7/31 Early Warning System update and news

It looks like August is upon us! Where has the summer gone? This is another update on the early literacy warning system transition to the FAST Application. Please take a look at the information below. There are a number of things that people need to know and possibly act on soon.

  1. If it is the district’s responsibility, please remember to change your SIF agent to the 17-18 school year as soon as possible. For some student information systems, the SIS vendor handles the rollover. If you have questions about how to complete this task, please contact your SIS vendor.
    1. Also, be sure that you have courses for teachers scheduled accurately in your SIS - they will build your rosters in FAST.
  2. Some of the webinar sessions are filling up and we are exploring how to add more capacity and reduce unused training slots. All sessions are limited to 100 participants. See below for registration links.
    1. If the session you prefer is full, you may have to register and attend a different date instead. You may monitor your preferred session for a vacancy. If you do get in, please cancel the unneeded registration so someone else can use the space.
    2. If you are unable to attend a session, please cancel your registration so another person can take your place. We have people requesting access to training sessions that are full.
    3. Please do not register multiple people for the webinar if you will be watching together in the same place. We need to preserve/share registration slots to get as many people trained as possible. If you have multiple people with reservations and won’t need them, please have all but one of the team access their original registration email and cancel the unneeded registrations.
    4. Our intent is that the people who attend the webinars will train the rest of the school staff. For more information, see item 7 below.
  3. Non-FAST schools - We do not have details worked out yet to handle collecting screening data from schools not using the FAST system. We will turn our focus to this after we get our feet on the ground with the transition to the FAST Application. Know that the screening requirements remain the same, and the windows for screening are listed below. We will get back to the non-FAST schools with more details as soon as we know what they are!
  4. Screening windows for 17-18 for all schools (other than the 3 year-round schools) are defined by the IDOE and shall not be changed by the district:
    1. Fall: September 11 to October 6
    2. Winter: January 15 to February 9
    3. Spring: April 23 to May 18
  5. 279.68 Literacy Status and Default Assessment for all students will be calculated outside of the FAST Application. We will provide further information when the details of the new process have been finalized. There will be a survey sent out to building principals in the next few weeks to ask what each building will use for a default assessment for literacy status determinations. When you receive the link, please confer with your district leadership team and fill out the survey once for each building.
  6. AEA staff access to the FAST Application will be managed by the DE in collaboration with each AEA. We will be communicating with the AEAs about this process as soon as the details are worked out. We ask that schools not set-up AEA staff themselves.
  7. We have the capacity to train a few people from each school or district, and we expect that the people who receive training will use the available resources to help train others in their building. Please do not short-change your peers by reducing the training content. The resources in the FAST knowledge base will be very helpful for training. Also, please keep in mind that we have separated the training into three sections, focusing on immediate information needs and spacing out the training over time.
    1. District/School Manager webinar training is primarily to learn about the system setup and security/user management. There will be an overview of other features of the system, but mainly as an introduction.
    2. Getting Started with FAST webinar training goes into much more detail about how to administer assessments and navigate about the system. It will include some overview of reports and an introduction to setting up progress monitoring, but again, mainly as an introduction
    3. Face to face training scheduled for late September and into October will go into much more detail about using reports, progress monitoring and intervention tools. More information about this training, including registration information will be available soon.
  8. Starting August 7th, please use help@fastbridge.org for general communications and questions related to implementation of FAST. This will allow us to follow up in the ticket system for FAST. 

 

To access previous messages, including registration links, follow this link: 

https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/IACIO/bulletins/1a61966

 

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 Content prepared by Connor Hood and Janell Brandhorst