Collingswood board hears 2024——25 assessment results; district outperforms state in several grades but subgroup gaps remain

The Collingswood Public School District Board of Education on Thursday heard a full summary of the district—s 2024——25 spring assessments, including ACCESS (WIDA), the Dynamic Learning Maps (DLM) alternative assessment, the New Jersey Graduation Proficiency Assessment (NJGPA), and the New Jersey Student Learning Assessments (NJSLA).

"The results that you will see this evening have already been shared with our families," said Dr. Dana Walker, the district—s special assistant for school improvement, performance and accountability, as she opened the required report. Walker emphasized the state—s suppression rule that prevents publicly showing subgroup results for groups smaller than 10 students, and explained the purpose of each instrument, including that DLM is an alternate assessment for students with the most significant intellectual disabilities.

Why it matters: The presentation showed that Collingswood generally outperformed New Jersey averages in many grade bands but that measurable disparities persist across race, economic status and IEP status. District leaders framed the results as the basis for targeted work in multi-tiered supports, inclusion, professional development and data literacy.

Key findings and context

- ACCESS (multilingual learners): Walker summarized the WIDA proficiency bands and reported growth percentages by band. She said 64% of elementary multilingual learners demonstrated one or more years of expected growth in the most recent year; 40% of middle- and high-school multilingual learners showed comparable growth. She noted the district serves Spanish-, Haitian Creole- and Arabic-speaking students and reminded the board that the state—s suppression rule limits how small-subgroup data are shown publicly.

- DLM: Walker said the DLM is an alternate assessment for students with the most significant intellectual disabilities and that the district—s DLM counts are small enough to be suppressed under state privacy rules; therefore those slide-level results were not shown publicly.

- NJGPA: "We're sort of right in line with where New Jersey is," Walker said of the NJGPA graduation-pathway indicators, noting 78.6% of tested students met the ELA cut score and 56.7% met the math cut score on the spring administration. Walker said some students take make-up administrations (summer/fall) and that tally for NJGPA will increase when those results are returned and processed.

- NJSLA science: Collingswood outperformed the state in several science grades, with fifth grade at 42.4% (state 30.1%) and eighth grade at 31.8% (state 19%). Walker noted eighth grade showed the largest gain year-over-year (about +11.8 percentage points).

- Disaggregation: Walker presented subgroup results: for ELA females outperformed males (84.6% v. 74.3% meeting the cut score in the reported band), and students with IEPs met the ELA cut score at 42.3% and the math cut score at 19.2%. She described year-over-year increases for several subgroups in both ELA and math.

Board questions and district response

Board members pressed district leaders on how the district will accelerate growth for subgroups and multilingual learners. Board member Kate asked for specific strategies to support middle- and high-school multilingual learners after noting lower growth percentages in those bands.

"Do you mind if I defer to our assistant superintendent and ask Meredith to jump in?" Walker said; Meredith (Assistant Superintendent) described plans to reallocate the district—s multilingual coordinator time to provide more on-campus coaching at the sixth through twelfth grade level and said that work has already begun.

Several board members asked about MTSS and school-level implementation. Walker and Meredith said MTSS actions already began with staff-in-service analysis of universal screener data, targeted meetings for "bubble" students, and school-based professional learning communities. The district also said it is now using NWEA MAP as a k——12 math universal screener and that preliminary comparisons show MAP aligns with NJSLA trends.

District priorities and next steps

Walker and other administrators described the district priorities tied to the data: higher-quality and more engaging differentiation of instruction; stronger data literacy among teachers and leaders; expanded multi-tiered supports (MTSS) with documented individual plans for students near proficiency; an inclusion task force to plan rollouts with partners and CPAC; and continued focus on attendance and chronic absenteeism (district leaders reported a reduction of 57 students on the chronically absent track compared with the same time last year).

"We are proud of the progress that we are making, and it is not good enough yet," Meredith said in response to questions about subgroup gaps, adding that the district will set aggressive but achievable KPIs for each school and monitor progress through PLCs.

What the district will report back: District leaders said they will continue to provide disaggregated data during future board meetings, report back on MAP/NJSLA alignment, and share follow-up actions tied to MTSS, multilingual coaching and the inclusion task force.

Ending: Board members thanked staff for the presentation and acknowledged both areas of progress and continuing work to close persistent gaps.