The Iroquois Central School District Board of Education said it will center its fall board meeting agenda on school accountability data after a presentation on the New York State report card and the district’s AIMSweb screening program. Mary Jo, the district superintendent, told the board how the state report card compiles district- and school-level demographics, assessments and graduation statistics and said AIMSweb is the locally used, nationally normed screening tool used to identify students who may need extra reading or math support.
The board agreed to receive building-level presentations beginning in October and asked staff to circulate the data to members in advance so trustees come prepared to ask focused questions.
The New York State report card, Mary Jo said, consolidates district-submitted information — enrollment, subgroup breakdowns, 3–8 and Regents assessments, graduation rates and some post-graduation outcomes — and is released with a lag (the 2023–24 card appears as the 2023–24 school report card, with subsequent years posted after state review). “The information is taken from there,” she said, and noted the federal changes that expanded reporting: No Child Left Behind (2001) and Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2015).
A separate locally held dataset, AIMSweb, is used for Response to Intervention (RTI) screening. “AIMSweb is different. AIMSweb is a program that we adopted for the purpose of identifying students who may be in need of remedial assistance,” Mary Jo said. The district benchmarks students three times per year, K–10, and uses subtests such as ORF (oral reading fluency) to flag students for diagnostic testing and targeted interventions. The superintendent added that AIMSweb data are normed nationally and are not published publicly; they are used internally to shape interventions and professional learning.
Board members described recurring concerns about external rankings such as Business First and signaled a desire to examine state report-card data alongside those third‑party rankings to understand trends. Trustee Doug stressed that good data should “drive good decisions,” and the board committed to at least one meeting per month focused primarily on data review and interpretation so the district can target supports where the numbers show need.
Directives and next steps from the discussion: the superintendent’s office will (1) deliver the October building-level presentations with data circulated to trustees in advance; (2) include AIMSweb benchmark summaries and how those data map to RTI interventions; and (3) provide a concise primer comparing state report‑card measures to common external rankings for trustees to review before the presentations. No formal policy changes or votes were taken at this meeting.
The board emphasized that data will be used to guide supports for students and teachers rather than as an end in itself. The district said it will continue scheduled staff study-group days and summer professional learning that it began after prior years’ assessment reviews to support implementation of the adopted evidence‑based reading program.