KiDS Corner

Building on the prior work that was completed to identify meal distribution sites, the KiDS team worked with Kern High and BCSD to identify addresses that had students attending both districts in the same residence. Using this information, the districts were able to maximize the number of households receiving a hotspot by eliminating the possibility of the same household receiving multiple devices. This report is now available to all districts in their development site and can be moved to production upon request.

The completion of this project opens additional possibilities to track households that have received devices from the school district. The KiDS team will be providing more information to districts as this project develops.

Using the Attendance Dashboards, school leaders are able to view attendance at the district, school, classroom and student level. In addition, filtering attendance by chronically absent students will allow school leaders to take advantage of the heat map feature to identify where chronic absentee students live and monitor high concentration of students not participating in distance learning. Using the available tools, school leaders can zoom into high concentration areas and identify a students' address, name and demographic information directly on the map.

Based on feedback from our Pilot 1 districts, the KiDS team has created a custom STAR dashboard to provide greater insights into student performance. With this new customization, districts can now compare STAR results over time by grade level. There is also a new feature that adds the grade level proficiency cut score to the chart to make it easier to identify student performance as compared to grade level norm. This tool automatically adjusts to match the time of year the assessment was taken to ensure that student performance is measured against the appropriate testing window norm. If you are a Pilot 1 district interested in having this added to your dashboard, please notify the KiDS team and we will add it to your assessment module.

With the 2020-2021 school year underway, the KiDS Professional Learning team is excited to begin training all pilot districts in implementing the KiDS platform throughout their organization. While the new school year looks a lot different than we are used to, we want to remind our partners that the KCSOS KiDS team is ready to support our partners. The KiDS team realizes that addressing the needs of students from a distance is challenging. Teachers, Administrators, Attendance Teams, Academic Coaches, and MTSS leads are just a few of the individuals at your site that may be unable to access all the important information and data that comes with students each new school year. The Professional Learning team encourages you to think about the individuals in your organization that would benefit from utilizing the KiDS platform to support students. We have designed a few professional learning opportunities to choose from. These sessions are perfect for getting new users excited about what KiDS has to offer. Please contact us today to start planning your KiDS training pathway. We will work with you to identify which individuals to train first and tailor a schedule that fits the size and needs of your district.

We are excited to welcome 19 districts to the kids platform beginning as early as October 2020. We have already received commitments from a number of districts with more expected soon. With the addition of the 19 cohort districts, KiDS will expand to include 30 Kern County School Districts representing 90% of the student population of the county. This expansion could not be accomplished without the commitment of Dr. Barlow and all of the district superintendents who support the Kern Education Pledge.

In order to ensure district and school staff are taking advantage of the tools available in KiDS, the Professional Learning team has designed a Module Training Timeline to help streamline the training process for the onboarding Cohort districts. We have taken all the expected module release periods and strategically scheduled training where it would be most effective. Moving forward we will schedule out all training during onboarding and release completed modules during scheduled training.

Onboarding of our Pilot 2 districts continues to progress. Even in the face of school closures and distance learning challenges, the KiDS support team is working closely with KCSOS Alternative Education and Fruitvale School District to continue the Map and Gap and Validation process.

KCSOS Alt Ed validation of Essentials is complete and ready to go live in the next few weeks. Carlos Rojas, Administrator of Alternative Education states, “The onboarding process with KiDS has been thorough, collaborative, and educational. With guidance from the knowledgeable and accommodating KiDS team, we have been able to review critical student data which has generated plans and ideas for how this platform can be used to identify program successes and areas for improvement. We are excited to dig deeper into the data and learn how to best utilize the wealth of information available to us”.

Fruitvale School District faced the unique situation of transitioning to a new student information system while at the same time, onboarding with KiDS. Due to the dedication and persistence of the Fruitvale team, they were able to work closely with Aeries to fast track their SIS implementation so they could stay on track with their KiDS implementation timeline. Having just transitioned their SIS, the Fruitvale team was able to quickly and easily validate their information which made for a very smooth implementation. According to Leslie Garrison, Superintendent of Fruitvale School District, “ ...the process was extremely smooth. Our Information expert, Kevin Hill, was able to troubleshoot and clarify all of our data points with the KiDS staff easily. Thank you to the KCSOS team who walked us through the integration process. We are looking forward to using KiDS to better serve our students!”

Many thanks to our partners at Hoonuit for highlighting the work we are doing in Kern County. Please view the video below to see how KiDS is impacting not only students in Kern County, but driving innovative practices across the nation!