Richfield superintendent outlines back-to-school priorities, sets draft goal to raise graduation rate to 90%

Richfield Superintendent Steve Unoske gave a fall “back to school” update and presented a first draft of his 2025–26 goals at the Richfield School Board meeting on Sept. 2, focusing on literacy training under the READ Act, expanded progress monitoring, modest gains on state assessments and a district graduation-rate target of 90 percent.

Unoske told the board the district staggered secondary and elementary start dates to smooth transportation and welcomed new curriculum rollouts: Benchmark Advance/Adelante at elementary and StudySync for secondary English language arts, with about “30 percent” of secondary materials supplemented locally “to make sure that our curriculum is culturally responsive,” he said. He described district-wide implementation of the READ Act literacy training (referred to in the meeting as letters training) and said phase 1 is complete for several staff groups and phase 2 will extend to secondary staff.

The superintendent said the district is pushing more frequent progress monitoring through FastBridge for students who are furthest behind: the district’s goal is to reach 95 percent of those students with progress-monitoring assessments twice per month. He also reviewed preliminary Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA) results, saying reading showed small gains while math improved more modestly.

Unoske presented draft outcome goals emphasizing student achievement and equity: he cited targets such as a 3-point gain on MCAs in several grade bands and a stated objective to regain and exceed a 90 percent graduation rate across demographic groups. He framed administrative “process” goals—data-driven decision making, training implementation and strategic planning—as levers to reach those outcomes.

Board members pressed for clarity about subgroup reporting, particularly how the district handles small counts for American Indian/indigenous students. Unoske explained that state reporting rules can suppress or “pull out” small groups for public-release datasets to preserve student privacy and said the district will continue collecting the data and will adjust the footnotes and wording on public charts to avoid confusion.

On training and readiness, Unoske provided completion figures the district is tracking: 56 percent of staff had completed the asynchronous component of the READ/letters training at the time of the meeting, another 33 percent were in progress, “85 percent have completed units 1 to 4,” and 34 staff had completed all units 1–8; the district had hired 12 new teachers who had not yet completed that training. He said a “train the trainer” model is in use to speed up local capacity.

Unoske also reviewed enrollment and class-size snapshots, saying secondaries were running about 30 students above projection while elementary averages ranged by school (one slide cited an average line of 21.87 for a school with higher compensatory education counts). He reminded the board the district funds elementary class sizes at an average of 25 and Centennial at 23 and that numbers will continue to shift during the first weeks of school.

Unoske outlined a strategic-planning timeline that begins with an Oct. 6 study session for the board, site-level engagement in winter and spring community input, a draft plan in April and board presentation in May–June for a plan intended to steer the district through the 2026–27 school year and beyond.

Discussion and next steps: Unoske said he will return with a revised second draft of superintendent goals reflecting board feedback, clarified data footnotes for small student groups and more specifics on how survey questions were distributed. He asked board members to participate in strategic-planning discussions; board members emphasized that early board input (the Oct.–Dec. window) carries more relative weight than later broad public input because fewer decision-makers are involved at that stage.

The board did not take a formal vote on Unoske’s draft goals at the Sept. 2 meeting; he presented the draft for feedback and indicated a revised draft will be returned before final action.