The December 4 Olympia School District Board work session included a presentation by Billy Harris, Director of Assessment & Accountability on the Washington School Improvement Framework (WSIF), and a mid-year Professional Development Update by Executive Director of Teaching & Learning, Inger Owen.
Harris explained that WSIF was developed to measure student achievement and growth among different demographics, in order to identify discrepancies and successes. The OSPI Student Growth Percentiles are explained below.
The presentation highlighted the success of McKenny Elementary School, which was identified for low student growth among students with disabilities. Over the cycles that they were identified for support, the growth among students with disabilities doubled. In the same period, student growth among Hispanic/Latino students dropped 2.5 points. Director Seidel posited, “Is this a shell game? A resource shell game? Are we pushing resources to one group of students, and then not able to fully support another group of students… I know people don’t like this metaphor, but…we often have too much toast to not enough butter, or peanut butter, or whatever you like to spread on your breakfast.”
Harris explained that much of the data fluctuation can be attributed to smaller, overlapping, and shifting subgroups “I’m looking at the n-size for Hispanic students at McKenny, and this was a year their student growth number was 11. So, because it’s multiple years that, n-size of 20 is important that it’s more, but I could easily see, and then the 24/25 is 14. So, as a reminder, one student, when you’ve got that size of number, can create really big fluctuations.”
Director Flores, who worked on the framework at OSPI said, “Some of that is resources, some of it’s also just intention. Then we focus deliberately on structural practices for this group. And that sometimes doesn’t have anything to do with resources other than, oh, we see it, we see that there needs support, and now we’re going to structure things differently…So, the intention of this is visibility.”
As the meeting continued, technical difficulties emerged on the Knox Building roof. An OSD facilities staff member (Thanks, Paul!) found and resolved the issue.
Executive Director Owens went over Professional Development across the district, including for custodial, business, and transportation staff, as well as restorative justice practices. President Clifthorne remarked, “As we think about building culturally responsive classrooms, making time for and layering in culturally responsive bus rides, and a culturally responsive playground.”