Board workshop outlines new start‑of‑year screening plan, agendas adopted

Los Alamitos Unified School District board members heard a staff presentation Sept. 9 on the district's revised start‑of‑year assessment program and adopted the workshop agenda by a 5‑0 vote before recessing to closed session.

Ms. Reed, a district staff member who led the presentation, said the briefing was the first of a two‑part series on using assessment data as an instructional tool. "The goal of this two‑part series is to understand the purpose of our assessments, learn about key beginning‑of‑year measures and explore how collaboration days with teachers support data analysis," she said.

The district described two classes of measures. Early literacy screeners include mCLASS (Amplify) in kindergarten and Amira in grades 1–2; both are diagnostic and will be used to guide classroom grouping and intervention. Ms. Reed said mCLASS will be administered one‑on‑one in kindergarten, takes about 10 to 15 minutes per student, and will serve as the district's SB 114‑aligned dyslexia screener during the January window. "We don't actually diagnose dyslexia," she said, "but these screeners inform us whether students are displaying behaviors consistent with reading difficulties." She added that parents will be notified and retain the option to opt out under SB 114 and that the district must share results with families within 45 days of the January screening window.

For grades 1–2 the district will use Amira, an AI‑driven oral reading benchmark that adapts to students in real time and provides teachers suggested next instructional steps. Ms. Reed said Amira is intended to pinpoint whether a student's struggles are primarily decoding, fluency or comprehension so teachers can group students for targeted interventions.

For grades 2–5 the district is adopting easyCBM (University of Oregon) to replace prior Fountas & Pinnell benchmarks; easyCBM combines a one‑minute oral reading fluency measure with an online comprehension component to produce a fuller profile for progress monitoring. Ms. Reed said easyCBM is used to identify students below the 20th percentile for more frequent progress monitoring.

Broad growth and alignment measures will be provided by NWEA MAP Growth for grades 2–10. Ms. Reed described MAP as a nationally normed, computer‑adaptive assessment that yields a stable RIT score and growth percentiles; it is given three times a year and can take 45 minutes to two hours depending on student familiarity. "MAP gives us both a stable score and a growth percentile so parents can see how a student is growing compared with academically similar peers nationwide," she said.

Ms. Reed said the district is working on how to share MAP reports with families. Elementary parent reports will be printed for conferences; for grades 6–10 the district is exploring Panorama to synthesize data across multiple sources.

Board members asked about logistics, including how to manage widely varying MAP administration times and how elementary teachers will find planning time to analyze results. Ms. Reed said sites are using strategies such as paired teachers, benchmark blocks and two‑day windows at middle schools; she also described multi‑year professional development and classroom coaching to bring teachers up to date on structured‑literacy practices.

The presentation repeatedly framed assessments as instructional tools rather than only accountability measures; Ms. Reed told the board the measures will inform reading lab placements, tiered interventions and classroom grouping and will guide districtwide instructional planning during scheduled collaboration days.

The board adopted the meeting agenda at the start of the session (motion moved and seconded; tally reported as "Motion carries 5 0"). President Davidson then announced the board had no public speakers for the workshop and recessed to closed session, returning at 6:00 p.m. for the regular meeting.

What happens next: Ms. Reed said the district will continue the second part of the series later this fall to show how staff use assessment data to inform classroom instruction and will provide MAP parent reports at elementary conferences while pursuing options for grades 6–10.