Meeting One: the data
Part of the planning process is to look at data about the community and the library. Here’s what we sent to the planning committee before our first meeting:
[click on the links to view the images]
Part of the planning process is to look at data about the community and the library. Here’s what we sent to the planning committee before our first meeting:
[click on the links to view the images]
Amy G. said
Superintendent Brent Kay assures me that the standardized test scores I distilled into the Community demographics (from the Vermont Deptartment of Education, and the Agency of Human Services) are quite misleading, and do not reflect the true performance of either the schools or the students of the Orange Southwest Supervisory Union. Five years’ worth of student performance data are available at the OSSU website – http://www.orangesw.k12.vt.us/ – under “Information – Student Performance.”
Standardized test scores are problematic in many ways, and never tell the entire story of student and school performance. There is, in my opinion, no way to provide a complete-enough context to make the scores mean something, definitively. On the other hand, they don’t mean nothing, either. I urge everyone participating in or following Kimball Library’s strategic planning process to consider all of the data presented as potential windows into the conditions of our community, windows that each necessarily provide only a limited and de-contextualized view.