Responding to membership feedback, the WSSDA Board of Directors has voted to establish a task force that will focus on helping school boards meet federal requirements for progress on student achievement.

The board voted to create a Task Force on Student Achievement after reviewing results of a school board member survey conducted at the WSSDA Annual Conference and online. Polled on a variety of topics that could be addressed by a task force, nearly two-thirds of the respondents ranked student achievement issues as their highest priority.

The overall mission of the task force will be to assist school boards in ensuring that their districts are making progress on student achievement as required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Under the act, schools and school districts must demonstrate Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) toward complying with NCLB’s ultimate goal that "100 percent of students in each state be proficient in reading, math and science" by the end of the 2013-14 school year.

AYP is measured in 37 categories distributed among nine student classifications (e.g., race/ethnicity, special education, low income). Districts or schools that do not meet AYP in any category for two years or more are put in "improvement" status and are subject to increasing levels of intervention if they continue to fall short.

It is expected that the task force will concentrate on helping school boards understand data related to student achievement and how to use that information to craft policies and procedures that will put all student groups on track to meet performance goals. The board will establish specific objectives after conducting a follow-up survey of the school directors who expressed interest in serving on the task force.

The WSSDA board also voted to continue the Task Force on Small Schools Issues and the School Trust Lands Advisory Task Force.

The small schools task force organizes workshops at the WSSDA Annual Conference and the WASA Small Schools Conference, provides input on small schools issues to policy and study groups, and serves as liaison with OSPI, the Rural Education Center, the State Board of Education and the WASA Small Schools Committee.

The trust lands task force will continue to collaborate with various state agencies to ensure that school trust lands are being managed to benefit the construction needs of school districts.