Belleville reports spring NJGPA and WIDA results; district outlines interventions
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Summary
District staff presented preliminary spring results for the New Jersey Graduation Proficiency Assessment and WIDA ACCESS for multilingual learners, described subgroup performance and listed intervention strategies including curriculum revision, tutoring and adaptive software.
Ms. Vinari presented the district's spring New Jersey Graduation Proficiency Assessment (NJGPA) and WIDA ACCESS results for grade 11 and multilingual learners.
She said the state set proficiency cut scores at 725 for both English language arts and mathematics when the assessment was adopted. According to the slides shown, Belleville's ELA proficiency decreased roughly 11 percentage points while statewide ELA proficiency decreased about 1 percentage point; math proficiency in the district increased by just over 5.4 percentage points while the statewide math proficiency rose about 3.3 percentage points.
Ms. Vinari outlined district interventions tied to the assessment results: a k-12 ELA and mathematics curriculum revision aligned to the New Jersey Student Learning Standards, continuation of grades 7'12 curricular resources, response-to-intervention (RTI) tiered instruction, adaptive software (Exact Path, Edmentum, Nearpod, Freckle), before- and after-school tutoring, an academic center called CASA, on-demand tutoring for identified students, and an NJGPA summer prep course using ALBERT.
On WIDA ACCESS, Vinari said multilingual learners must score a minimum of 4.5 on the WIDA composite to be considered for exit from the ESL program and that students have up to five years to demonstrate progress for exiting. The district reported a year-to-year increase in WIDA ACCESS percentage scores, citing a 17.5-point increase from the prior year in the multilingual learner group.
Ms. Vinari also identified student transiency and attendance as factors that disrupt learning progress and reiterated ongoing supports including push-in/pull-out services and a k-12 ESL teacher coach going into year three.
Ending
The board recognized students of the month and the administration said more detailed assessment slides would be posted; a public commenter later asked that prior years' presentations be made available on the district website for comparison.
