Our Mission
To improve the learning outcomes and well-being of all children and youth by providing services and leadership in partnership with families, schools and communities.
Our Goals
• Increase learning growth for students
• Decrease the gap in achievement
• Increase annual graduation rates
• Increase gateways to post-secondary success
Nikki Roorda, current Heartland AEA Region 6 regional director serving the Ankeny Community School District, has accepted a position as the Executive Director of Teaching & Learning for the Johnston Community School District. We wish her well as she transitions to her new position!
As the new school year begins, the following assignments will be in place in Region 6:
- Karla Jones, who is currently the regional director for the Urbandale Community School District, will move to the Ankeny Community School District and will provide leadership for K-12 Special Education services and supports. She will also supervise staff who serve the Ankeny Schools.
- Charlie Johnson, a retired Heartland AEA regional director, will provide leadership for Early ACCESS/Early Childhood services and supports and general education/curriculum for Ankeny. He will also serve as the contact for non-public schools in Ankeny.
- Keri Steele, current regional director for the Saydel Community School District, will add the Urbandale district to her assignment and will continue to serve the Saydel as well. She will also provide supervision of staff who serve the Urbandale Schools.
Beginning Sept. 1, 2019, the Business Office will begin checking employee expense claims against leave requests and calendars. If 7.5 hours of leave is requested on a day that expenses are submitted, the expense request will be rejected. Employees will receive an email stating the dates needing attention and will need to edit and resubmit the expense request.
If employees submit expenses on an off-calendar date, a warning email will be sent to both the employee and their supervisor. The off-calendar dates will be listed in the email. The expense claim will proceed through the system without any further action taken by employees. The warnings will be sent so employees and supervisors can check to make sure work was performed on the date in question (addendum day). If the expenses were submitted in error, employees will need to work with their supervisor to have it rejected for corrections.
The intent of this change is to tighten our internal controls and ensure that public funds are being spent appropriately.
If you have questions, contact Mary Heaberlin, Accounts Payable Specialist, at ext. 14818 or Brian Whalen, Business Manager, at ext. 14005.
Aug. 31, 2019, is the last date the Business Office will accept and process any claims for expenses occurring on or before June 30, 2019. Remember:
- Do not submit expense claims with dates crossing the new fiscal year. Use a separate expense claim if you have reimbursable expenses which occurred prior to July 1.
- Please check your ‘Rejected Expenses’ link to see if you have any expense claims requiring your attention and resubmit after appropriate changes are complete.
If you have questions, contact Mary Heaberlin, Accounts Payable Specialist, at ext. 14818 or Brian Whalen, Business Manager, at ext. 14005.
As Heartland AEA continues to make improvements in our agency’s safety and security, all staff are required to complete the online ALICE training once a year. By the end of the 2019 calendar year, all Heartland AEA staff members should take the hour-long online training to become familiar with the ALICE program and the techniques it teaches in response to an armed intruder event.
ALICE stands for:
- Alert: Get the word out! “Armed Intruder in building” instead of “Code Red,” or “Bring the purple folder to the office.” Use clear, concise language to convey the type and location of the event.
- Lockdown: Good starting point. We will continue to lockdown in secure areas.
- Inform: Communication keeps the intruder off balance and allows for good decision-making.
- Counter: Apply skills to distract, confuse and gain control.
- Evacuate: Reduce the number of potential targets for the intruder and reduce chances of victims resulting from friendly fire when help arrives.
In short, using the ALICE method will give you more tools to use in the event of an armed intruder/active shooter. We want to provide you with the knowledge that if faced with a life or death situation there are methods that can be applied to enhance your chance of survival.
Again, you are expected to complete the ALICE online training by the end of the 2019 calendar year.
The training has been assigned to all Heartland AEA employees in the AEA Learning Online Learning System. To access the training:
- Log into your record in the AEA Learning System.
- Click Resume by the training, Heartland AEA: ALICE Training.
- Click the button, Launch course in a new tab.
- On the ALICE Certification home page, click Enter.
If you need assistance with accessing the site, contact:
If you have any questions about the training or the ALICE program in general, contact Dustin Gean, Operations Manager, Emergency Response & Safety Team Lead and Certified ALICE Trainer.
The Aug. 2019 School Leader Update from the Iowa Department of Education is available.
The Aug. 2019 Iowa Board of Educational Examiners’ newsletter is available. In this issue: Renewal Tips, Mandatory Reporter Training Changes, New Licensing System, Temporary Initial Teaching License, Substitute Teaching, Conditional Licensure, College and Career Readiness, Helpful Hints for Administrators, Ethics – Cybertraps and Recent Cases.
Dept. of Education Offering Panorama Database to Districts
Panorama is a database being offered free of charge to districts by the Iowa Department of Education. It will eventually support MTSS across literacy, math, behavior and social-emotional learning. When Panorama initially becomes available to districts, the only data elements that will be available in the system will be literacy screening data for grades K-6. You will be able to:
- See all the information about each child in one place.
