“What is measured gets done.” — Indian River County School Board Member Dale Simchick
The Indian River County School District rolled out its five-year strategic plan about a month ago, but at the Tuesday, Aug. 22 workshop, more muscle was added to the framework, making it a living, breathing document, with more to come over time.
“This is not a document that will sit on the shelf. We will be monitoring results,” said Bruce Green, overseer of the strategic plan and assistant superintendent of technology and assessment and human resources.
Green went over the various measures to be used to determine if the district is getting closer to or farther away from the five major goals in the strategic plan.
Goal 1, “Student Success,” has three objectives. The first, objective 1.1, is “All students graduate with the skills necessary for college and career success.” It has three measures. The first is graduation rate, which the district hopes to increase by two percentage points in each subgroup, going from 90.7 percent to 92.7 percent for whites, from 85.6 percent to 87.6 percent for Hispanics, from 74.2 percent to 76.2 percent for blacks.
Students in grades kindergarten through third grade will have academic success measured by i-Ready test results, a software program instituted for all elementary grades last year in math and reading and expanded to middle-school grades this year.
Currently kindergarten students are achieving a 50-percent pass rate in i-Ready, which the district hopes to increase to 52 percent, with similar hopes that first-graders go from 51-percent to 52-percent, second-graders from 55-percent to 57-percent and third-graders from 58-percent to 60-percent pass rates.
Students in third- through 12th-grade will have academic performance measured by Florida Standards Assessment results broken down by subgroup. Green said that data from 2016-17 are not available yet and provided no baseline data.
Green provided baseline data for other goals and objectives within those goals at Tuesday’s workshop with more to come later.
