Priorities

This is a short post to release a pent up frustration that I have. This post may make me some enemies, but I will stand by my statements. Because I am PASSIONATE about our children and their education.

Our priorities as a community are messed up, frankly. Our 190 Middle School students currently have to essentially BEG the public for money to support fields trips that will help in their primary education. PLEASE support them by following the link below:

https://app.99pledges.com/fund/fallcreekcrickets?fbclid=IwAR3DaxvNVkjBcOniFZEzMZ2ANFDRoYDS6fdWSuh2nNi-CjZhoraV3fwl3qs

Apparently, there wasn’t room in the school’s budget to pay for class field trips. However, you know what the sitting School Board did find money for? A pole vault platform:

No need to start a fundraiser for this, no sir! They consider a pole vault platform that will service perhaps a couple dozen students twice as important as the entirety of the Middle School being able to go on their academic field trips for the year.

On a related note, I, an individual parent whose annual salary is roughly equivalent to that of one of our teachers, was able to match and exceed the entirety of the PTO’s “Directed Funds” for the 2020-2021 school year with individual donations over time directly to our teachers, largely funding over a dozen projects that the teachers felt were directly necessary for the education of our children:

While I’m sure that most of the PTO’s projects are worthwhile, only a couple of them appear to directly assist with the education of our children.

And that’s what a School District, and a PTO, should be primarily concerned with. Education. First and foremost. While the other stuff is “nice to have”, it should always come secondary to the direct education of our children’s minds.

While a pole vault is certainly a good thing to have to help train our student’s bodies and coordination, the likelihood of it directly helping them be successful in the workforce is slim.

While it’s important to give to families in need, and to support children during Christmas time, I would think we’d want to make sure that our hard working teachers have EVERYTHING they need to educate our children FIRST and foremost.

This, makes me sad. We can do better. For our children’s education. For their future. I know that we can do better than this. And we should.

2021-2022 DPI Updated Charts

2021-2022 DPI Updated Charts

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has released (as of two days ago), the scores for the past school year.

I am now providing updated timeline ranking which now includes the new data. Something else that I’d overlooked was the Altoona School District. I could have placed it on the Eau Claire/Chippewa chart, as its proximity is so close to Eau Claire that it can be hard to tell whether you’re in Eau Claire or Altoona. However, I decided that it would make more sense to place it into the “Rural Schools” chart, as that is how the Altoona School District has been “behaving”, more similar to other rural schools than the more “urban” school districts.

As you can see in the chart above, while Chippewa Falls is frankly abysmal, Eau Claire is quickly starting to catch up to our district after many years of worsening failure, matching our climb with their own.

Fall Creek is still showing a positive trend in its ranking compared to other schools in the state, jumping up from 181 to 142. This is good news! We have survived the pandemic, and not only that, the pandemic doesn’t appear to have harmed our position as it has for other school districts. I think that credit goes to our hard working teachers that adjusted to the situation and did fantastic work through remote learning and adjusting to the needs of their students.

However, it’s still not quite caught up with the loss that it suffered between 2013 and 2018, and has a little left to go to catch up to itself from where it was when this data was first recorded back in 2012-13, when it had a rank of 134 out of 423 schools.

Now, let’s look at the rural schools. I’m going to make this one a bit bigger so that you can see more detail:

As you can see, we started in “third place” amongst rural schools, and have so far ended in third place. So, at least, we have maintained our position in the Chippewa Valley. Adding Altoona to this chart is interesting, as it shows that that district has substantially improved since 2013-14 compared with most of the other districts and is now the “top dog” right above Stanley-Boyd.

Conclusion: We’re on a positive path forward. However, I still think we can do better, and certainly better from a state-wide perspective. We should be at the top of the state in how well our district is performing, rather than “third place” in the Chippewa Valley.

You can find my datasheets and charts here, if you’d like to look at the numbers yourself:

Fall-Creek-vs.-Eau-Claire-and-Chippewa-FallsDownload
Rural-School-Districts-Consolidated-vs.-Fall-CreekDownload
Fall Creek Versus… (DPI Data)

Fall Creek Versus… (DPI Data)

The last time that I released information from Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) regarding the Fall Creek School District, I was met with some criticism that I was misinterpreting the data, or that the values didn’t mean what I thought they meant. However, those that made these statements didn’t provide any alternative interpretations of the data to contrast with my analysis. I stand by my past statements that on a hundred point scale, we SHOULD be comparing ourselves based on a standard educational grading system.

