Kristen Dixon, director of teaching and learning, presented the district's new 10-year curriculum review cycle and explained how the district will monitor adoptions and provide annual updates to the board under proposed policy 22-10.

Why it matters: a structured curriculum cycle affects textbook and materials purchases, professional development timing and alignment with state standards across K-12 classrooms.

Dixon said the district studied other districts' cycles and settled on a 10-year plan to balance cost, stability and longitudinal data collection. She said long adoptions reduce material costs, give teachers time to implement and provide more meaningful multi-year data about student outcomes. Dixon described six phases inside the cycle: monitoring (walk-throughs), explore (vendor review), evaluate (standards review and data analysis), targeted professional development and routine monitoring.

She told the board the 2025-26 year will include district-wide ELA walk-through monitoring (K-10), evaluation of secondary science (6-12) and tech/STEM reviews, plus standards reviews for science, computer science and health education. Dixon said teacher teams participate in the explore and evaluate phases and that the district pre-vets vendors to ensure alignment to Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction standards.

Board members asked how the cycle applies across grade spans; Dixon said subject-area reviews cover K-12 (for example, an "art" review would be conducted across all grades). The board's policy committee will present policy 22-10 as a first reading; Dixon will provide an annual update to the board describing where items sit in the cycle.

Board members praised the plan as a way to avoid leaving non-core subjects unreviewed for long periods and noted the approach also spaces expensive adoptions so multiple large purchases do not fall in the same year.

Dixon emphasized the district will not "adopt and abandon" materials without monitoring; the plan includes intermittent checkpoints and professional development throughout the 10-year span.

Less urgent detail: subject-area names mentioned in the schedule include ELA, science, computer science, health, music, world language, art, business and family and consumer sciences (FACS).