Christina School District workshop narrows one-year goal to boost 5th-grade multilingual learners' Smarter reading scores

The Christina School District Board held a live-streamed workshop on Sept. 30, 2025, to develop one-year student-outcome goals and practice a monitoring cadence required under the superintendent's contract. With only three board members present and no vote taken, members agreed to bring a single one-year goal to the board's October business meeting for formal action.

Superintendent Dr. Joyner presented two candidate goals she and her team had workshopped: raising third-grade I-Ready reading proficiency for multilingual learners from 44% in July 2025 to 48% in July 2026, and raising fifth-grade Smarter Balanced reading proficiency for multilingual learners from 12% to 14% over the same period. She also offered a secondary proposal to increase the percentage of 12th-grade students demonstrating college- and career-readiness from 55% to 60.5% by July 2026.

Board consultant Mister Jordan read the contract language that framed the exercise: "The board shall adopt goals and guardrails. The superintendent shall submit to the board interim goals and interim guardrails. The superintendent's evaluation shall include progress towards these board adopted goals and adherence to guardrails as evidenced in monitoring reports." He and other coaches recommended using one-year goals as a practice run to establish monitoring reports, a cadence for progress reviews, and eventual alignment of budgets to board priorities.

Board members and Dr. Joyner debated which measures to use for monitoring. Dr. Joyner cautioned that the Smarter Balanced assessment is a once-a-year summative test and "it's a lagging indicator" that makes short-term monitoring difficult. She said there is "some correlation" between students meeting I-Ready goals and later Smarter proficiency but warned it is not one-to-one, noting potential validity issues in using I-Ready as a strict interim for Smarter outcomes.

Board member Shannon Troncoso urged school-level transparency, citing information from a parent that at one school only nine students were at grade level in reading and five in math. "I would like to see more information about how each school is doing," Troncoso said, asking for school-by-school breakdowns so the superintendent can target supports where they are most needed.

Dr. Joyner described the instructional resources principals need to raise student performance: strengthened instructional leadership, school climate and culture work, and a data-driven multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS). She and coaches identified multilingual learners and students with disabilities as subgroups with the greatest opportunity for improvement and noted that opportunity funding already targeted to those groups can be used to align resources.

Board members favored narrowing the work to a single, focused one-year goal to practice monitoring and avoid overloading the district. Several members said the board's listening sessions and a future 3-to-5-year goal-setting workshop could change the final set of priorities. The board asked Dr. Joyner to provide background trend data from the August needs assessment and a brief summary for distribution to all board members before the October business meeting so questions can be submitted in advance and appended to the agenda.

No formal vote was taken at the workshop; the board directed that the selected one-year goal be posted as an action item for the October meeting, along with supporting trend data and the superintendent's proposed interim monitoring measures. The district said it will return with regular monitoring reports if the board adopts the goal, and noted that early-year movement may be small as budget alignment and other resources are phased in.

The meeting closed after a call for public comment (none offered).