Agenda Item
Meeting Date:
5/21/2021 - 7:00 PM  
Category:
Teaching, Learning and Leadership  
Type:
Info  
Subject:
School and Department Improvement Updates  
ACPS 2025 Strategic Plan Goal:
Goal 2: Instructional Excellence
ACPS will ensure that all students have access to and engagement with high-quality instruction.
 
Policy:
IA - Instructional Goals and Objectives  
Funding Source or Fiscal Impact (where applicable):
 
File Attachment:
210521_Brief_School_and_Department_Improvement_Updates.docx.pdf
210521_Quarter_3_Chat_Progress_Monitoring_Highligts.pdf
 
Agenda Item Summary:
The Board Brief contains a progress update on school and department continuous improvement efforts for the current academic year.  
Background:
ACPS continued to engage schools and departments in the newly designed process for developing School and Department Improvement Plans (SIPs and DIPs), focusing on deepening teams' understanding of the role of data to drive action planning schema and planning to assess progress as a component of developing improvement plans.

ACPS approach to progress monitoring as part of the continuous improvement system prioritizes a commitment to a distributive leadership strategy to increase collaboration, build consensus, enhance communication, and improve the leadership capacity of school leaders.

Departments participated in professional learning sessions, and individualized technical assistance support with the executive director of school improvement to learn about the enhancements to the SY 20-21 Department Improvement Plan (DIP), including requirements to align improvement plan goals with the ACPS 2025 Strategic Plan focus areas. Teams were asked to reflect on progress toward improvement plan goals, successes, and challenges as part of the progress monitoring updates in the third quarter.

The Quarterly Chat format for SY 20-21 was revised in response to the unprecedented demands the current health pandemic has exerted on school operations and instructional delivery. In recognition of the myriad of factors impacting families and students during the pandemic, the foci of progress monitoring needed to consider the context of the new norm for teaching and learning conditions. All students have been impacted by the pervasive and extended disruptions in learning due to school closures. The negative impact on disrupted learning is inevitably magnified for targeted student groups with persistent achievement disparities. Thus, an essential line of inquiry for the second quarter chats concerned how schools adjusted to meet students' current academic performance, social-emotional, and attendance needs.

For the third quarter chat, school teams were asked to respond to the following focus areas:
- Progress of achieving your Comprehensive School Improvement Plan (CSIP) SY 20-21 goals;
a) Data to indicate progress toward CSIP SY 20-21 goals during a global pandemic
b) Successes in achieving Essential Actions and Action Steps? Challenges?
c) Adjustments to CSIP in response to monitoring and data analysis?
- Current monitoring processes and the most relevant data collected since our last meeting; and
- Supports needed from the school division.

The focu
 
Recommendation
The Superintendent recommends that the School Board review the Quarter 3 Board Brief and attachments for an overview of the continuous improvement processes and synthesis of key progress monitoring themes across schools for the third quarter.  
Approvals:
Recommended By:
Signed By:
Dr. Terri H. Mozingo - Chief Academic Officer
Signed By:  
Dr. Gregory C. Hutchings, Jr. - Superintendent