The South Kitsap School Board received an update on academic progress and instructional initiatives from Lisa Fundane’t, the district’s executive director of teaching and learning Aug. 20.

Fundane’t said staff have been focused on strengthening Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) across grade levels.

“So a couple of celebrations, a lot of celebrations really,” she said. “We have been working really hard on essential standards this last year through our PLC work. And so we now have essential standards in K-12 math, K-12 literacy and…high school science. And we have roadmaps for all of our K-8 classes. The roadmap is what standards we teach throughout the year so that teams can really plan around the most important standards in math and reading.”

Fundane’t added the district has seen encouraging academic gains.

“Our teams have been working really hard the last two years on how we narrow our focus to the most important things and have an impact on literacy,” she said. “The high school English/language arts team has been working really hard as a professional learning community for a long, long time. They’ve had common assessments since the inception of PLCs really working towards alignment but still having autonomy to bring in novels that’ll peak interest for kids and their (Smarter Balanced Assessment) scores. We hit 70% on the SBA in ELA, and we used to score higher than 70%. A lot of schools are not hitting that 70% threshold and that’s a really, really big deal.”

She listed schools that reached strong proficiency levels, including Mullenix Ridge, which hit 80% in grades 3-5 reading. Other schools reported: John Sedgwick at 76%, Olalla at 75%, Burley Glenwood at 76%, Cedar Heights at 74% and Sunnyslope at 72%.

Math proficiency scores also improved.

“Olalla is 83% proficiency in math grades one through five, Cedar Heights 75% proficient in math, John Sedgwick 71% in Star Math, South Colby 70%, Mullenix Ridge 72%, Burley Glenwood 72%, Sunny Slope 72%,” Fundane’t said.

She noted staff also trained last spring on the “15-day challenge” and unit planning.

“And so we know that the proficiency scales in the unit planning are going to be really integral to our common assessment work this year and schools have been really excited that so many tools are already available to them,” Fundane’t said. “They’re not all creating this on their own; they’re district-wide commitments.”

A major tool moving forward, she said, is the Data Analysis Reflection Tool (DART).

“This is something that we feel could really transform the effectiveness of PLCs; it’s about making the collection of data as simple as possible so that they’re spending time analyzing the data,” she said. “Data input can take a long time especially at a secondary school and so we are working really hard to provide tools at a district level that are what teachers are asking for, what they need to make that process as efficient as possible and then the protocol is embedded in that tool of the questions that we want to be asking to help teams stay on track to answer those questions about how we are going to meet the needs of kids. People were very excited that so many schools were able to pilot last spring and that it will be available for all teams this year.”