California School Dashboard shows progress and also decline for MCUSD

The California School Dashboard (CASD) is an online tool showing K-12 school/district performance using colors for multiple measures like graduation, test scores, attendance and climate, looking beyond just test scores to give parents and educators a complete, equity-focused picture of student needs and strengths for improvement.

Tracy Lingenfelter, LCAP and District Improvement Coordinator, provided some numbers during the school board meeting on Dec. 11 to give the community an idea of how the district is doing.

“This provides yearly insights into local performance,” said Lingenfelter.

“It offers a clear view of how we compare across districts, counties and the state.”

The CASD is important because the dashboard functions like a report card for schools and districts.

“It helps us understand how our schools and district are performing,” she said.

“It highlights students groups, schools and districts who may need additional support.”

The dashboard is a tool which communicates how schools and districts are doing and it establishes common standards and expectations for all schools and districts.

It also identifies student groups, schools and districts that may need extra support.

This tool focuses attention on eight state priorities and informs about annual budget as well as strategic planning.

The dashboard tracks 11 measures of school successes with eight state-wide priorities.

The state indicators include academic performance, chronic absenteeism, English Learner Process (ELP), high school graduation rate, suspension rate and College and Career Readiness.

The local indicators are basic conditions, implementation of academic standards, school climate surveys, parental involvement and family engagement along with access to courses.

Demographics in Mariposa County Unified School District include a total enrollment of 1,685 (increased by 16).

MCUSD is socioeconomically disadvantaged by 69.4 percent (increased by 1.2 percent).

These numbers represent student populations within MCUSD that were used in the 2025 dashboard.

These numbers are from Census Day in October 2024.

The district enrollment has 4.7 percent English learners (decreased by 0.5 percent) and 2.3 percent of total student enrolled are foster youth (increased by 0.4 percent).

The state indicators/accountability rank performance in each district by color starting with blue as the highest performance and decreasing to green, yellow, orange and red being the lowest performance.

“California’s color grid ranks each indicator by combining two factors, our current results (range very high to very low) and it includes the results that have changed from last year,” Lingenfelter explained.

MCUSD results on state indicators include:

• Graduation rate — orange
• ELA achievement — orange
• Math achievement — orange
• Science achievement — yellow
• Chronic absenteeism — yellow
• Suspension rate — yellow
• College/career indicator — green
• English learner progress — yellow

When it comes to academic performance, MCUSD is ranked 39.1 points below standard and is ranked in the orange category (maintained 2.1 points).

“You’ll see it has remained steady, some schools experienced some very large increases while some schools experienced some decline,” Lingenfelter said.

“While both trends highlight areas for attention, it’s encouraging to be able to examine the practices of schools who saw academic growth so that we can work to duplicate these strategies at all sites.”

For math, the district is ranked 66.1 points (maintained -1.7 points) below standard and falls into the orange category.

For science, MCUSD is showing 51.2 science points (maintained 1.2 points) landing in the yellow category.

When it comes to the English learner process, 64.2 percent (declined 3.1 percent) of students are making progress and the district falls into the yellow category.

For college/career, the district falls into the rankings of green with 41.1 percent (increased by 5.9 percent) of students prepared.

“It’s not unexpected to see a slight decline in the English learner progress. Often we see cycles where many students remain at level three for a few years then with targeted support they’ll reclassify and boost our scores in those years,” continued Lingenfelter.

“After a strong reclassification period we are now in a building phase again.”

Academic engagement and conditions and climate show the district has about 29.8 percent (declined 3.4 percent) of students who are chronically absent (yellow) and a graduation rate of 89.9 percent (declined 3.8 percent) falling into the orange category.

The suspension rate falls into the yellow category with about 7 percent (declined 1.5 percent) of students suspended at least one day.

“Two measures are moving in the right direction,” said Lingenfelter. “Both chronic absenteeism and suspension rates are declining.”

Board chair Wayne Forsythe inquired about students being able to opt out of the state testing.

“How can we encourage them to help us and opt back in?”

Lingenfelter explained it’s something they are actively working on.

“That’s a conversation we’ve been having and we’re looking for ideas around that,” she said.

“We get penalized if we don’t have 95 percent participation rate and the penalties are very great.”

Forsythe asked how we compare to like schools as well as districts statewide.

“I’d love to bring back some more information,” Lingenfelter said.

Trustee Emily Hanchett asked what was accounting for “the great scores for college and career ready?”

MCHS had an increase for ELA and math testing scores.

“That was likely the big boost,” continued Lingenfelter.

“If you look at the numbers on the dashboard, our high school had a really outstanding performance this year.”

To view the dashboard and information about MCUSD, visit www.caschooldashboard.org