Anne Arundel County Public Schools reviews strategic-plan scorecard, unveils public dashboard and reports gains in literacy, graduation and staff retention

Anne Arundel County Public Schools staff presented the district's strategic-plan scorecard and demonstrated a public data dashboard at a board workshop, saying the tools are intended to increase transparency and let school leaders and community members track progress across priorities.

Shannon (director of strategic initiatives) and Erin Wright (senior manager of research) led the presentation, describing the scorecard layout, data cadence and how metrics link to the Blueprint for Maryland's Future. "The data we're sharing tonight is in the aggregate," staff said, and they explained that more detailed school- and student-group views are available through the CPS data dashboard.

The presenters highlighted several district results. On early literacy (the DOUBLES measure), they gave a 2024 baseline and said the share of students at or above grade level was 24.8% in the baseline year and that subsequent cohorts showed growth in the measure. On graduation, staff reported that the Class of 2024 graduated at 88.5% and that the Class of 2025 rose by 0.4 percentage points. In workforce metrics, staff noted improvements in retention and cited an exit-survey result showing the share of respondents naming compensation as a reason for leaving declined from 10% to 4%.

Staff also reported progress in student supports and staffing. They said expanded use of community-school funds allowed hires that reduced average student-service caseloads by about 13 students, and they reported more than 700 National Board Certified educators in the county, which the presentation identified as a top national ranking for the district.

Presenters discussed a roughly 4-percentage-point decline in English-language proficiency. They said the English Language Development office is developing secondary-course offerings and other targeted supports to address that decline and will return with more specifics. Board members pressed staff for follow-up data on the decline and for school-level breakdowns.

During a live demonstration, staff showed how to filter the public strategic-plan scorecard and the CPS data dashboard by priority, school and student group. They noted that MST redaction rules are applied to small student groups (groups with fewer than 10 students are redacted) and said the district plans to improve the dashboard's usability, add ADA compliance features and offer multilingual translations.

Board members asked questions about use of the district learning-management system (Campus), differences in engagement by grade level, and whether strong practices at schools with notable graduation-rate improvements could be replicated elsewhere. Several members asked for follow-up reports showing disaggregated graduation-rate trends and requested tracking of outcomes for a three-year cohort in the dual-language program at Tyler Heights.

Staff said principals and project teams have access to a non-redacted analytics portal for their schools and that quarterly assessments and other near-term data load into the system soon after students complete them. Staff also said Project Graduation teams use the portal to monitor students monthly and to support on-time graduation.

The board heard that staff will provide further updates on Blueprint-aligned metrics at a future meeting and that personnel updates will be presented at the next scheduled session. There were no formal votes or motions recorded during the workshop.