Sausalito Marin City School District will launch a new program aimed at highlighting educational metrics.
A free event, “Dinner and Data,” will be held at 6 p.m. Jan. 14 on the Martin Luther King Jr. campus in Marin City. The night will showcase a newly launched online dashboard that displays everything from standardized test scores to attendance, enrollment and suspension figures.
“I want to make sure we all are engaged in data — and really understanding our district data, ” Superintendent LaResha Huffman said at a board meeting on Dec. 12. “I believe in transparent data, and in people having all the information.”
The event will include guest speakers on literacy and the science of reading, Huffman said. “We want to impress upon parents the importance of reading,” she said.
The new dashboard took a year and a half to complete, Huffman said. District communications and IT specialist Nixon Diaz and community school director Phillip Logan were the chief architects, along with other contributors, she said.
Highlights of the new dashboard include results from the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress and other standardized tests.
The results were presented at board meetings in October and November, which showed 42.18% of district students who took the test met or exceeded the standard for their grade levels in English, compared to 49.26% last year. In math, 40.11% of students met or exceeded the standard, compared to 35.36% last year.
Marin’s countywide test results showed that 61% of students met or exceeded the state standard for their grade level in English this year, while 52% met or exceeded the state standard for their grade level in math.
Statewide, the CAASPP results showed that 47.04% of students met or exceeded the standard in English this year, compared to 46.66% last year. In math, 35.54% of all students met or exceeded the standard for their grade level this year, compared to 34.62% last year.
The CAASPP is administered to students in grades three through eight and in 11th grade. The Sausalito Marin City School District, which has about 280 students, only goes up to eighth grade.
“We included an explanation of what is CAASPP,” Diaz said. Diaz said the personal student section of the dashboard is password-protected, while the public-facing part has sections on test results, attendance and enrollment data.
Other demographic data to be added later will be on grades, race, gender, special education and language fluency, Diaz said.
“We will be able to add report cards next year,” he said. “In that timeline, families will also be able to see attendance and grades.”
To access the dashboard, go to the district website at smcsd.org.
