Message from Ryan Wise: Additional Information on ESSA Timeline for 2018-2019

I announced last week that the Department has changed the notification date for ESSA levels of support from Oct. 15 to sometime between Dec. 3-14. Because of this change in the timeline for notification to schools, the school improvement schedule this year will also be adjusted. I’m pleased to tell you that most of the schedule will remain intact. The staff at the Department and all of our AEA colleagues have worked hard to ensure as little disruption to schools as possible.

The newly revised ESSA School Improvement One-Page Timeline is accessible HERE. The full ESSA School Improvement Timeline - with links to webinars and presentation slides - is at the same link as before and has been revised to match the one-page timeline. Here are the critical points you need to know about the updated timeline:

The Department and AEA staff chose to leave the schedule of professional learning intact because we feel this is the right work regardless of federal compliance requirements. We want to value the hard work of schools that have been on this journey of continuous improvement long before ESSA was a consideration by continuing to offer high quality professional learning in collaboration with the AEA system. This will be done largely on the same schedule we had communicated prior to the ESSA notification change.

The Administrator Information Sessions previously scheduled for the month of October have been canceled. We will instead hold a series of webinars during the month of October to keep administrators and other staff up-to-date on ESSA. The dates, times and topics will be posted to the ESSA School Improvement Timeline as soon as they are available. All webinars will be recorded and posted to the same document.

In addition, we will reschedule Administrator Sessions between Dec. 10 and Jan. 11. Department staff will be at one session in each AEA to go over the ESSA designations, report card, and any questions you may have.

Any changes to the AEA registration system for all professional learning opportunities will be finalized by Oct. 10. Only small changes will be made in individual agencies after this date.

While we will not be offering Intervention System professional learning during the regular school year, as planned, we will make it the focus of our Summer Institute. The Institute is required for schools receiving comprehensive assistance, recommended for those receiving targeted assistance, and open to all other schools, as well. The dates freed up by moving the Intervention System professional learning will be repurposed to offer the necessary ESSA components for schools, such as Self-Assessment of MTSS Implementation (SAMI) and Action Planning.

Schools will not be able to do the ESSA data review until after designations are announced. Even so, we will provide you with a list of other data sources that may be useful as you engage in the self-assessment in the fall.

We will add additional dates to our fall professional learning calendar for 2019 for Universal Tier Tools and Intervention System.

Site visits for schools receiving comprehensive assistance will not take place now until the spring semester of 2020. We will conduct two pilot sites in fall 2019.

If you have questions about these changes prior to the October webinar series please contact Barbara Ohlund at barbara.ohlund@iowa.gov.