December has gone quickly and has brought on the start of winter in a big way.

As we wrap up the calendar year, our staff is busy with some mid-year benchmark testing. A new assessment we’re using this year is called DIBELS. This assessment is given to our elementary students and helps us identify if additional supports are needed for each individual student. We talk a lot about meeting individual student needs, and this is a good example of how we do that. In addition to the classroom teachers who work on this, our intervention teams include Title and EL teachers, Reading Specialists, Academic Support staff, and others who give assessments, review the data, determine appropriate interventions, and measure ongoing progress toward goals.

For students who demonstrate an ongoing need for greater levels of support, we offer additional special services as well, all driven by assessments and data to help us make decisions around how we can best meet each student’s needs. When we talk about our staffing needs, there are so many people who work alongside the classroom teachers that offer support to meet the needs of our many students. Plans to address these needs range from very formal with a full team of support staff to informal plans the classroom teachers put together.

All students participate in regular assessments that provide data to help us identify where they are making academic progress. There are also non-academic resources and supports in place that also help us reach academic growth for students.

We continually look for data that drives our decision making, goal setting, and budgets. Our data shows how far students have come; especially after the global pandemic made us reconsider everything we thought we knew about teaching and learning.

Going forward, we’ll continue to offer assessments at regular intervals, including another round of this benchmark testing in the spring. The data not only shows us individual student needs, but also helps us measure the effectiveness of our programs and make adjustments as needed.

— Jeremy Williams is the superintendent at Marshall Public Schools District