Superintendent lays out three-year goals: cut chronic absenteeism, build board data capacity, boost student experience

Superintendent Doctor Carolyn Bernal presented three draft goals for the coming cycle, tying operational measures to student attendance, board understanding of educational data, and student-reported experience.

Goal 1 — Attendance: Bernal said current district figures show a substantial chronic absenteeism rate (students missing 10% or more of instruction). The district has established school-based attendance teams that work with a director of prevention/intervention and youth outreach workers. The superintendent proposed a target to reduce the chronic-absent cohort by 10 percent (a relative reduction from the baseline that will be established when current-year data are finalized) and to increase the share of students attending at least 90 percent of school days.

Goal 2 — Board data capacity: The superintendent proposed a series of work sessions and a short pre/post assessment to measure the board—s improvement in understanding educational data and indicators. Bernal said the district will provide a baseline assessment in November, follow-up checks after the February and April work sessions, and a post measure after the spring cycle; the stated improvement target for planning purposes is roughly a 30 percent increase in assessed comfort/competency for the board as a group.

Goal 3 — Student experience: The district used YouthTruth this past spring to establish a baseline survey of students, staff and parents. Bernal said the district will re-administer YouthTruth next April and seeks to raise positive response rates by five percentage points on three priority items: whether students report at least one trusted adult at school, whether discipline practices are perceived as fair and equitable, and whether classes are academically challenging and engaging. School principals have identified one actionable school-level strategy tied to those indicators.

Bernal told the board the YouthTruth vendor tracks participation thresholds needed for valid sample sizes and will report participation progress during the survey window.

Next steps: principals will continue school-level implementation of targeted strategies; the district will re-run YouthTruth in April and report the results to the board in June; the board will receive baseline and progress briefings during scheduled data-focused work sessions.