District adopts NextPath to manage Act 20 screening, reading plans and intervention data

Curriculum directors Tim Shale and Amy Johnson described Feb. 24 how Waunakee Community School District is using NextPath, a student-data platform, to manage assessment data, administer Act 20 screening and diagnostics, house personal reading plans and visualize district intervention trends.

Johnson said NextPath provides "workspaces" for specific tasks, including an Act 20 reading-plan workspace that helped staff meet statutory deadlines for diagnostic assessments and parent notifications. She said families receive a secure link to view a student's personal reading plan and that the district also provides a hard copy to families.

Shale said NextPath replaced EduClimber after the district ported data late last spring and discontinued the EduClimber contract. Presenters described NextPath as having improved automation and a more contemporary, Netflix-style interface that reduces clicks and provides canned dashboards. Shale said the platform pulls high-school grades and in-progress grades from Infinite Campus and can import assessment data automatically from vendors such as i-Ready and AIMSweb/AIMSweb Plus.

Johnson and Shale demonstrated how NextPath can show district- and school-level dashboards, classroom rosters by intervention status, and flow charts that track movement of students among risk categories from fall to winter testing windows. Shale reported that across the district’s tested groups there were 259 students who performed below target on selected assessments and showed how the tool can identify who rose or fell between windows.

The presenters explained how the district organized Act 20 screening this winter. Because some early-grade measures are one-on-one assessments, the district used a dedicated "AIMSweb plus" team composed of interventionists, instructional coaches, school psychologists and some retired teachers to administer one-on-one diagnostics; classroom teachers administered computer-based components similar to previous STAR testing. Staff and grade-level teams provided feedback that the approach reduced classroom disruption and that the district will streamline the staffing plan for the spring administration.

Board members asked whether parents have access (Johnson: families receive a secure NextPath link and hard copy), how intervention exit decisions are made (Johnson: local rule of four consecutive data points above the 25th percentile), and whether summer-school participation and outcomes could be overlaid in NextPath for follow-up. Shale said it is likely feasible to import summer-school rosters as an attribute but that the district would need to confirm dataset availability and coordinate with NextPath.

Presenters described summer offerings: elementary schools use targeted summer enrichment; middle school has summer support classes and the high school uses credit-recovery models. Staff noted limitations: participation is voluntary, and older students less frequently attend summer programs.

Why it matters: NextPath supports the district’s Act 20 compliance (time-bound diagnostics and parent-notification requirements), centralizes multiple assessment sources, and gives teachers, principals and interventionists a single dashboard to monitor student progress and intervention effectiveness.

Next steps discussed included a focused spring report with local-assessment and RTI/intervention trend data, further review of summer-school data import options with NextPath, and possible staffing adjustments for future large-scale administrations.