By Tom Ganser
Correspondent
Thirty Whitewater School District teachers, administrators and pupil support personnel had its first taste of the new school year that is on the horizon with the district’s annual Data Retreat.
The Data Retreat takes place within the district to engage building leadership teams and create data-driven goals for each of the district’s facilities, said Kelly Seichter, director of instruction and the facilitator of the retreat.
“By analyzing the strengths and challenges of all of our student achievement data we are able to determine where best to focus our energy and resources moving forward,” Seichter said.
“The work we do on this day helps establish a powerful framework for our improvement processes throughout the upcoming year,” she added.
Seichter began the retreat with a review of the district’s vision, mission, core values, and strategic priorities. She followed that up by giving a close look at several sources of information about the academic achievement and academic growth of students, including the district’s overall and individual school’s “report cards,” and the results of the state-required Forward Exam and the Measurement of Academic Progress (MAP) tests.
District report cards for 2015-16 can be viewed at http://www.wwusd.org/page/3069. The district summary and detailed report cards for 2015-16 and the four preceding school years can be viewed at www.apps2.dpi.wi.gov/reportcards/ after selecting “Whitewater Unified” as the school district. The report cards for 2016-17 will not be available until October.
The Wisconsin Forward Exam gauges how well students are doing in relation to the Wisconsin Academic Standards that outline what students should know and be able to do in order to be college and career ready. The Forward Exam is administered online in the spring of each school year at grades 3-8 in English Language Arts and mathematics, at grades 4 and 8 in science, and at grades 4, 8, and 10 in social studies.
The MAP assessment is a computerized, adaptive, online assessment in Reading, Language Usage and Mathematics for students in grades 1 to 8. The MAP assessment is administered three times a year to establish baseline academic proficiency, monitor progress, and determine student academic growth.
Mike Lovenberg, newly appointed principal of Whitewater High School, shared information about the performance of WHS 11th grade students on the ACT – now required of all WHS juniors, not just “college-bound” students – and how WHS staff are using the results of the ACT to enhance their instruction.
Lanora Heim, the district’s director of pupil services, discussed the results of ACCESS for Whitewater’s English language learner students. ACCESS for ELLs (Assessing Comprehension and Communication in English State to State for English Language Learners) is an English language proficiency tests designed to measure English learners’ social and academic proficiency in English. It assesses social and instructional English as well as the language associated with language arts, mathematics, science and social studies in the domains of speaking, listening, reading and writing.
The focus of the Data Retreat then turned to reports by the elementary and middle school principals, and by High School teachers Laura Masbruch and Rheanna Jaske-Dickerson, of each school’s progress in meeting the goals set for 2016-17 at last year’s Data Retreat. That was followed by each school’s team working together to develop school goals for 2017-18 shaped by the district data presented and supplemented with data for individual schools. The teams continued to work on formulating goals in the afternoon.
Following the retreat, Keri Adelmeyer, a teacher at the kindergarten and first-grade levels teacher at Lincoln Elementary School, said,
“The Data Retreat provides a valuable time for us to look at our school and district data. It is a great way to kick off the new year by celebrating our successes and setting goals for the upcoming year,” said Keri Adelmeyer, a teacher at the kindergarten and first grade levels at Lincoln Elementary School. “We continue to see a lot of growth each year, and we are excited for what the future holds.”
The new school year starts this Tuesday, Sept. 5.
