The ACSD has developed a Comprehensive School Improvement Plan to reflect input and feedback from the staff in individual buildings, the superintendent’s Advisory committee, the Education Task Force, the Combined committee, and the Parent Advisory committees, as well as guidelines for the state. All of the individual buildings completed the following process to develop their individual building plans.
Staff incorporated research-based staff development strategies into the action plans to support the implementation of the identified goals and to foster continuous improvement. They aligned District resources including Phase III, Eisenhower, Staff Development, Title I, Title VI, At-Risk, Special Education, Safe and Drug Free schools, Early Intervention, and Federal Reading funds. District and building plans were aligned with the District Goals for the 2001-2006 school years. During the development of the action plans, baseline data sources were identified, in addition to, ongoing ways to evaluate the plans.
Curriculum Mapping
An additional educational need involves a process called curriculum mapping that the District has implemented. Curriculum mapping is a tool that collects information about what each teacher actually teaches using the school calendar or a modified format as an organizer. These individual maps collect information on essential questions, content, skills, and assessments used by each teacher. The skills on the maps are directly aligned with District benchmarks and content standards in specific content areas. From the individual maps, the District has created district maps/curriculum frameworks that contain the core content, benchmarks, and critical skills that must be taught by each teacher. Over the five years (2001-2006) of this CSIP, teachers will be integrating various cross-curricular content and skills/benchmarks into the individual and district maps. For instance, during the 2001-2002 school year, teachers will be focusing on integrating reading, research and technology, and problem- solving skills/benchmarks into the individual and district maps. In the 2002-2003 school year, the integration of problem-solving skills/benchmarks in math and science into the maps will be completed, and teachers who have not already integrated School-to-Work and multi-cultural, gender-fair strategies and skills will focus on that integration. For 2003-2004, the district focus will shift to identifying the areas of global education in every individual and district map. The remaining years of the plan, 2004-2006, will be used to integrate thinking skills and any other area that has not been integrated. Part of the integration process is to design district-wide assessments that will provide data on whether or not the students in the district have learned these skills and strategies. In addition to the integration process, the District will be collecting data on whether or not the skills and strategies listed above have been integrated into the maps with a piece of software called Curriculum Compass. This software collects all of the data from every individual and district map and produces reports that will indicate if the integration has taken place and how these skills and strategies are aligned with District standards and benchmarks. The reports in this software allows the District to identify many of its major educational needs.
K-3 Reading
Another major educational need that was identified through the student achievement and community feedback data collect annually by the District is K-3 reading. With Early Intervention funds provided by the State and Federal governments, the District has started working on the following Early Intervention goals for 2001-2002.
Goal 1: Continue to reduce the student/teacher ration in K-3 reading instruction in each of the District’s six elementary buildings.
Goal 2: Provide professional development for all K-5 teachers, 6th and 7th grade reading teachers, and trained classified personnel to identify, select, and implement appropriate assessment and instructional strategies and use the data from these assessments to guide instruction.
Goal 3: Increase by 0.3% the percentage of students scoring at the Proficient or higher performance levels in reading comprehension on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills from third grade (2000-2001) to fourth grade (2001-2002).
For the 2001-2002 school year, the District has added 5.5 teachers to teach first grade reading, effectively lowering the class size for reading instruction in first grade to 17:1. The District will be collecting the student progress data from the district-designed reading assessments to determine if lowering the class size in first grade reading instruction has improved student achievement in reading. If the data supports the supposition that a lower class size increases student achievement in reading, additional second grade reading teachers will be hired in 2002-2003.
In addition to an emphasis on reading instruction with K-3 early intervention, the District has established committees and identified purposes and products to be produced for K-12 math and reading. Those actions and the products are listed below.
K-12 Math Problem-Solving Actions:
Products to be Produced:
K-12 Reading Actions:
Products to be Produced:
Another need that has been addressed in the past by the ACSD is the need for a mentoring program for all teachers new to the District. Much of the survey data obtained from new teachers over the past ten years has been used to design the current District program. With the inception of the 2001-2002 school year, an additional program has been added for first year teachers. This program is the B.E.S.T program adapted for Heartland AEA by Arizona State University. The goals for the program are listed below.