La Mesa-Spring Valley dashboard: ELA improves to yellow, math remains orange; absenteeism high but declining

At the Jan. 13 La Mesa-Spring Valley School Board meeting, a district presenter, introduced as Matt, briefed the board on the 2025 California School Dashboard and what the dashboard’s color indicators mean for the district and its schools.

"The cool part about the dashboard is it just doesn't give you a snapshot. It compares growth," Matt said while explaining that each indicator combines a status metric (distance from standard for each student) and a change metric (year-to-year movement). He described the "distance from standard" calculation and how the state places districts on a 5-by-5 matrix to assign color categories.

Matt reported La Mesa-Spring Valley’s district-level results for 2025: English language arts landed in the yellow category (district students averaged about 9.6 points below the minimally proficient cut score, with a +4.4 change from 2024), mathematics was in the orange category (about 37.1 points below minimally proficient; change +2), English learner progress was yellow (46.6% of English learners made or maintained progress), chronic absenteeism was orange (a very high rate by status but the district reduced the rate by 2.3 percentage points), and suspension rate was yellow (2.8%, a modest decline of 0.2 points, maintained overall).

A board member asked why some schools do not appear on the English learner indicator. Matt replied, "The number is 30. You have to have 30 students to have an indicator," noting that schools with fewer than 30 English learners are suppressed on that indicator and appear grayed out on the dashboard.

Matt offered to follow up with detailed school-level visualizations and answered clarifying questions from board members. The presentation concluded with the board moving on to other agenda items; no formal district policy action or vote was taken on the dashboard itself.