School Impact Check

I work at an elementary school that became a Title I targeted assistance school four years ago due to redistricting. The change and adjustment was difficult for teachers, students, and especially parents. Since that year our CCRPI score dropped from an 84.6 to now a 70.3. This school year we have put many changes into place to in order to improve our CCRPI score. One of these changes was to plan a mid-year impact check. As our school Intervention Specialist, I was in charge of planning and leading this with the help of a small team which included: two administrators, the counselor, our school LEA, and our RtI lead teacher. We did this impact check last week. As a team we reviewed our school and grade level goals which were all based around student growth. Our school goals were set during our summer planning based on last year’s data. The purpose of the impact check was to see how the school, classrooms, and students were progressing towards the goals. The impact check team created an excel file where teachers could enter student's beginning of the year score and mid-year benchmark score. The spreadsheet helped teachers easily identify students with low growth.

The data surprised a lot of teachers. Many were shocked at the amount of high students who showed low growth. During the impact check there were a few cases where teachers were able to identify students that qualified for acceleration courses or more intense interventions. I have received positive feedback from teachers saying that it was a beneficial way to analyze the data. Teachers have created plans for students who demonstrated low growth and the administration plans to follow up with grade levels to ensure that we are addressing concerns that were discovered during the impact check.

I wanted to blog about my school’s impact check because this is something that I was really excited to plan and lead. I strongly believe that all students can learn and I am very passionate about using data to drive instruction. I hope that my school will continue to closely track student data to help ensure growth and that school impact checks become a yearly practice.