001Welcome USD264 community, patrons, staff, and anyone joining us online on YouTube. Uh this is our superintendent update at Clearwater Clarity for April of 2026. This month we're going to be really focusing in on our accreditation goal for 2627. So KSDE accredits all schools through their KISSA system. Um the KISSA system is in its second year of existence. So we just finished year one. We'll review that and then we'll talk about what we're going to do in year two. Um, just know that when we're starting with the 2627 school year, we're going to also start being accredited based on state assessment results, graduation rates, and post-secary effectiveness. So, KISSA goals are new each year. And so, uh, every year that we're going to go through this process, we're going to have to write a goal. And
002the goal is to create an underlying action, um, that can work within the schools to help us with achieving the goals within our graduation rate, state assessment scores, and post-secary effectiveness. So last year we used the fundamental of balanced assessment and we were really focusing on building an assessment calendar. Um before we got started we really didn't know how many assessments we were given when we were giving them how many assessment kids were taking on the same day. And so that was part of our idea is to really get a good grasp and a good feel of how many assessments are the students taking. Are the students are the assessments uh worthy? Uh are they getting the information that we need? And then making sure um that we're not stacking too many on at the
003same time. So that's what we worked on this year and we hit our goals for each one of that. And then on March 26, just last week, we went back to Orion where we met with Conway Springs and Douglas who are the two other schools in our cohort um to review those goals and then to start working on goals for the 2627 school year. So when we start looking at next year, we want to really stay within that fundamental of balanced assessments again, but we're going to start looking at uh creating benchmark assessments. So, benchmark assessments are multiple units or multiple chapters within a um given class that will just give us a little bit more of a look at where are the students at in comparison to what they should be able to do
004towards the standards. And so, the standards are what we teach um that are uh embedded within the curriculum and the high quality instructional materials that we provide the students. So, starting next year, we're going to really just focus on ELA and math and we're going to start making sure that we're giving those assessments at least quarterly. Um we will have uh three of them in uh math in K12 or in uh K12 or K through algebra 2 math. And then we will also be making sure that we will be giving uh quarterly assessments or four of them in ELA. Now those assessments aren't just over one unit or one chapter. They're multiple uh units and multiple chapters where students are going to be able to demonstrate how well they are um performing on the standards
005that are aligned from the state uh state standards. And then we're going to be able to take that data and start analyzing the data so that we know which students need whi what kind of support on which standards. And then we're going to use that data to then address some of those needs in our win time, which is what I need now. Uh which is a tier 2 intervention time that each uh student has the opportunity for. So when are we going to do this? We're going to start in September of 26 and we're going to develop and schedule the benchmark assessments in ELA and math. We'll have that done by our six-month target. We'll have four times in ELA, as I said, and three times in math. And then we're going to collect the
006data and input it into how's school going for parents to access and for teachers to analyze. So if you're not using how's school going yet, there is a QR code on each one of the paper calendars. It's also on our school website where you can get in. You can look at your students attendance. You can look at your students grades. You can look at their assessments. And that's where we're going to start putting some of this data so that we can analyze how are our students doing on these benchmark assessments. that should give us some analytics into what their potential may be for the state assessment and what those scores may look like so that we can start having an impact on those scores. So, we want to make sure that this is a teamwork
007and this is a uh all in the same um uh footing going forward. So, when we think about being in the arena this year, we want to really think that it does it's more than just the teachers, it's more than just the students. It's also um the parents, it's the administration, it's the support staff making sure that we're all providing an opportunity for students to be as successful and for us to actually know what they know. Um and so we know any given day and just taking one test on one day does not give us that picture. And so we want to be able to have multiple checkpoints throughout the way to check in on our students and making sure that we are progressing towards where we want them to be by the end of
008the year. So again, as always, we're always here for you to be able to um reach out to us. So here's our contact information. Again, if you ever want to just sit down and schedule a meeting, please reach out to the office, call or email. And again, we're looking forward to finishing the spring strong for the 2526 school year and being ready to think about the 2627 school year is just right around the corner. So have a great day.