Covington Independent Public Schools

2023-2024 Executive Summary for Districts 

2023-2024 Phase One: Executive Summary for Districts

Describe the district’s size, community/communities, location, and changes it has experienced in the last three years. Include demographic information about the students, staff, and community at large. What unique features and challenges are associated with the community/communities the district serves? 

Covington Independent Public Schools (CIPS) is an independent public school district that serves approximately 3600 students. CIPS has nine schools (five K-5 elementary schools, one 6-8 middle school, one 9-12 high school with a career center on campus, an alternative center serving some of our most at-risk and challenging students in grades 6-12 as well as our residential students living at the Children’s Home of Northern Kentucky and one preschool). Sixty- two percent of the students served by CIPS are considered minorities. Eighty-nine percent of the students served qualify for free and/or reduced lunch pricing (88% qualify for free and 2% qualify for reduced). 17% of the learners in Covington are considered homeless. In the past seven years, CIPS has had an influx of English Learners (EL) from a region of Guatemala where formal education stopped around grade 2. Currently, we have almost six hundred and fifty students labeled as EL based upon W-APT screening and ACCESS testing results. This population has increased by an additional 125 students since last year. At this time CIPS has over 20 instructors on our staff to work with our EL students so that they get the best education we can provide. Twenty-three percent (including Pre-K students who qualify for Special Education services) of the students in Covington have an IEP (state average is 16%). Considering these demographic factors, the attendance rate for CIPS was 95.2% for the 18-19 SY. Annual attendance has hovered around the 95% range for the past several years. Our students come to school. Covington sits among approximately 40 school districts in the NKY/Greater Cincinnati region. As a result, approximately 27% of our teachers leave Covington annually (state average is 17%). Our overall years of experience is 8.0 years compared to a state average of 12.1 years of experience. In addition to the demographic factors and trends listed above, the properties in Covington where our families primarily live are mostly rental properties. This creates a transient rate for students moving in and out is about 30% annually.

Identify and describe the district’s stakeholder groups. How does the district ensure stakeholder involvement and engagement in the improvement planning process? 

District Leadership Team - composed of District Leadership, principals, AP, and teacher leaders, counselors, psychologists

These meetings focus on academics and behavior/social-emotional topics throughout the year. These stakeholder groups take the information discussed and share it back in their schools.

Superintendent's Cabinet - Composed of Assistant Superintendents and Directors from Finance, Personnel, and Instruction

Address day-to-day functions of the districts and new needs that arise on an ongoing basis. They will be a decision-making group.

Covington Partners

Work to provide mentoring, work work-based learning experiences, after and before school activities

Superintendents Advisory Council - High School students representing all grades.

Students work with the superintendent to problem solve collaboratively to solve issues that revolve around district improvement priorities.

Covington Community and Business Stakeholder group

Composed of local businesses, city commission, community members, students, administrators from local colleges, board members The purpose of this group was to help compose the new 5-year Strategic Plan and helped us develop the Comprehensive

District Improvement Plan

The Equity Committee, the committee charged with developing an Equity Plan and Policy for the district, which was approved by our Board of Education. 

Provide the district’s purpose statement and ancillary content such as mission, vision, values, and/or beliefs, including the year in which they were last reviewed or revised. Describe how the district embodies its purpose through its program offerings and expectations for students and how stakeholders are involved in its development.

Towards the end of 2022, we began the significant undertaking of revising and updating our district strategic plan. This process encompassed most of the end of the 21-22 school year and the beginning of and into the 22-23 school year. We began our strategic plan work focusing on building a Portrait of a Graduate for Covington Independent Public Schools. This process was led by an outside agency named Battelle. This process also included students from our high school, staff members, parents, district administrators, and community and business members throughout Covington. Our Strategic Plan and Portrait of a Graduate will be our North Star to focus on what our students need to be successful graduates of Covington Independent Public Schools. Our Strategic Plan’s components include Student Learning and Progress, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging, Organizational Health and Efficiency, Leadership and Accountability, and Stakeholder Engagement and Outreach. See the attachment for our Portrait of a Graduate and our Strategic Plan.

