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Denali Borough board reviews AK STAR and school-climate data, flags low participation and drops in student respect scores
Summary
Board members spent a work session reviewing AK STAR (state summative) results and a school climate survey; administrators warned small-school data suppression can obscure trends and pointed to marked drops in some student-respect metrics that the board agreed to revisit in a follow-up work session.
Superintendent Dan Pulte presented district- and school-level AK STAR data and the School Climate and Connectedness (SCCX) survey to the board, cautioning that small enrollments in Anderson and Campbell lead to suppressed results and limit what administrators can infer.
"Because of the small size, you get a lot of suppressed data," Pulte said, and noted that participation rates varied sharply across sites — Tri Valley near 100% while Denali Peak participation was reported at roughly 15–20% — which gives "a real different view" of the student population.
Board members and staff also dug into the SCCX student responses. One board member noted a troubling fall in a question about students showing respect to others, with Tri Valley dropping from 55% to 37% and Anderson from about 45% to 36% in the staff-reported measures. A staff summary showed student-to-student relationships and staff-to-staff climate measures fell sharply in some sites.
Pulte urged the board not to treat any single measure as dispositive. He described AK STAR as a criterion-referenced assessment with a high proficiency threshold and suggested that local measures (such as the RIT-like growth metric included in the report) could help staff track year-to-year student growth even when state proficiency rates shift.
Board members asked for more disaggregation — which grades and cohorts are driving those drops — and for staff to return with a narrower work-session focus. "Would you like a smaller piece you'd like to focus?" Pulte asked, proposing a follow-up session to let members "dig in and say, what are these questions?" The board agreed to revisit the data as part of its ongoing goal-setting and monitoring work.
Next steps: administrators will prepare a targeted follow-up work session to show disaggregated participation and subgroup results and to propose specific lines of inquiry (attendance, classroom engagement, and staff supports) for board review.
