Mario Penman, the district’s director of curriculum and assessment, presented a data-focused workshop to the Robla Unified School District board on student assessments, behavior and attendance, emphasizing the need to prioritize students' academic and social-emotional needs.

The presentation outlined multiple assessment streams — a K–1 phonics survey, STAR Reading for grades 2–6, the district’s ELFA rubric for English learners and math benchmarks — and flagged a consistent, districtwide drop in proficiency in 2023–24 across student groups. "What happened to cause a dramatic drop across the board in 23–24?" Penman asked, and repeatedly urged the board that leadership would "dig deeper" into teacher assignments, cohort differences and test rigor to explain the pattern.

Why it matters: Board members said the drop is significant because it was broadly consistent across schools and demographic groups in the packet, and the district is reporting small but actionable groups of students who are "nearly met" on state-aligned measures. Penman showed that moving modest numbers of students at each site — in some cases five to 21 students per grade — could raise site-level proficiency percentages substantially (for example, he reported moving a cohort in one grade from 22% to 29% and another from 28% to 37%).

Key details: Penman explained the district added Dual Language Immersion (DLI) reporting for Glenwood School and that earlier years did not disaggregate DLI students, which complicates cohort comparisons. Director Lyon, who discussed English-learner measures, said the district’s in-house ELFA rubric captures listening and speaking but cannot be uploaded to the current district system because the platform accepts numeric scores only. "We can't put a rubric like this in it," Lyon said, explaining the limitation prevents easy, systemwide analysis of some EL skills.

Principals and board members discussed school-level differences. Main Avenue’s gains were attributed to targeted professional support from a county curriculum specialist and systematic tracking of extended-day groups; Taylor showed wide swings on different slides (a 58% measure versus 14% on another), prompting requests for principal-level breakdowns. Panelists noted variation in curriculum and classroom practices (for example, some teachers use Wonders while others use YouFLY), staffing changes, and the testing environment late in the year as plausible contributors to divergent results.

Discipline and behavior: Presenters clarified differences between suspension counts (a student counted once regardless of repeated suspensions) and SWIS referrals (which can log multiple incidents per student). School leaders said SWIS is used for big-picture monitoring (locations, time of day, incident type) and that PBIS handbooks, staff training and referral narrative fields are used to standardize coding. Board members asked for suspension and referral breakdowns by student group; administrators agreed to include such disaggregations in the December dashboard presentation.

Attendance and engagement: The district reported attendance recovery since the pandemic baseline and principals described strategies used to increase daily attendance, including weekly trophies, classroom incentives and increased staff visibility during drop-off. Administrators highlighted community liaisons and parent outreach as emerging supports for sustained gains.

Procedure: The board adopted the meeting agenda at the start of the session by voice vote. No formal policy votes or ordinances were taken during the workshop; the session closed after board requests for future agenda items were solicited.

What’s next: Presenters said leadership will drill down on the 2023–24 declines, prepare site-level follow-ups for principals, provide disaggregated suspension and referral data at the December dashboard presentation, and explore data-system options that better capture rubric-based EL measures.

Representative quotes from the workshop

"I'm Mario Penman, the director of curriculum and assessment," Penman said as he opened the workshop and later urged the board to help "keep that priority together when we are making decisions." Director Lyon described the ELFA tool and the district’s system limits: "We can't put a rubric like this in it," she said, explaining why listening and speaking components are not easily uploaded. Principal/lead speakers described site practices that appeared to drive improvement at specific schools: "We were focusing on differentiated instruction ... and tracking certain data with our extended day groups," a principal said when explaining Main Avenue’s gains.

Sources and limits: This article draws exclusively on presentations, question-and-answer exchanges and on-site principal remarks recorded in the Robla board workshop transcript. Where precise dates, policy citations or external reports were not given in the transcript, the article states 'not specified' or reports only what presenters showed or said. No outside documents were used.