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Riverview, El Mirage staff cite PLC collaboration for gains and outline targets
Summary
Two Dysart elementary schools presented continuous improvement (PLC) spotlights to the board, reporting gains on assessments, targeted interventions, co-teaching and next-year priorities to raise proficiency in ELA and math.
The Dysart Unified School District governing board received school-spotlight presentations from Riverview Elementary's fourth-grade professional learning team (PLT) and El Mirage Elementary's K'4 cohort team describing collaborative instructional teams, common formative assessments and targeted interventions.
Joey Toki, introduced as principal of Riverview Elementary, presented the fourth-grade team's work and results. Team members described using backwards planning, weekly PLT meetings, common formative assessments and co-teaching with the ESS teacher. Teachers reported a 20% reduction in students identified as intensive on the Acadience Reading Assessment compared with the same cohort's third-grade results, an 11 percentage-point drop in minimally proficient students on the AASA ELA measure and a 12-point drop in minimally proficient students in math; the team also reported a 6-point increase in AASA math proficiency. The Riverview presenters said students tracked their own data and that instructional coaches supported small-group interventions using Read 180, Illustrative Math, Savvas and IXL.
Principal Rick Haney and the El Mirage team described a continued focus on cohort growth in the K'4 configuration, noting that fourth grade accounts for a large portion of the state growth metric in the district's K'4 model. El Mirage reported three consecutive years of strong growth in the cohort metric and detailed weekly common formative assessments, tier-2 and tier-3 interventions, restructuring intervention groups every three weeks, and using Achieve3000 for reading intervention. The team said fourth-grade math proficiency increased from 36% in third grade to 51% in fourth for the cohort highlighted, and the school set internal goals to raise ELA from 43% to 46% and math from 54% to 57% while decreasing the number of minimally proficient ELA students by 3 percentage points.
Board members asked several questions about the underlying numbers, the extent of co-teaching and professional development, and whether the gains were distributed across student subgroups including ESS and English learners. Riverview presenters highlighted co-teaching structures and weekly planning time, and El Mirage presenters described how they restructure small groups and use interventionists and specials teachers to expand instructional capacity.
Both schools emphasized sustainability and next steps: increasing academic conversations in math and ELA, strengthening backward design, expanding cross-grade alignment and using instructional coaches to sustain targeted interventions. The presentations were informational; no board action was taken.