District’s Purpose

Over the past four, going on five years, Covington Independent Schools has continued its work on building what we consider to be a world-class curriculum. This curriculum has been touched by all professional learning teams PreK-12 in our district in some form or fashion over the past four years. The process of building the curriculum has been led by teachers, lead teachers, coaches, and administrators in our district. The curriculum’s first draft was rolled out for the first time in 2021. The district is now in the process of quality controlling all parts of our curriculum, including each district common assessment for each unit. The quality control team consists of smaller teams of our most veteran and proven successful classroom teachers, instructional coaches, and administrators. We aim to develop a coherent, viable, and equitable curriculum that each teacher uses, and every student has access to in each classroom, no matter which school they attend. Currently, our schools have received updated high-quality instructional resources for all content areas to be used in conjunction with our curriculum. Those who chose these resources were trained by KDE on how to choose HQIR. During the 23-24 school year, we will continue to quality control our curriculum and assessments based on teacher and student input. Our fifth year of curriculum work will also consist of training the trainer at our district leadership meetings. We will focus on training our teacher leaders, instructional coaches, and administrators from all schools. The next step in this work will consist of embedded learning for teachers around high-impact teaching strategies and formative assessment.

We are also continuing to develop and implement Response to Intervention Systems (RTI) and Positive Behavior Intervention Support (PBIS) systems in all schools PreK-12 to provide a coherent Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) for all students. Between last year, during the summer, and continuing into this year we have developed two committees to focus on developing protocols for our district to be consistent in all of our schools. Our committees are represented by all of the schools in our district. We plan to develop districtwide protocols in order to create an equitable system for our students. Our goal Districtwide is to analyze our 3 tiers of instruction for reading and math over the next 2-3 years and guarantee that each school has a solid implementation of all 3 tiers. This will be determined by analyzing multiple data sources at the school and district levels. Our goal is first to develop a rigorous curriculum that is viable and guaranteed for every student in our district. Our curriculum development is in its fourth year.

Describe the district’s notable achievements and areas of improvement in the last three years. Additionally, describe areas for improvement that the district is striving to achieve in the next three years.

Our most recent notable achievements include: We just conducted our 2nd annual Summer PD Academy. All PD session topics were chosen based on a yearly survey we send out to all staff to ask for their professional learning needs. On August 16 and 17, Covington Independent Public Schools held its 2nd Annual Professional

Notable Achievements and Areas of Improvement

Development Academy. Over 260 staff members attended a wide array of sessions. Presenters from NKCES, Millennium Learning Concepts, Apple, Footsteps to Brilliance, and many of our best teachers, instructional coaches, support staff, and administrators taught sessions including Social-Emotional Teaching and Learning, Student Engagement in Learning, Culturally Responsive Teaching and Classroom Management, Supporting Diversity in our Classrooms, Working with Students with Special Needs, and Staff Wellness. On August 22, Covington Independent Public Schools held an all-day conference at Receptions Hall in Erlanger, Kentucky. Over 400 instructional and support staff attended to hear Hector Montenegro from Solution Tree present on The Unique Needs of our English Language Learners. Dr. Montenegro shared many techniques for staff to use in the classroom to meet our learners' academic and social-emotional needs. Cognia Accreditation 2022 (more information below), 1:1 implementation continued at all of our schools K-12, Transformational Learning Center awarded Center of Distinction 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. James E Biggs Preschool-5 STAR Award, Glenn O Swing Elementary- 5 STAR Awards. The districtwide attendance rate is consistently above 95%. Holmes Middle School tested out of CSI status and moved to TSI status in 2022, John G. Carlisle Elementary and Latonia Elementary- 3 STAR Awards. During the 2021-2022 school year, Covington Independent Public Schools underwent its 5-year ‘system’ accreditation process with Cognia. CIPS was scored in Leadership Capacity, Learning Capacity, and Resource Capacity. Overall the district scored a 355.97 out of a possible 400 on the Index of Education Quality. This was a 100-point gain since 2017 and above the 5-year Cognia IEQ range of 278-283. We will use this data and guidance to help continue to strengthen our systems at the school and district levels. In the next three years, our goals include to increase proficiency in reading and math to 70% and decrease all areas of novice below 20%.

Provide any additional information you would like to share with the public and community that was not prompted in the previous sections. None at this time.