we should be able to we should be able to pull that. We will know for sure our students who sat, for any of our dual credit offerings Mhmm. That they didn't need, for example, an AP test Right. To find out. We'd have to we can probably use Otis to help us with the AP scores
and find out, okay, what students got a three or higher to to match up that number and see where we're at. As I have a sophomore in college right now, and I've heard from many parents and other community members that say, my kid is graduating in December, and their kid is a junior in college right now. And so and they're graduating in December and they came from our school district. So when they started their school, they're just cruising along and then you're hearing about internships or, you know, international programs they're going to go do.
And I just think that's absolutely fantastic that we have we are providing that. And we've been doing that for years, but it's just I feel like we're throwing an emphasis on it. We're doing a lot more with it. And I just want to congratulate the administration and our teachers for focusing on that and giving those students and families that opportunity. And that's for the college kids. I mean, we have so many opportunities for, like I said, going into the military, going into a profession or, excuse me, employment or trade schools, I get that. But just hearing some of the things at the college programs and how we're so
prepared, if you will, I appreciate that. So, thank you. Thank you. A couple of questions and a comment. I'll start with a comment. Just thank you. I mean, this is amazing, fantastic. Thank you, everybody over there. Thank you to our teachers, our administrators, principals, everybody that put so much into this. I certainly didn't realize how many people got involved in all these things before I sat here. So thank you. Great work. But a couple of things. One, and this probably could be an entire presentation on its own, but we keep hearing a lot about NIET. Yes. Just a little background on that.
What is it? Where did it come from? We seem to be all in on this now. Just tell me about a little how we got there, what it is? Yeah. I'm going to defer. But, I could I could do a good job at this point, but, someone that could do a better job is, Doctor. Fedders Thompson, so I'll let her Oh, thank you. Summarize. Thank you. NIDT is a structure, a professional development structure. And as doctor Federer said, we brought it in last year with our k four abilities. It is intentional, review of the data and then new learning that is brought to our teachers so
that, that is done after we've gone into classrooms and tested out those different strategies. We take that from teachers and say, love. It works because it's for our kids. We improved you. And we have heterogeneous groups and that that way we bring in our special education students. Alright? Our lovely students so that we can say whatever level you are, the specific strategy is is working. So, the difference between the the difference between the PLC process Yeah. The difference between the PLC process and the MIT process is the new learning,
and that's all generated from that that field testing. So, we have instructional leadership teams at each of our, buildings, and they're the ones that will drive the work. That field testing. So, we have instructional leadership teams at each of our, buildings and they're the ones that really drive their work. And then we have teacher leaders in the building that offer their students in their classroom to do that field testing. And I will say our instructional coaches, having a full time instructional coach in every building, they are key in in this this practice. So Doctor Pedersen, is that just K through four or five and six also? Well, last year, it was K through four, and this year, we get a receipt to all of our remedial,
including some of the Okay. So it sounds like if I'm kind of hearing it right, let me make sure I understand, it's a little more focused on data and then using that data more quickly, more in a more structured approach and react to it faster with those I don't I don't wanna say it's more focused on data because our POCs with the second variable are yet what we put focused on data. But it's more about what we tell the student Okay. And the teacher out there to get that student outcome.
