District outlines NextPath data platform use and Act 20 testing, shows early progress on interventions

Waunakee Community School District curriculum directors on Feb. 24 gave the curriculum committee a detailed overview of NextPath, the district’s new student-data platform, and how it supported the district’s first-year implementation of Act 20 reading diagnostics and required personal reading plans.

District curriculum director Amy Johnson and director Tim Shale told the committee NextPath aggregates assessment vendor data, Infinite Campus records and manual entries to create dashboards for central office, principals, teachers and interventionists. Staff said NextPath has helped the district meet Act 20 timelines for administering diagnostics and for delivering and documenting personal reading plans to families.

Johnson said the platform provides layered “workspaces” including a reading-plan workspace tied specifically to the Act 20 workflow; dashboards show outstanding diagnostics by calendar-day deadlines, the status of parent notifications, and which students have plans created and acknowledged. Staff said families receive a secure link to view personal reading plans through NextPath and the district also provides hard copies.

Shale demonstrated features that allow teams to visualize assessment results by testing window (fall/winter/spring), by grade and by student attributes such as IEP or multilingual-learner status. He said the district currently runs i-Ready reading across multiple grade levels and that the platform shows 259 students performing below the target (below the 50th percentile) across the tested windows. When comparing fall to winter results for students with both tests, staff reported that 43 students moved to a lower-risk category and 47 students moved to a higher-risk category; staff said seventh grade produced the most upward movers while eighth grade had the most downward movers.

Committee members asked how parents access NextPath and what information is shared; staff said parents receive the personal reading plan and can view diagnostic and progress-monitoring results via a secure link. Committee members also asked about summer-school follow-up and whether the district can track summer-school participation as an attribute in NextPath. Staff said that technically it should be feasible but that they would need to coordinate data from the summer-school program and the NextPath vendor to set up that overlay.

Staff also described the district’s approach to administering Act 20 diagnostics. Because many younger-grade assessments require one-on-one administration, the district assembled an "A Team" of interventionists, instructional coaches, psychologists and some retired teachers to administer assessments, limiting classroom disruption; teachers administered some computer-based assessments such as the classroom-based STAR-like test. Staff said the administration took fewer days than initially scheduled and that lessons learned will inform spring testing planning.

Committee members asked whether paraeducators could administer the one-on-one diagnostics as a way to reduce teacher disruption; staff said it is not explicitly required that a licensed teacher administer the measures and they will examine staffing options while noting scheduling constraints.

Staff told the committee that NextPath replaced Educlimber and that the district migrated data last spring and discontinued the prior contract. District staff said NextPath’s automation and visualization are more user-friendly, and that the platform has already shown promising patterns for intervention effectiveness: staff reported stronger upward movement among the district-defined target group (for the target group, 41 students moved up) compared with the overall group. The district plans to report comprehensive spring local-assessment data and intervention trends later this spring and will explore incorporating summer-school data into NextPath.