TLE committee forwards $25,000+ contract renewals to full board; staff demoed SchoolPace and discussed curriculum adoption

The Beloit School District Teaching & Learning Committee voted to forward the district’s listed purchases and contract renewals at or in excess of $25,000 for the 2025–26 school year to the full Board of Education.

“These are all renewals,” Theresa Morteck told the committee, explaining the items meet a new threshold and the updated purchasing policy. A committee motion to forward the attached purchases and contracts carried after public questions and discussion.

District staff demonstrated SchoolPace and the American Reading Company (ARC) digital materials during the meeting. Tony Bosco logged in to show the district SchoolPace landing page and dashboards, saying the platform holds independent reading level assessments (IRLA), the Spanish ANNEAL assessment and teacher goal‑setting tools. “This is the district's, school paced landing page,” Bosco said. “We can see, at the district level, at the school level, at the grade level, all the way down to the student level, exactly how much students are growing… it aligns very closely with Act 20, our early literacy, statute.”

Committee members asked for usage and cost breakdowns. Morteck said the district had piloted materials and followed a five‑year adoption cycle for core curricula; parceling out pieces of an adopted program is not preferred. She and other staff described options for printing updated materials and integrating digital resources.

Committee members discussed several supplemental learning platforms during the review. Staff said the district previously used DreamBox but shifted to Imagine Math because internal analysis showed a larger effect size for Imagine Math (reported in the meeting as 0.22) compared with DreamBox (reported as 0.11). Staff explained the district’s implementation focus: for Imagine Math, a current goal is 30 lessons per student per year (referred to in the meeting as a 30‑lesson goal) and a target of two lessons per week for fidelity of use.

Members also raised concerns about SpringBoard, the district’s secondary ELA curriculum, after a company ownership change. “They sold it last year to McGraw Hill,” one speaker noted; staff said the publisher has signaled possible sunsetting and the district will plan pilot and budget timing accordingly.

The motion that the committee moved to the full board was: "approve forwarding the attached purchases/contracts at or in excess of $25,000 for the 2025–26 school year"; the committee voted to send the packet to the full Board of Education for approval.

Details captured during discussion: SchoolPace is the district repository for IRLA/ANNEAL and teacher resources (My ARC); usage statistics for digital content access were not specified at the meeting. Staff said curriculum adoptions follow a five‑year review cycle and that any decision to alter components would be weighed against preserving the integrity of an adopted program.

The committee's vote was procedural — directing the package to the full board — and did not itself adopt or reject individual curriculum programs.