Volusia schools shrink local testing load, revise calendar after teacher focus‑group feedback

Volusia County Schools officials on Tuesday presented a testing‑calendar update and said they have reduced the district’s local assessments significantly while changing testing windows to avoid the week before winter and spring breaks.

The changes stem from an assessment steering committee and teacher focus groups Superintendent Carmen Balgobin said the district convened to evaluate Volusia benchmark assessments, or VBAs, and state progress monitoring tests. "Everything that we do aligns to our strategic plan," said Dr. Julian Azarria Valle, the district’s chief academic officer.

Why it matters: District leaders said the revisions are intended to maximize instructional time and provide teachers more actionable data without increasing students’ time spent in testing. Kyle Shicker, interim coordinator for research, evaluation and accountability (REA), told the board the district’s combined local and state testing currently averages under 2% of instructional time — well under Florida Department of Education guidance that students not spend more than 5% of total school hours on assessments.

What the district presented: REA staff described three changes the steering committee recommended and district staff adopted for 2025–26: - Move the PM‑1 state diagnostic closer to the start of the school year (to the third week) so it is a more useful baseline for teachers. - Use the week before winter and spring breaks as makeup windows rather than the first test days to avoid testing immediately before or after breaks. - Continue quarterly teacher feedback cycles and school testing teams to refine assessments and administration logistics.

Data and teacher input: REA analyst Michael Cimino said the district went from administering about 1,250,000 district assessments in the 2021–22 school year to roughly 406,000 last year, a reduction of roughly 2‑thirds. Cimino said VBA structure differs from state progress monitoring tests: PM‑1, PM‑2 and PM‑3 measure content across the full school year, while VBA 1–3 measure quarter‑by‑quarter content. "Knowing how your students perform on the content that they have been specifically taught by your teachers is imperative to driving the instruction every single day," Cimino said.

Reliability and validity: The REA presentation described two technical checks for district assessments. Cimino said reliability addresses whether student responses are consistent across administrations and validity assesses whether local assessment results predict state outcomes. He told the board that a VBA‑3 score of 70% or better in 2024 predicted a student scoring a level 3 or above on the state assessment with about 99% certainty, versus roughly 50% certainty in 2021 when the district had many more local tests.

Steering committee process and scope: District staff said 72 teachers from 56 schools and 11 principals participated in the steering committee cycle (East side and West side face‑to‑face meetings plus Teams sessions). Superintendent Balgobin described the work as iterative and cyclical: draft, teacher review, curriculum coordinator review, principal review and back to teachers. The district said the teacher group logged about seven hours of direct meetings plus ongoing Teams chat input.

Time estimates and state calculation: Board members asked how the district measures the percentage of instructional time used for assessments. Shicker said the state calculates testing use as total instructional minutes (the district estimate was about 55,000 instructional minutes per year). The district provided typical administration‑time guidance: VBA‑1 about 45 minutes, VBA‑2 about 80 minutes and VBA‑3 up to about 120 minutes; combined these local VBAs total roughly 240 minutes in a full year per student on that sequence.

Next steps and limits: The district will bring the revised 2025–26 testing calendar to the board for approval and, thereafter, submit it to the Florida Department of Education as required. Staff said they will continue quarterly teacher check‑ins and provide schools guidance and “guardrails” for local testing plans. No formal board action was taken at the workshop.

Planning questions from board members covered how teachers were chosen for the steering committee (selected by principals and some volunteers), requests for a list of participating teachers, and a request to share the district’s minute‑by‑grade calculations that are submitted to the state.