The Appleton Area School District Board of Education met 08/28/2023. They discussed and approved the R-1 Mega Results Monitoring Report.
One member of the public spoke on the report. She believed that the report was “a fancy, feel-good list of goals” that were not easily able to be monitored or objectively measured and that the school district should focus on monitoring things like reading and math scores, truancy rates, and assaults in school.
Assistant Superintendent Steve Harrison reviewed the report for the board and noted that the Mega Results Report was the culminating report for multiple more narrowly focused reports that were focused on various academic subjects such as English Language Arts and Mathematics as well as on Essential Life Skills such as Cognitive Development and Morald & Ethical Character Development. The report was in its baseline year so most items did not indicate whether or not progress had been made.
Some time was discussing the recent graduation rates. Assistant Superintendent Harrison drew attention to the fact that the 2022-23 graduation results were, as of yet, uncertified and did not include any students who may have been able to graduate after attending summer school, so the results would only go up from what was preliminarily reported.
I’ve prepared a transcript of the discussion for download.
Assistant Superintendent Harrison started out his presentation by reminding the board that the district has nine Academic Achievement Results Policies, one Essential Life Skills Results Policy, and two Operational Expectations Policies. The Mega Results Policy is the final, culminating report based on those other results policies.
He also said that, starting last fall, they had looked at the reports for all the different academic subject areas. They had also been reviewing their OE (Operational Expectation) policies and had updated roughly half of them. They would be talking through recommendations for changes within each of the remaining policies.
The Mega Result Report was fairly self-explanatory. The report year had been the first year for Superintendent Greg Hartjes, so they had been establishing a baseline. As a result, there were no progress results to report; however, in future years, the report would look at the various Academic Achievement Results Policies and report if the district had achieved “reasonable progress”, “reasonable progress with noted exceptions”, or “reasonable progress not made”, for each academic area. They would do the same for the various “Essential Life Skills” areas.
They spent several minutes discussing the graduation rates that were reported. The graduation rates as currently reported were down from the 2021-22 school year by 0.7 percentage points for all students and 6.7 percentage points for black students, but were up by 4.2 points for students with disabilities. However, an important caveat was that the 2022-23 results were uncertified and did not include anybody who may have qualified for graduation after completing summer school.
The rate of students who graduated within 7 years had increased year-over-year for the last 5 years, with only 84.3% of the Class of 2016 graduating by the end of the 2018-2019 school year but 94% of the Class of 2020 graduating by the end of the 2022-2023 school year. Assistant Superintendent Harrison was asked if that graduation rate included students who got a GED instead of a regular diploma or students with disabilities who, due to their disabilities, were unable to complete the academic requirements to get a diploma but nevertheless completed their program and received a certificate of completion. Mr. Harrison was not positive, but thought those students likely would not be counted in the graduation rate.
View full meeting details here: http://go.boarddocs.com/wi/aasd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=CUQT7W73510B
View full meeting video here: https://www.youtube.com/live/I0H1t9JjuoA?si=Div-EMvrzUa2IxGD
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