SAN DIMAS/ LA VERNE– Bonita Unified School District saw significant success in multiple areas on the California School Dashboard, a tool that gives parents, students and educators access to important school and district data.

Released on Dec. 6, the updated Dashboard includes two new metrics for evaluating school and district performance: chronic absenteeism and college and career readiness. The Dashboard is fully accessible on smart phones and tablets, and has a user-friendly interface that makes complex data easy to understand.

Bonita Unified students continue to perform strongly on the state’s English language arts proficiency test, hitting 44 points above the standard and increasing by 7.3 points from 2017-18. On the state’s math test, students scored 10.3 points above standard and increased 5.2 points from 2017-18.

“Year after year, we keep getting better and we are extremely proud of the growth of our students and the diligent work from our teachers, certificated, classified and management staff,” Superintendent Carl J. Coles said. “I attribute our success to our three core values: equity, mastery and focus on results.”

The Dashboard evaluates districts, schools and student performance on a variety of measures, including parent engagement, suspension rates and the progress of English language learners.

Five color-coded icons – blue, green, yellow, orange and red – represent a school’s success on each state measure by averaging performance and growth data. A blue icon indicates high performance that is steady and improving. Red indicates poor performance that is declining.

The District boasts effective college and career programs, earning a green icon with 60.5 percent of students prepared for higher education and the workforce – increasing by 8.2 percent from 2017-18. BUSD also shows strong graduation rates with a green icon and 94.7 percent of students graduating in the 2017-18 year.

“We highly encourage our parents and community to take advantage of this informative tool to learn more about the District’s areas of strengths and improvement,” Coles said.

The Dashboard displays statewide data based on how each school or district performed and how much they improved or declined over time. It replaces the state’s Academic Performance Index (API), which relied mainly on test scores, and retired in 2013 when the state shifted to the California Standards and adopted new standardized tests.