- This will start with literacy, and then in the future, span across academics, attendance, behavior and social-emotional learning (Early Warning System).
- Identify at-risk students from universal screening and other data.
- Manage interventions and progress monitoring.
- Determine who needs differentiated accountability and support using Healthy Indicator reports.
Training for Heartland AEA districts will take place across the Agency during the fall semester. Stay tuned for more details.
Iowa Statewide Assessment of Student Progress Reports Coming in October
Iowa Statewide Assessment of Student Progress (ISASP) reports will be coming to districts in October. As soon as training is available through the ISASP website, we will be asking you to complete that training module and be ready to discuss it at DBT meetings, so you can better understand how to use the data to support districts. Here is information Iowa Testing Programs shared in May on performance level descriptors and reporting. In addition, here is the link to the ISASP portal.
Iowa’s AEAs Continuing to Partner with FastBridge
Iowa’s AEAs are continuing to offer the FastBridge suite of formative assessment tools to public districts and non-public schools for the 2019-20 school year. Schools will be able to access the full FastBridge suite of resources for math and behavior for grades K-6. This year the AEAs expanded access for grades 7-8 in the areas of literacy, math and behavior assessment tools. The Heartland AEA districts and accredited non-public schools participating in the 2019-20 school year are linked here. Please note there is a tab for grades K-6 and 7-8.
Listed below are changes to FastBridge for the 2019-20 school year, current as of the end of July. The best way to stay up-to-date is to check the FastBridge Release Notes on the Knowledge Base when you’re logged into your FastBridge account.
Group Screening Report Updates
The Group Screening Report for Teachers was updated to better display results for assessments with subtests. The new default view provides a summary of the composite score by interval. A new dropdown is also available to view a summary of all subtests or a specific subtest. This updated view is available for AUTOreading and Comprehension Efficiency.
The Group Screening Report for Leader roles (District Managers, School Managers, Specialists) now supports additional assessments as well and includes summary information at the top of the report for:
- AUTOreading
- Comprehension Efficiency
- mySAEBRS
- SAEBRS
Introducing FASTtrack Reading
FASTtrack provides a simple solution for quickly screening students across multiple disciplines and providing resources for teachers based on student results. FASTtrack ensures you are always using the right combination of assessments with your students based on grade level and time of year. FASTtrack removes any guesswork by providing a one-button solution for teachers and students to start or continue testing. FASTtrack Reading is available as of July 2019.
After completing FASTtrack, teachers get access to several valuable resources:
- A tailored instruction plan to address any class-wide skill gaps
- Individual student risk levels across multiple skill areas
- Supplemental instruction plans for students who show risk in skill areas
- Recommended intervention tools and dosage
- Progress monitoring recommendations
Math Updates
New items have been added to the aMath item bank that assesses high school math standards (grades 9-12). In order to accommodate the new high school items, the aMath scale is being extended from the maximum score of 245 to a new maximum score of 275. This change enables aMath to accurately estimate general math performance across the full range of math ability from kindergarten through grade 12.
The new content will be released in Lab status for the 2019-20 academic year. This new content is available by enabling the aMath assessment for grades 9-12.
As changes are being made to math assessments, the S2I report will not be available for math.
New Intervention Content
New intervention content is now available via the Training Center.
As of July 2019, new math intervention modules are now available for grades K-5:
- Number Sense
- Whole Number Operations
Other Assessment Updates
FAST is changing its Fall screening recommendation for CBMmath assessments to be on-grade rather than the previous grade. User feedback has mentioned a desire to screen students on current grade-level standards and to use the Group Growth report with CBMmath, which requires on-grade Fall results to provide full functionality. So for the 2019-20 school year and moving forward, FAST will recommend screening on current grade level in Fall. The ability to choose prior grade level as desired still remains from the Screening page in FAST, however.
Graphical logos for FAST assessments are updated in this release. This update does not affect functionality for educators or for students.
Benchmarks & Norms
The national norms for the FAST assessments listed below were updated and linked here.
The update applies to both seasonal norms (fall, winter and spring), and growth (fall-to-winter, fall-to-spring and winter-to-spring). The update also affects default benchmarks because the benchmarks are tied directly to the national norms.
This update differs from prior updates in that FAST researchers employed special procedures to produce samples that have demographic characteristics matched to the overall U.S. student population by gender, race/ethnicity and the percent of students receiving free or reduced lunch. The sampling procedures were repeated for each combination of assessment and grade separately. And, for each assessment, the norms are based on students from at least 20 states.
