Kern County Superintendent of Schools launches pilot program with 9 districts
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KBAK/KBFX) — Kern County Superintendent of Schools is partnering with nine districts to launch a new pilot program called the Kern Integrated Data System.
According to Kern County Superintendent of Schools, KIDS will serve as a data warehouse and analytics solution that provides educators access to information that will help them plan and implement instructional strategies to help close the student achievement gap in Kern County.
KIDS will track 436 student metric including grades, attendance and student behavior.
"We want to utilize all this data to really inform our own practices, but also support the county with the work of bringing our districts together," said Mark Luque, assistant superintendent for educational services for Bakersfield City School District.
Joey Higginbottom has two kids. Each one attends a school district participating in the pilot program.
Higginbottom said neither district has notified him about the KIDS program, and he would like to learn more.
However, he said he supports the program as long as it benefits the students.
"I'd like to see our students do better,” Higginbottom said. “I know my students are doing pretty, really good, not every kid out there is doing great, got to get down to where the problem is."
Luque said his district is gradually working on notifying the parents about the program.
He said having access to real-time data is key to identifying areas of improvement.
Officials with Kern County Superintendent of Schools said they hope the data gathered will help them inform current instruction practice, implement data-driven instructional strategies, provide early warning signs for student intervention, highlight trends that want to be investigated and replicated county-wide, and further professional development for teachers, administrators, and instructional support staff.
"Our goal is to equip our teachers, and our principals, and our schools staff with information that allows them to make timely decisions on a day by day basis rather than waiting six weeks to learn information that by that point is too late to go back and re-teach," Luque said.
Luque said evaluating the data points will be key in assessing the needs of the school, teacher, and student.
"It will impact the curriculum from the perspective of ensuring we meet the needs of our kids where they are," he said.