If the scale meant something other than that, if for example it was similar to the way that SATs are scored 400 to 1600, or the ACTs are scored 1-36, they would have a point. Or, even, if the schools and districts themselves didn’t actually fall along a 0-100 scale on average, and the schools and districts only ranged between 40 and 80 points, then that should surely be taken into account.

However, that’s not the case. The possible range is from 0-100, and schools and districts absolutely fall within that entire range.

For example, last year’s scores (for the 2020-2021 school year), show that the Swallow school district outside of Waukesha scored an Overall Accountability Score of 96.9, the highest in the state, while our closer neighbor Lake Holcombe, north of Cornell, had the lowest score for that year with a value of 46.9. Fall Creek, meanwhile, was somewhere in the middle of all districts with a value of 72.9, making it district #181 out of 420 districts overall, slightly “above average”, in the 43rd percentile meaning that 43% of schools were “above” us and 57% of schools were “below us” in ranking for this score.

As such, I do truly believe that the standard educational grading scale is an appropriate way to judge our school systems.

I want the best for my kids, and for yours. As such, I would like to see the Fall Creek School District at the TOP of that list someday. We already do well for our students. My children personally have received excellent care from their teachers, who have been open, honest, and conducive to working with my wife and I to try to get the very best possible outcome for my twins.

However, some have responded to my past data releases with statements similar to “how about us vs. other local districts as opposed to the state of Wisconsin as a whole?” or “it’s not fair to compare us to schools elsewhere in the state”.

This is an absolutely fair point.

As such, and since I’ve had some time to spare for once, I’ve crunched the numbers and plotted them, for your convenience. First, I compared Fall Creek to our other fellow “rural” school districts. Looking at by district-by-district scores, and only looking at the Overall Accountability Scores, which are the amalgam of all of the other scores that the DPI judges our schools on, here’s where the local schools pan out:

We started in “third place” regionally behind Stanley-Boyd (which has been the consistent top regional school) and Elk Mound. And while we in general maintained our score for the most part and had fairly stable numbers over the years (with only a slight trend downwards), other local school districts shot up and started to surpass us, namely Colfax, Osseo-Fairchild, and Cadott. We now sit in “sixth place” in terms of rank using this DPI metric.

Secondly, I performed the same comparison to the Eau Claire and Chippewa School District, as I’m sure we’re all interested in how we fare against our more “metropolitan” neighbors. The results should not be a surprise to anyone:

Aside from a temporary dip in 2015-2016 where Eau Claire surpassed us in this metric, Fall Creek has FAR surpassed the two larger cities in Overall Accountability. So, for this we can be PROUD.

However, I think it is important for us to keep aware of these values, as well as all of the other metrics, and work towards improving them even better.

Because I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to just have “good feelings” about our schools. I want our schools to be PROVABLY better than the rest. We’re already provably better than Eau Claire and Chippewa. I want to see us push to be better than ALL of the regional schools, and push even further than that to become the best primary academic institutions in the STATE.

I hope you wish the same as well for your children, and mine.

All of my data sheets can be found below, for anyone else that wants to perform their own analysis.

Rural-School-Districts-Consolidated-vs.-Fall-CreekDownload
Fall-Creek-vs.-Eau-Claire-and-Chippewa-FallsDownload
Fall Creek School Board 05.19.2022 Packet and Commentary

Fall Creek School Board 05.19.2022 Packet and Commentary

Thanks to Ms. Teresa Reetz from the School District office, we now have access to the packets that the School Board receives at the beginning of each meeting. By necessity, these are redacted to only the information which should be provided to the public, but I thank the school district for providing this to us.

FC-School-Meeting-05.19.2022-Information-PacketDownload

Below I will provide my commentary for the meeting. Each entry will start with the timestamp that I’m looking at when I made my comment, so you can follow along if you wish:

You can find the video for the Board meeting here.

08:25 to 15:00 – The “board reorganization” wasn’t a board reorganization, at all. Everyone maintained their current positions. This, in my opinion, is problematic. I understand the concept of letting someone do a job that they’ve already done before due to them already having previous experience. There is a strong argument that this experience is valuable. However, I would argue that what would be more valuable, ESPECIALLY with the entire makeup of the Board representative remaining the same, is for board members to switch positions for the purpose of giving those members additional experiences and insight that they wouldn’t otherwise have. This would strengthen the board greatly.