Okay. The other thing it does is it ends the isolation for the teacher, especially in the elementaries at the same grade level. When they all go back and they work on that skill, and then they come back together and they bring that student work and said, how did your students react to that lesson? And then they can share information amongst them among themselves so we can make certain that that skill gets taught. And as she says, it doesn't matter if it's the high ability student, the general ed student, special needs student, we're constantly working with our teachers to make certain that we hit all of those learners,
and that's the system that it puts in place. Okay, great. Thank you. A couple more things I noticed on SAT math scores were all from all the different schools seem to be trending down. Is that something that I don't know, should we noticed that? Well, it's, I mean, it is interesting that from a composite perspective, they're all lower than the language, than the writing, reading, writing, things. And almost everything on those charts, not just for us but for almost all the schools, was generally stair stepping up. Math SAD was just I made a note because it was the only outlier where
it was kind of consistently going down. I think we did we improved, I think, on that one, but I didn't know if there was any reason for that. It was seemed like an outlier. As a group, it's an outlier, but it doesn't give me much alarm because we're all kind of in the same boat in that regard. And at the end of the day, we're trying to make sure we still increase. But seeing where as an aggregate group we're scoring, I can't explain why they're lower than the reading or the writing, but we'll work with Still compared to other districts,
we're still doing a good job. We're still above average and performing highly, but it's interesting that that one went down when most of the other ones went up. And then the last thing I had, just kind of a more general question. I tried a little bit to track along with the cohorts as they moved. Suzanne mentioned it a little bit, instead of just third grade to third grade, but watching them move through. And I appreciate that you put five year numbers in there because that's really since the start of COVID. Correct. It looks like, and that's kind of what your opinion on this, that those kids are starting to kind of bounce back and you can't go you
can't exactly take eighth graders now and go retest them in iLearn or iRead, but they are moving in the right direction. Do we feel like we've I don't know. I mean, this is a big question, but do we how do we feel about the recovery of those kids is something I've worried about kind of the most of there was about two year year and a half, two year period where they were out of school. We saw everything drop. Do you feel like it's coming back? Like those kids that are now eighth grade, ninth grade, tenth grade, that window that were our second, third,
fourth graders performing now. Yes, I absolutely think. I mean, I feel like these numbers kind of bear that out. But this is math and language arts is a little lower gain, but there's still a gain there. So, I definitely think our students are are regaining the skills that maybe they lost in that time period. And I I would say that, you know, probably overall in a lot of areas, but they just in iLearn, it's it I think it's a little more prevalent. You can see it a little better, as students have gone through, but certainly.
And that fifth grade year would be those kindergartners, right? So when if you did that and they've and then you go six, seven, they look at how strong those numbers went up and circled back, if you will. To me, I think that's quite impressive. I don't know if expect is the right word, but coming into kindergarten and COVID, that's such a pivotal time that's gotta be tough. But to see that we still are doing very well Well, and we had an iLearn change prior to COVID too. Oh, that's true. Right. Right. And it got more rigorous, and mister Mapes has shared this previously.
And so I don't think we ever got some consistent instruction mapped toward the new iLearn because of COVID and we're getting that now. We feel good about that direction. We definitely got hit in multiple ways that we all remember. But, again, just kudos. Thank you. The data speaks for itself, so great work. I have a couple of questions. Sure. So there's a couple of grades, third grade and fifth grade to be exact, where it seems like it's dipping the other way. What are we doing to correct that?
Well, I think all the the systems that I share with you just at the end slide are things that we have in place to again, I don't think that a what is it? 1.5% dip could be a class issue. It could be a it doesn't necessarily mean it's a programmatic issue, which is why I put the five year change there. We don't I am a little hesitant to be hypersensitive to big curricular changes when looking at one year. That doesn't mean we don't pay attention to it.
And at the building level, they're looking at that data and saying, okay. What is this telling us about our kids? Because oftentimes, we will hear in in our school improvement presentations, we'll hear principals kind of debrief us on, hey. Our teachers, we don't understand why our kids because we thought they were ready to go for this exam, and they and it didn't happen. So those are things that they really look at at the building level to make the the kind of minor tweaks that would make a difference in terms of instructional delivery. And then if you're looking between 2021 and 2022,
in most grades, it seems like the greatest gains happened there, and and then it started trending down, and now it's picking back up. What do you attribute that to? I don't have a, we did this at a certain time that would point to to that. I think it could be a class related issue or as the groups move through, but it's hard to tell. Thank you. You're welcome. Dawn, did you have a question or comment? So I would love to see more desegregated data by school so we can really look at how the schools are performing across, not just the grades,
but but, building by building. And, and with that, what additional resources might be needed to sustain or accelerate some of the improvements that line of either potential in the home growth, bring the state funding changes. How are you, proactively thinking through that and forecasting that? Jeff, did you get all that? I was just trying to pitch it. Yeah. I was trying to hold the mic down. Yes. Don, we can't hear you. We can't hear you, Don, unfortunately. Alright. Let me fix this mic. My whole question. Hold on. Can she type it in? Wait a minute.
