Lawrence USD 497 school board

The Lawrence school board on Monday will review a report detailing the district’s most recent graduation rates and state assessment results, and it will also consider the resignation of a teacher who was the subject of a recent investigation.

The report will analyze the 2016 graduate rates of student subgroups — race and ethnicity, English language learners, students with disabilities, and those eligible for free or reduced-price lunches — as well as the overall student population.

School board president Marcel Harmon said he hadn’t seen the numbers, but expected there to be some improvement from last year’s graduation rates. Data for 2016 has not been released to the public yet, but the number of students graduating from Lawrence public schools has risen over the last several years, climbing from 85 percent in 2011 to just more than 92 percent in 2015.

Race, as noted in reports presented to the school board earlier this fall, can sometimes play a role in achievement disparities between students of color and their white peers. Students of color, both locally and nationally, still tend to graduate at lower rates than white students. In Lawrence, African-American students graduated at 85.2 percent in 2015, compared with nearly 93 percent of white students that same year.

Monday’s report will also provide analysis — by co-authors Terry McEwen, director of curriculum, instruction and assessment, and Angelique Nedved, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning — of the district’s most recent state assessment results, keeping in mind the Kansas State Department of Education’s move earlier this year to reduce the time required for test taking. The decision was made to minimize the loss of instructional time incurred by the assessments.

“At this point, it’s difficult because you can’t compare it to previous years, really. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison,” Harmon said of test results.

Although state assessments provide “one way to look at how students are doing,” he added, they’re smaller pieces of a much larger puzzle.

Lawrence, for the record, followed a much larger pattern that played out across the state this year. The Lawrence district, along with districts statewide, experienced growth in both the bottom and top achievement levels in 2016. Local students scored slightly higher than Kansas students overall.

In other business, the board will:

• Hear a recommendation from district officials to accept, as a school board, the resignation of an employee “who was the subject of the pending investigation effective at the end of the 2016-2017 school year.” District administration further recommends that the employee be placed on administrative leave for the duration of the 2016-2017 school year. The recommendation will be delivered by Anna Stubblefield, assistant superintendent of educational support, and David Cunningham, the district’s executive director of human resources and legal counsel.
• Hear an update on the district’s master facility planning for secondary schools. John Wilkins Jr., a principal with architecture firm Gould Evans, will present a report on the aspirational goals, needs and proposed concepts of tentative renovations and additions to Lawrence’s middle and high schools. David Arteberry, an associate of the district’s bond financial adviser George K. Baum, will present information outlining the district’s current outstanding debt obligations as well as information on past bond issues, mill levies and existing bond payment schedules and debt capacity.
• Be asked to approve a final draft of input regarding a new school finance framework before submitting that draft to Gov. Sam Brownback. The presentation, delivered by Stubblefield and Lawrence Public Schools finance director Kathy Johnson, will also ask the school board to review a final draft of the district’s proposed 2017 legislative priorities.