There’s also the very real danger of something happening to a sitting board member (such as sickness, death, or “scandal” – which I’m sure won’t happen). In the case of something happening to a sitting board member, if nobody else has fulfilled that role in, say, 15 or more years, then when that person goes, ALL of their experience and skill goes with them. That’s called in the business world “institutional knowledge loss”, and is a MAJOR cause for concern and business failures. Businesses often times struggle with this, being a case of “putting all of your eggs in one basket”, and then the “basket” walking away or disappearing. Then, quite simply, all the “eggs” are gone/lost. We need to prevent this wherever possible.

As to any concerns about having a less skilled member in a position due to the changing of the seats, with the board makeup itself not changing, that’s greatly diminished, as the original holder of that position is there to help guide the other person and advise them. That’s actually another point in favor of switching positions, especially when the makeup of the board itself doesn’t change. It would give the chance to make the board even stronger by having all members learn new skills, and learn more from each other.

Not to mention the stagnation that comes with the same people doing the same things over and over again inherently causing a reduction in potential for improvement. It is vital for organizations to constantly have an influx of new people and new ideas. Otherwise, if the same people and same ideas are always there, and the world changes around them, then they won’t be ready for those changes. To me, it’s a simple matter of desiring both constant improvement and preparation for potential future disaster. “Same old, same old” is generally NOT a good idea.

17:27 – Resolution Considering Authorization of Funds – Defeasance, is essentially setting up an escrow account to “pre-pay” back the referendum-approved debt at a constant rate. The fancy business “trick” that is happening here is to basically set aside some of the money that you had planned in the future to use to pay back a debt, and put that money instead into another account that will hopefully accumulate positive interest, to offset the negative interest of the original debt (aka “interest avoidance”). It works. I had some misgivings about it initially, as it seemed fairly “shady” to me, moving money around like that. But the more I look into it, the more it seems a standard business practice throughout the finance services industry, and it also relies on the owner of the original debt to agree to the situation. So, as long as everyone is in agreement about it, it all appears to be above the board to me, and is a great way to save money.

27:45 – Excellent to see this breakdown of the budget, and see where our money is going. Charts and graphs are always a good thing, as many of us are visual thinkers. Also good to see that most of our money is going to the people that are helping our children make it through school!

37:00 – Good on Ms. Kneifl for asking if there was “wiggle room” to allow us to renegotiate our school food options. I’m not a big fan of how Dr. Sanfelippo sort of “shut down” further inquiry by stating the the service that we currently get “is fantastic”. That’s good to hear, but it sounded very forceful to me, like there shouldn’t be any argument or further discussion about it. It’s fantastic, and that’s it, it’s done, let’s move on. I’m concerned about that interaction.

40:43 – I do like that Dr. Sanfelippo suggested that we keep food prices the same, and make a new decision next year about changing the prices. This gives us a chance to “wait out” the after effects of the COVID pandemic, and give people time to adjust back to paying for regular school meals again.

46:08 – Mr. Ryan brought up the great idea of potentially scrapping one of our buses rather than doing a trade-in with the bus company. This section of the meeting shows the school board at its best – someone brings up a reasonable idea or concern to the contrary of the existing “path”, people talk it over, and rather than just accepting what’s already been previously set, the motion is passed to buy the new bus, and do the homework of scrap prices vs. trade-in to see which would net us the greatest payback. I hope in the next meeting to see the Superintendent to come back with information about the actual values of scrap vs. trade-in.

51:55 – Regarding the pole vault bid – I’m disappointed to see that while we can see the actual bid for Richey in the informational packet, no mention at all of the other bids was given except in passing. I personally would have liked to have known exactly what other entities were contacted, and what their bids were. Instead, we’re just given one choice, and the board then has to choose to vote on one choice. I’m also slightly disappointed that none of the other board members asked about the other bids.

01:05:00 – Good to see students being brought in to the board meetings, to share their experiences. I would like to see this happen more often. It’s beneficial for both the board, and the students themselves.

Fully Funded

Fully Funded

Since apparently my posts are now being automatically declined in the Fall Creek Connections page:

Why? Because our educators are doing important work, and they should receive all of the resources that they need to accomplish that work. Period.

By The Numbers… Prime Metrics – FC vs. WI

By The Numbers… Prime Metrics – FC vs. WI

I’m going to be making a series of posts looking over the metrics that the DPI has provided, and comparing Fall Creek to both the state as a whole, as well as to other individual districts, to see where we stack up, and to see where we do well, and where we don’t.

