INNOVATIVE
SCHOOL SYSTEMS GRANT

Aldine Independent School District | Aldine, TX

• 62,000 students
• 80 schools
• 98% students of color
• 66% students in poverty

Aldine is leveraging its diversity to provide high-quality school options for all students and to create new school options that pilot learner-specific strategies. Aldine will scale its most evidence-based, successful, and universally applicable strategies to other school sites. It will focus on three choice schools and programs already underway: La Promesa, Impact Academy, and its Additional Days School Year (ADSY) program in four elementary schools. Aldine will continue developing learner-specific, accelerated academic instruction and enrichment programs at each of these sites and prepare to scale best practices for district-wide implementation.

Gwinnett County Public Schools | Gwinnett, GA

• 182,000 students
• 142 schools
• 83% students of color
• 55% students in poverty

Gwinnett County is integrating a new learning focus, “AI Future Readiness,” that ensures students are prepared for a technologically advanced future. Future readiness learning connected to a new career pathway in artificial intelligence will be built into Gwinnett’s existing classes and across all subject areas. Seckinger High School, an AI-themed cluster, was the first school to pilot the curriculum and is expected to serve 6,000 students during the 2023-24 school year. Gwinnett will also continue its second year of an AI career technical education pathway and conduct new professional learning pilots for content leaders. This initiative will eventually scale system-wide to all GCPS students, making it one of, if not the largest, AI CTE pathways in the nation.

Da Vinci Schools | El Segundo, CA

• 2,663 students
• 5 schools
• 81% students of color
• 38% students in poverty

Da Vinci is launching Project Leo, an open-source, project-based learning platform that leverages Chat GPT to generate project ideas aligned with students’ interests. Project Leo also connects students and teachers to working professionals, enabling them to get feedback from experts and build professional social capital. Project Leo is available to all Da Vinci Schools and their Los Angeles partner schools. Approximately 60 Da Vinci teachers serving different grade levels, content areas, and school sites will use Project Leo in classrooms.

Mesquite Independent School District | Mesquite, TX

• 38,500 students
• 50 schools
• 89% students of color
• 54% students in poverty

Mesquite sees a need to better support students’ holistic development, social-emotional well-being, and learning gaps after the pandemic. To address this, Mesquite will scale AYO (named for an African word meaning “great joy”), a data-driven, interactive learning platform that uses artificial intelligence to generate a comprehensive profile of students’ passions, aptitudes, and growth. Using algorithms, AYO recommends activities, opportunities, and other academic resources aligned to each student’s interests. AYO is available to all Mesquite schools, but five pilot campuses will have concentrated support. Each campus can customize AYO to the unique needs of its student population.

Bullitt County Public Schools | Shepherdsville, KY

• 13,260 students
• 25 schools
• 14% students of color
• 49% students in poverty

The current state assessment system in Bullitt County offers a single source of information that fails to align with our community’s values and restricts teachers from delivering authentic assessments capable of inspiring a passion for learning. To address this, Bullitt County is building a competency-based assessment system that reframes assessment as a “learning journey” and not a final destination. This new system will evolve instructional practices and teacher use of assessments, allow students to demonstrate mastery in new ways, and shift how the community views successful schooling. Bullitt County will support teachers and schools to create local assessment measures grounded in a district-wide benefits mindset, and connect them to high-quality pedagogical practices. Over the next year, Bullitt will:

1. Train a new cohort of around 100 teachers in BCPS’s competencies and innovative teaching practices
2. Help previously trained teachers to create performance indicators and serve as lab host classroom teachers.
3. Pilot their assessment model in at least one school.

Ednovate | Los Angeles, CA

• 2,500 students
• 6 schools
• 98% students of color
• 85% students in poverty

Ednovate is redesigning their current high school report card into the Whole Child Report Card. This report card will reflect what parents and students want most out of high school: “to be intellectually curious, to be kind to themselves and others, and to find one’s passions and purpose in life.” It rethinks traditional standards by prioritizing mastery, college rigor, self-regulation, positive multigenerational change, critical thinking, and presence. For the past 10 years, Ednovate has been building up to this work by changing expectations for college readiness, increasing focus on SEL practices, and more. In the 2023-24 school year, Ednovate will roll out the Whole Child Report Card to their whole network, reaching approximately 2,575 students. This first year will be focused on developing SEL metrics and increasing parents’ access to the tool. 

McComb School District | McComb, MS

• 2,200 students
• 8 schools
• 90% students of color
• 73% students in poverty

McComb has developed the DEEDS (Discover, Examine, Engineer, Do, and Share) instructional framework to reverse student disengagement. This system emphasizes the need to take students’ learning back to the district and community. Students will use the framework to solve specific challenges in their community. The framework consists of four essential components: strengthening literacy and numeracy skills, exposure to employment opportunities, SEL practices, and review of personal growth data. McComb plans on conducting a cross-district pilot to redesign their elementary, middle, and high schools using the DEEDs framework, consisting of six-week “action and reflection” cycles involving six teachers and their students.

St. Paul Public Schools | St. Paul, MN

• 33,110 students
• 69 schools
• 77% students of color
• 71% students in poverty

St. Paul seeks to establish new schools that partner with community-based organizations and experts to teach accurate culture, history, and language for their students of color in a a way that affirms their identities and lived experiences. They will launch and study two new schools serving the Hmong and East African communities. St. Paul will launch a fourth culturally affirming school centered on the East African community in fall 2023. These four culturally affirming schools will serve a combined 1,500 preK-8 students, 95% of whom are students of color. The district seeks to learn from and with their culturally affirming schools to identify curriculum and materials, instructional practices, and school-wide supports and partnerships to support students.

St. Vrain Valley Schools | Longmont, CO

• 32,600 students
• 55 schools
• 39% students of color
• 32% students in poverty

St. Vrain has launched AGILE (Advanced Global Interactive Learning Environments), a virtual system for high school students to take synchronous online courses as part of their broader vision for student-centered, personalized learning through customizable “playlists.” They are exploring extending AGILE to students in other rural Colorado districts, allowing students statewide access to a wide range of courses in hybrid and fully remote configurations. In 2023-24, the AGILE program will offer 17 high school courses taught by teachers from seven of the district’s eight high schools and the district’s Innovation Center.

Building 21 / Northern Cass School District | Philadelphia, PA / Hunter, ND

• 700 students
• 3 schools
• 2% students of color
• 9% students in poverty*

Building 21, a nonprofit focused on promoting competency-based learning, is collaborating with Northern Cass School District in a pilot initiative. Their goal is to establish how competency portfolios can replace the Carnegie unit, enabling anytime, anywhere learning. Building 21 will co-create and test a new learning management system (Beacon), competency tracking platform, and teacher coaching model. They will work closely with pilot sites at varying transformation stages, providing resources, tools, coaching, feedback sessions, collaborative design sessions, and professional development. Their goal is to develop resources for scaling their work to transform similar and larger districts and schools.

*figures for NCSD, specifically

Cajon Valley Union School District | El Cajon, CA

• 14,800 students
• 27 schools
• 55% students of color
• 69% students in poverty

Cajon Valley is envisioning a new competency-based student data and assessment system that focuses on a student’s well-being and gainful employability. This builds on the district’s previous emphasis on career-connected learning and social-emotional learning. The system will anchor in the district’s Portrait of a Graduate. About 60 teachers from diverse grade levels, content areas, and school sites will pilot the development and implementation of competencies aligned to Portrait of a Graduate in their classrooms.