The Verona Area School District presented a high-level summary of the state report card on Dec. 1, explaining how the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) compiles its measures and why the district's overall score should be interpreted cautiously.

"Overall, as a district, we were in the exceeds expectations banding and overall score of 76.6," presenter Amy said, describing DPI's four priority areas: achievement, growth, target-group outcomes and on-track-for-graduation measures.

Amy explained DPI uses two years of data for the achievement bands and noted that weighting shifts based on the percent of students identified as economically disadvantaged. "We're at about 25% of our students that are economically disadvantaged," she said, which increases the relative weight of the achievement metric for this district.

Board members and administrators discussed attendance, a multi-year rolling measure that lags the most recent interventions. Amy and staff said the district's attendance campaign has helped reduce chronic absenteeism from 17.7% at the end of the 2324 school year to 16.8 at the end of 2425. "So almost a full percent reduction," Amy said, while noting that those improvements may not yet be fully reflected in the published report-card data because DPI uses earlier-year averages.

On growth, Amy said VASD's overall growth score increased by 3.8 points from 2324 to 2425 and that several middle schools recorded gains as large as 24.6 points. She attributed gains to adoption of core curricular resources, longer instructional blocks in some middle schools, and more robust data-review systems for targeting interventions.

Amy closed by outlining next steps: continue expanding the continuum of services, address disproportionality in outcomes, and sustain attendance and data-review practices tied to the district's results policies. Board members cautioned against using raw score changes as marketing claims when DPI has said some categories are not comparable year-to-year.

No formal board action was taken on the state report card at the meeting; the presentation was informational and board members were invited to ask follow-up questions at future meetings.