I will start this series by looking at the overall five main metrics provided by the DPI, and here is a refresher from my DPI page:

  • Overall Accountability Score – which is based upon a calculation derived from the other four scores
  • School/Student Achievement Score – students’ level of knowledge and skills attained compared against state academic standards in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics
  • School/Student Growth Score – how rapidly students are gaining knowledge and skills from year to year, focusing on the pace of improvement in students’ performance
  • School/Student Target Group Outcomes Score (known in previous years as the “Closing Gaps” Score) – outcomes for students with the lowest test scores in their school – the Target Group. Outcomes are displayed for achievement, growth, chronic absenteeism, and attendance or graduation rate
  • School/Student School On-Track (to Graduation) and Postsecondary Readiness Score – how successfully students are achieving educational milestones that predict later success

Fall Creek Elementary School

Overall Accountability – Fall Creek Elementary started off slightly above the overall State Average in 2011 (when they started keeping track of these things). It then started to far surpass the state average, peaking in the 2016-2017 school year, until losing steam and meeting back up with the state in the last few years. Notably, this trend began before COVID hit.
School/Student Achievement Score – FCE has been consistently above State Average in terms of Student Achievement. This shows that the school is excellent at teaching the fundamentals of “reading, writing, and ‘rithmatic”.
School/Student Growth Score – Note from the description of this metric that it has nothing to do with how much the school itself grows, but rather, how good the school is at slowly improving students’ skills over time, from year to year, and building on previous foundations laid. Ideally, as with most metrics, we want to see this slowly increase over time in a consistent manner. However, unlike the State Average, which is doing this, the Elementary’s track record of improving students’ skills from year to year is… inconsistent. This suggests to me that there is some inconsistency in the curriculum from year to year. It doesn’t tell us a whole lot, but it does open up some questions… such as: “What’s changing year to year?” “Is staff consistent?” “Is there proper handoff from one teacher to the next of knowledge of students’ capabilities?” These are the questions we (and the school), should be asking of ourselves.
School/Student Target Group Outcomes Score (known in previous years as the “Closing Gaps” Score) – These results show us that Fall Creek Elementary is very good at “closing the gaps” between the higher achievers and lower achievers. This is excellent. Nothing more to comment on here, except the expected dip with the onset of COVID.
School/Student School On-Track (to Graduation) and Postsecondary Readiness Score – Now, you wouldn’t think that this has any relevance to an Elementary School, but that would be incorrect. It’s important for students to be achieving certain FUNDAMENTAL milestones by certain times, to be successful in future grades, and all the way into college. The Elementary School has shown that it is EXCELLENT when it comes to facilitating the achievement of these milestones.

Conclusion – Overall, it appears that Fall Creek Elementary is doing fairly well, with the possible exception of the “hand-off” of students from one year to the next. We should consider how to better improve that and make that aspect of our children’s education a bit more stable.

Fall Creek Middle School

Overall Accountability Score – Fall Creek Middle started off the last decade in a rough place in terms of overall accountability. From 2012-2016, it was well below State Average. Then, as you can see, there was a dramatic improvement starting in the 2017-2018 school year. Then after a few good years, an expected COVID dip. We’ll need to watch this going forward and see if the school can bring that back up again.
School/Student Achievement Score – As with the Elementary School, the Middle School has been solidly slightly above State Average when it comes to teaching the basic, core, crucial subjects. This is a very good thing.
School/Student Growth Score – The Middle School has an ABYSMAL record when it comes to students being able to build on their previous year’s education. This suggests to me that the Middle School needs to spend a lot of time focusing on what they can do to prevent Summer Learning Loss, and to keep kids growing their skills beyond rehashing what they learned the last year.
School/Student Target Group Outcomes Score (known in previous years as the “Closing Gaps” Score) – The Middle School has had a poor record at the beginning of the last decade with getting lower achieving students “caught up” with the high achievers. This started to improve in the 2017-2018 school year, until a COVID dip. The Middle School needs to work harder to keep pushing this up, and to make sure that those students that have a harder time get the support that they need.
School/Student School On-Track (to Graduation) and Postsecondary Readiness Score – As you can tell, this has been a “roller-coaster” for the Middle School. The decade started off great, then had a drastic drop to below average when the State started to improve, and then started bringing this up again until COVID. Let’s hope that it can push past the pandemic and get our Middle Schoolers back on track to graduate!

