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Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the St. Vrain Valley School District increased its percentage points earned in its performance framework.
Colorado uses performance frameworks as part of the state’s accountability system to evaluate schools and district systems based on student performance, graduation rates and performance of historically underserved students. Frameworks, which are used to accredit school districts and assign school plans, restarted this year after a two year break due to the pandemic.
St. Vrain was rated accredited this year, as the school was in 2019, but increased its overall earned percentage from 61.1% to 61.5%. Executive Director of Assessment Ann Reed credited the improvement, despite the challenges of the pandemic, to the district’s preparation and investment in students.
“We would like to extend the congratulations to our staff who worked really hard during the school year and during this time, partnering with families to offer an extended school day, strong rigorous grade level instruction during the school year and our summer programming in June as well as our JumpStart program at the middle and high school level prior to school starting,” she said.
Seeing the district improve wasn’t a surprise, according to Reed, and in fact staff worked intentionally to ensure that students would continue to progress.
“We have a lot of local systems in place to monitor student academic progress,” Reed said. “Using that, I think we were encouraged that our students were growing throughout this time.”
Approximately 89% of St. Vrain schools were in the top two ratings. Rocky Mountain Elementary School and Timberline PK-8 made especially significant gains, Reed noted.
Longs Peak Middle School was one school that saw their rating decrease, but Reed said the district is already working hard to address that.
“We’re partnering with and working with staff, students and families to support their strong academics,” she said.
Additionally, district officials emphasize that while state measures of success through standardized testing are an important metric, St. Vrain takes several other factors into account when looking at the overall picture.
“We look at many different measures of student achievement and this is just one part of that story,” district spokesperson Kerri McDermid said. “There’s so many additional inputs and things to support student success beyond just the assessment data and the performance framework.”
More than anything, the framework results show that St. Vrain is getting a return on their investment into student success.
“We’re very encouraged about the direction of moving our system forward and the results show that,” Reed said.
