The Minnesota Department of Education announced last week that they are implementing a new statewide system to address learning recovery. The system is called “COMPASS” and is being implemented to help with learning loss, as well as the understanding from many that it will also help with seeing Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) scores start to rise again after seeing a drop in the 2021 numbers compared to the 2019 numbers.
Crookston Public Schools Superintendent Jeremy Olson discussed the new implementation and what Crookston parents and students can expect. “Basically, they’re trying to take some stuff that’s been in place and realign it to help with learning loss from last year,” said Olson. “There is a renewed emphasize this year on schools being supported so that we can support teachers who support students.”
COMPASS will be taking things that have been implemented in the past and making sure the schools’ practices are aligned with what the data is saying.
Olson talked more about the new push from the Minnesota Department of Education and its main goal. “It’s mainly trying to realign schools’ work around learning loss,” said Olson. “It will also realign a few other aspects as well. So, it’s trying to bring all these pieces together that have been in place and utilize them so that it’s more efficient for Minnesota.”
The other main part of this new initiative appears to be centered around the MCAs and seeing scores improve after a drop. A big part of the numbers decreasing was due to COVID-19 and the pandemic, and the State knew that the numbers would be down before the data was even released.
Now that the data has been released, Olson talked about the numbers for the State averages and how he is happy with where Crookston is, at all things considered. “Now that we have the data from the State, with how we did in Math, Reading, and Science, we saw clear declines in those categories around the State,” said Olson. “What I’m happy to report is that in Crookston, while we may have seen a decline, it was much better than the state average, which tells me we maneuvered the pandemic fairly well academically.”
Decreases in the number of students meeting or exceeding grade-level standards in all three assessment subjects of Math, Reading, and Science were seen across all 893,875 students in the state’s 2,097 public schools this past year, according to a statewide assessment.
With that in mind, Olson also discussed what Crookston’s goals are over the course of the next three years to get back on track and see an improvement in the data. “The school board has put in goals for the next three years regarding literacy and what we want to see,” said Olson. “This year, we want to get back to where we were in 2019 before the pandemic, in year two, we want to see a 4% increase, and in year number three, we want to increase again by 5%. If we’re able to hit all those marks will be one of the highest performing districts in this area, and that’s our goal.”
Below are the statistics from the MCA Data comparisons between the state average and Crookston School District and surrounding districts in the categories of Math, Reading, and Science from this past school year.
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