Conclusion – The Middle School has had a very hard time in the last decade with keeping its students’ education and skill levels from “slipping” from year to year, and has also in the recent past had troubles with getting students to the milestones necessary for successful graduation and being prepared for what lies beyond that. It has improved recently in saving “Target” students, and getting those students what they need to catch up to others, but we need the school to push past the “COVID dip”.

Fall Creek High School

Overall Accountability Score – The High School started off doing well, but then had an extreme nose dive for a period of three school years, before starting to bring itself back up again. It’s now positioned to do much better than average in a post-COVID world. Let’s hope it can keep it that way, and we don’t have any further dips!
School/Student Achievement Score – It appears that the High School has been “dancing” with the State Average in regards to the fundamentals. There’s not much to say here, except that it appears that the High School has been consistently “middle of the road” when it comes to teaching the basics. We can’t complain, but we don’t really have much to be proud of in this category.
School/Student Growth Score – For some reason, we have no data on this metric from before 2018. I did a double check, and it appears that the DPI was not recording this metric for about 2/3rds of the High Schools until that year. This is slightly concerning, because we can’t use this metric to see how well students have been retaining and building on their knowledge from previous years.
School/Student Target Group Outcomes Score (known in previous years as the “Closing Gaps” Score) – As with Student Growth scores, Fall Creek High was one of the 2/3rds of high schools where this data wasn’t recorded until 2018. However, it is good to see that in the two school years that the data for these two scores were measured, the school has substantially improved above and beyond State Average. Let’s hope it can keep it that way. This is the score that I’m going to be watching most carefully over the next few years, because it’s at the high school level where we’ll see the results of almost a decade of education in the district, to see if the schools can catch those that “fall between the cracks” and push them back up to ensure that they get the same education, the same chances, as those high achievers that things come more naturally to. It is far too easy for those that “fall behind” to stay behind and diverge further.
School/Student School On-Track (to Graduation) and Postsecondary Readiness Score – Here is a place where we can be PROUD of our High School. It does a very good job (at least since 2013) of getting our students what they need to push them out the door and set them up for success in post-secondary education. I am very happy to see that Fall Creek looks like it’s working it’s way to the top of the list of schools that get their kids graduated and pushed on to college!

Conclusion – Our High School is good at getting students graduated and ready for college, but we don’t have a lot of data to determine a whole lot else about it. I suspect that this lack of data is what has caused the school’s Overall Accountability to swing drastically and rapidly in both directions over the years. I hope that with the other two metrics starting to be collected, we’ll have a better picture in a few years’ time about where our high school stands in regards to other schools in the state.

Final Conclusions and Thoughts

After looking at the Prime Metrics, and comparing them to the State Averages, we can get a better picture of how well our schools are doing when compared to the 2600+ other schools in the state. By using the State Average as a baseline, it allows us to moderate the outliers at both the top and bottom of the list, to let us know much better just how we stack up in comparison to the rest of the state.

It appears that our Elementary School is doing a very good job at being consistently above average in most ways.

Our High School is good at getting our kids out of school at the end of their education, and pushing them to the next level of learning, but we don’t have enough information to really tell how well the intervening years are working, all we can see is the “final product” at the end.

The Middle School, however, is another story. It has had a rough and rocky time in the past decade, having troubles with both keeping student’s educational levels consistent and growing them over the years, as well as catching up low performers with their peers. Of most concern is the seeming downward trend of not being able to prepare our students for High School graduation and beyond, making the job of the High School that much harder to get our kids ready. However, it seems that things have improved in this area in recent years, so time will tell.

Out of all the schools, I think it would be in the District’s best interest to maintain the status quo for both the Elementary School (which has performed consistently well), and the High School (which we don’t have enough data for, so “stay the course”), and to focus any additional resources it may have on helping to pick up the Middle School’s “slack”, for the lack of a better word. After the Middle School has been “picked back up again”, then we can start talking about making a movement towards upwards mobility, and a push for academic excellence, for all of the schools in the District.

I don’t know about you, but I for one would like to see the Fall Creek School District become the BEST school district in the state. As it stands now, we’ve got a ways to go before we can attempt to get there. It’ll require a lot of work, focus, and some tough conversations, but if we want things to get better, those are the things that we’ll have to do.