I'm just gonna look like that. She wants it dis des disaggregated by schools, if possible. But that's about all I got. Okay. Let me try it again, Don. Okay. Try it again. Let me know if they're ready. We're ready. Okay. So I appreciate all of the data. One of the things I would love to see is desegregated data by school, to look at how we're identifying bright spots or challenges. I know you probably do that with your SIPs, when you're planning for each building, but that would be helpful. I noticed some of the demographic groups, especially with some of our Spanish speaking groups,
RENL, you know, looking at bilingual resources, and and those types of things. And with that, one of the questions that I really had really comes up, what additional resources might be needed to sustain or accelerate some of these improvements and why the the potential enrollment growth you might be seeing or even state funding changes. What kind of, planning or forecasting are you thinking through on that one? Yeah. We can certainly, dive into that data and see what we can pull for you and share that with the board. Dawn took some of my questions. So
but I did want to start by saying thank you for sharing the information and thank you and congratulations to our teachers and our students and our building administrators and coaches and all the people that worked really hard for this five year change. I mean, we're not even just looking at this year's data. So five years, right? And just make sure we clear up any misunderstanding that may be out in the community that the Board deserves this recognition for these scores because that is not the
case. So again, thank you and congratulations to the students and the teachers and the administration. I did receive a question and so I wanted to ask it here. Kind of if you could touch on why we're continuing to use things like NWEA and that sort of formative assessments along with the new checkpoint system? Yes. NWEA in specific is we decided we have had some conversation about not continuing to use NWEA. We also have,
and and the state through their formative assessment grant, which we often use those funds to help offset the cost of NWEA, We decided to go ahead and use it this year because we wanted to put it side by side with the checkpoints to see if the data that the checkpoints are supposed to produce and provide for us give us the same kind of information that the NWEA test does. And we know they're not exactly the same, that's not what we're trying to test here.
But really, is what is it testing what it's supposed to measure and what does that mean for us as a district. We often use, for example, our NWEA data to determine high ability placement. And the state has said you can use checkpoints for that. And to the extent that they're they've changed some of their funding around different assessments because they want they feel confident that checkpoints can do that for us. We would like to have a year to see side by side what that looks like before we just abandon NWEA and go all in on the checkpoints.
We know we have to do these checkpoints and we're certainly not interested in testing our kids to death. But we want to have a good formative measure to make sure that we're going to be on the right path as the year goes along. So that's why we're still using NWEA this year. So it's fair to say if Checkpoints provides the data we need, then we will no longer pay to use NWEA next year? Probably pretty likely, yes. Okay. But we have talked about excuse me, Doctor. Kelly. We have talked about NWEA continuing at K1 two. We didn't have any of that.
I know it's great. And that's important data for us to have those worded grades. What grade does Checkpoint start with? Three. Oh, third. Same I same as I learned grades. Okay. Three through eight. Thank you. Mhmm. I just want to say thank you so much. That's incredible, so much for our community and our staff and all of us to be proud of. So thank you for everybody in this room and everybody who isn't here. And I mean, everybody sitting in the crowd is just jumping for joy right now. Swaddlers in the background. Yes. For those there's nobody sitting here to hear all these successes. It's a little disappointing. Larry, yes, they keep rolling it down. It's tough in your mouth.
So thank you very much. When you get when more people show up for the budget presentation than the academic celebration, I mean, we've got to have a conversation around that. Exactly. Anyone else? Okay. Thank you very much. That was exciting news. And with that, we are adjourned.