What did 10 weeks off cost students?

MT. PLEASANT - The Mt. Pleasant Community School District plans to wait on setting student learning goals for the upcoming school year until October.

The school board met for a work session Monday evening and received an overview of the previous year's goals and data on student progress obtained before the shutdowns in March.

Director of Instruction Kathleen Gavin explained elementary grade-level students take assessments for literacy three times in a year but were only able to complete two rounds the previous school year. Secondary level students were not able to take state assessment tests that were slated to take place during the spring semester.

Due to the lack of the state assessment tests, the district tracked secondary level student progress with the Measures of Academic Progress Test, an additional assessment.

Gavin said the district has been trying to figure out how to set goals for the 2020-2021 school year after students missed 10 weeks of instruction in addition to summer.

'We were considering, let's get a baseline test just to see where the kids are at … I would like to give our students a chance to relax back into school and then see where they ended up and make and set goals at an October meeting,” Gavin said.

The director of instruction added state literacy assessments such as the Formative Assessment System for Teachers and Measures of Academic Progress would begin in just a couple weeks time and give the district an idea of where students are at.

'I don't know that we can judge what our students can do or what they've retained overall. Even with three weeks of summer school we had with our younger students, some of them had lost up to 40 percent of their sight words,” she added.

Superintendent John Henriksen added that all school districts are grappling with the same issues and no one knows the effect of 'what 10 weeks of not being in school” will be.

School board member Angie Blint brought up how the school improvement advisory committee would be involved with the goal setting. She suggested the board could discuss the goals at their work session in October and present the goals to SIAC in November.