What is KESA?
KESA is the acronym for Kansas Education Systems Accreditation, which is the state’s K-12 accrediting model. The accreditation process is something Kansas school districts must work through every five years in order to earn or maintain accreditation by the Kansas State Department of Education.
There are five goal areas that are believed to have direct impact on producing successful high school graduates. Districts are tasked with pursuing a continuous improvement process at both the district and school levels to support the five goal areas: Social-Emotional Factors, Kindergarten Readiness, Individual Plans of Study, High School Graduation and Postsecondary Success.
What does it mean to be accredited?
If a school district is accredited, it means they are in compliance with state Board of Education requirements and have shown conclusive evidence of growth in student performance and that they have developed and are using an intentional, quality growth process.
What does the KESA process look like?
The KESA process is structured in a four to five year strategic process that moves districts through the stages of research, planning, implementation, evaluation, revision, and re-evaluation. All of this is documented by the district and overseen by an Outside Visitation Team (OVT) comprised of trained educators from across the state.
Year one tasks:
- Conduct a needs assessment.
- Develop a Strategic Plan.
- Identify district KESA goals.
- Gather baseline data for evaluating goal progress.
Year two tasks:
- Complete implementation of plans.
- Monitor and document data.
- Evaluate effectiveness based off of prior year data.
- Make any needed adjustments to strategies.
Year three tasks:
- Evaluate current data trends.
- Revise goals, if needed.
- Continue to monitor and document goal progress.
- Develop action steps for continuous improvement.
Year four and/or five tasks:
- Evaluate improvement of Foundational Structures.
- Re-evaluate Needs Assessment
- Evaluate sustainability of the improvement process.
- Evaluate growth measures of five goal areas.
- Reflect on definition of a successful high school graduate and how our processes promote those characteristics.
- Prepare next steps in starting KESA cycle over.
Where is USD 490 in the KESA process?
USD 490 is accredited and began the latest KESA process during the 2020-2021 school year, which means we are currently in year three of the cycle. We have two focus goals for this year.
- We will increase student-centered learning opportunities to enhance strong academic and technical innovation skills to pursue their career and life-long goals as measured by graduation rate increasing to 95 percent, improving attendance rates to 95 percent, and decreasing chronic absenteeism to 10 percent.
- By implementing shared reading curriculum guides and structured literacy strategies K-12 students’ reading scores will improve as evidenced by reading proficiency scores on the annual state assessment. The students in levels three and four will increase and students in level 1 will be decreased by five percent annually.
During the district inservice day on January 30, district staff participated in a KESA workshop to look at data from these two goal areas and evaluate strategies for improving attendance. Collaborating in small groups, staff looked at current attendance policies at each of the schools, attendance data from each school, graduation rates, and information on how chronic absenteeism is defined and how it affects student learning. Each group provided input on strategies they think the district should keep, change, start, or stop to help encourage school attendance.
KESA work continued during the January 30 board meeting, where board members reviewed the data and listened to the feedback gathered during the staff workshop.