Demographically matched seasonal and growth norms have been updated for the following measures:
- earlyReading composite (and all measures required for the composite) K & 1
- earlyMath composite (and all measures required for the composite) K & 1
- aReading (K-8)
- aMath (K-8)
- CBMreading (1-6)
- AUTOreading composite (K-8)
The current national aggregate seasonal norms and growth norms for the following FAST assessments have also been updated. Like the demographically matched norms, these norms use scores from across the entire FAST user base. The difference is that the data were not constrained to conform to U.S. student demographic percentages. The demographics of the aggregate norm samples are similar to U.S. percentages, with modestly higher socio-economic status (estimated by percent on free or reduced lunch).
- CBMmath Automaticity (L1, L2, L3) grades 1-3
- CBMmath CAP (2-8)
- CBMreading (7-8)
Benefits
The new demographically matched national norms accurately represent the distribution of scores on FAST measures that would be attained in the full U.S. school population by grade, thus, providing FAST customers a way to accurately evaluate student, classroom, grade level and school results relative to national expectations. The procedures employed also increase the accuracy of the national norms across the full range of abilities from the 1st through the 99th percentile.
Because these norms are based on large samples using robust statistical procedures, they will likely remain the same for five years.
Comparison to Current National Norms
On average, the score associated with each benchmark (some risk and high risk) drops modestly. The decrease for the some-risk benchmark is small (e.g., 4 words per minute on CBMreading in Grade 2) and small to modest for the high-risk benchmark (e.g., 15 words per minute on CBMreading in Grade 2). What this means is that, on average, fewer students will be flagged as either high risk or some risk using national norms. The decline is due to the fact that prior national norms were based on samples with modestly higher SES levels (lower free-reduced lunch levels) than the U.S. school population.
For more in-depth information regarding changes to FASTbridge, access the Knowledge Base when you are logged into the system and read the FAST Release notes for July 12, 2019.
Results of the MTSS Belief Survey Are Available
At last April’s regional meetings, staff was asked to complete an MTSS Belief Survey. Research is clear that educator beliefs about the system they work within and the students they work with can have profound effects on student achievement. Here are the results of the survey.
This data will be reviewed by different leadership teams in the Agency and, hopefully, it will serve as a baseline to show how our beliefs change over time to deepen implementation of an MTSS Framework at Heartland AEA.
ESSA Designated Schools and Agency Staff to Support Them Listed
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), signed in 2015, is a federal K-12 education law that replaced the No Child Left Behind Act. The law maintains a focus on equity for all students, while giving states and local school districts more ownership over systems of school accountability and support.
ESSA requires states to develop comprehensive plans for accountability and support, identify schools for support and improvement (Comprehensive and Targeted) and publish school report cards reflecting performance. All Heartland AEA identified targeted and comprehensive schools submitted ESSA Action Plans in May 2019 per guidelines from the Iowa Department of Education. Buildings will spend the 2019-20 school year working to fulfill the actions they set out to accomplish in their plans.
Iowa’s new report cards, called the Iowa School Performance Profiles, include each school’s scores on a set of accountability measures, such as state assessments. The reports display results based on a school’s overall performance, as well as the performance of subgroups of students, such as children from low-income backgrounds.
This spreadsheet lists the targeted and comprehensive schools in the Heartland AEA area as well as the agency staff who have been identified to support them.
2019-20 Teacher Quality Information Available; Course Registration Begins Aug. 16
Registration for Teacher Quality (TQ) courses and study groups begins Aug. 16 and ends Sept. 13. TQ courses and study groups are offered as an optional format for professional learning for our Certified staff. They meet for 15 hours off-contract time, and participants are eligible for a stipend upon completion of the course. All Certified staff members are eligible to register for these opportunities. TQ opportunities are offered from October - June.
Heartland AEA has a strong commitment to time spent in service to our partners. TQ courses will be offered at times when service to children, educators and families is least impacted. TQ courses and study groups will be offered between Oct. 11, 2019, and June 30, 2020, outside of contract hours, Monday-Friday or on weekends, except for a few exceptions.
TQ Timeline for 2019-20
- TQ registration open: Aug. 16 - Sept. 13, 2019
- TQ proposals for staff-generated study groups due: Sept. 13, 2019
- Registration Deadline for staff-generated study groups: September 20, 2019
- TQ courses and study groups held: Oct. 11, 2019 - June 30, 2020
This document provides registration information for TQ courses, the process for creating study groups and details on stipends. Here is a frequently asked questions document that will help answer questions about Teacher Quality.
The agenda for the Aug. 13, 2019 Heartland AEA Board of Directors meeting is available.
If you haven’t taken a trip to Adventureland yet this summer, there’s still time to take advantage of the discounted ticket prices offered to Heartland AEA staff members! Visit the Adventureland/Heartland AEA discount site today.
Bravo Sports Marketing is again offering discounted tickets to both Iowa and Iowa State football games for staff in all of Iowa’s AEAs. These special prices come at no expense to the AEA system – this discount comes solely from Bravo Sports Marketing.
