Ann Arbor Times

The Saline Area school board recently received a presentation on its continuous improvement plan.

During a Dec. 13 board of education meeting, Kara Davis, Executive Director of Teaching and Learning, and her team came to present the December update on the continuous improvement plan. The plan has moved into the monitoring and adjusting phase, so they're focused on collecting data from assessments and course grades and then adjusting and adapting to various needs as they see from the data results. 

"As a part of our data monitoring plan, we are monitoring three areas," Davis said at the meeting. "Growth: In which ways are plans positively impacting overall student success? Disproportionality: in what ways is our plan positively impacting students and subgroups? And then reliability: How well do our assessments holistically represent that student growth?"

Caroline Stout, the district’s MTSS coordinator, gave a presentation on their updated data. She showed the results of both Academic, a state assessment for grades K-3 that measures benchmarks readiness, and NWEA which is an adaptive test. The results show that targeted efforts in K-3 are improving their results, but continuous efforts are needed as around 30% of students in each grade are still below benchmark standards. The NWEA shows that 4-8th grade students in the district are still scoring much higher than the average, with at least 80% of each grade scoring above the 40th percentile (average).

When the results are broken down by disadvantaged subgroups, results fall much more into the at-benchmark or below-benchmark numbers. Students who come from an economically disabled background or are students with an IEP are more likely to be below the benchmark. Students who are African American or Hispanic also have higher ranks of being below the benchmark than white students, though not by too much. The rates are very similar between male and female students.