The Antigo School Board on Monday approved the AGR spring data report and heard extended explanation of changes to the district’s literacy screener and state reporting that will affect how results are compared year to year. The board approved the report after Director of Curriculum and Instruction Amy Dustream explained the district is transitioning screening tools and cautioned that new national norms will change appearance of comparisons.

Dustream told the board the district will move from FastBridge to AIMSweb Plus for kindergarten through third-grade screening and will give fall, winter and spring benchmark administrations as it has previously. She said the change followed Wisconsin’s implementation of Act 20 and the state’s direction to use Pearson’s AIMSweb Plus for those grades. "We moved everyone to AIMSweb Plus as their screener," Dustream said. "When you look at the AGR reports, you'll notice in 2024 it's FastBridge results and spring ELA is AIMSweb, but this next year we'll move to AIMSweb for everything."

Dustream cautioned that AIMSweb updated its norms this year — she said the company had not revised norms since 2016 — and the new norms will likely make some cohort comparisons look different. "If I put them side by side it may look like we had a lot of students who were on reading plans and suddenly in fall a lot of kids didn't need reading plans," she said, adding that changes in cut scores explain that effect. She told the board the district still plans to track a district-level benchmark roughly around the 40th–50th percentile as an internal indicator of being on track, even though the state uses a different cutoff to identify students needing intensive intervention. "What the state is saying is they want to take the 25th percentile and below," Dustream said, "but we still have the middle group we don't want to forget about."

Superintendent (district administrator) Mrs. Ojinski and other board members asked procedural questions about the AGR report and the state report card changes that will be reported to the public later in the fall. Dustream said the State Report Card will show some shifts and that state educators revised items to reduce cultural or contextual bias on the Forward exam. "They walk through a lot of different testing questions to make sure ... any student has access to show their best knowledge," she said. The board voted to approve the AGR spring data report as presented.

Why it matters: The screening tool change and updated norms will make direct numerical comparisons with prior years misleading unless the district explains the methodology change. That affects parent-facing materials, decisions about reading plans, and early-intervention grouping.

Details and next steps: Dustream said fall screener results will be presented to the board and that staff will explain how the new norms changed cut scores so the public is not misled by naive year-to-year comparisons. The board approved the AGR spring data report by motion; no roll-call vote totals were recorded in the public transcript.