Iowa City schools push to improve extracurricular data, boost participation and access

Director Luke Lingo opened the operations meeting by asking the committee to approve minutes from April 8 and then turned the panel to the district’s activities report, which examined middle- and high-school participation in athletics and fine arts and identified gaps in data and access. Executive Director Ptacek Lucas and District Activities Director Tanisha led the presentation and described both what the district can measure now and the changes they plan to make to get more accurate, actionable numbers. The presentation summarized two school years of participation data and stressed that the district’s current counts mix unique students with total activity occurrences. "These are unique head counts and not duplicative," Executive Director Ptacek Lucas said when clarifying how the district currently reports some figures. Tanisha, the district activities director, said the district lacked reliable free-and-reduced-price-lunch (FRL) data tied to activities and described plans to improve entry of activity rosters into the student information system to enable better demographic and equity analysis. Why it matters: district leaders said extracurricular involvement supports attendance, social connection and mental…