The Lyon County School District Board of Trustees was scheduled Tuesday to consider final approval of the District Performance Plan, which must be submitted to the Nevada Department of Education by April 15. The plan includes districtwide SMART goals, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound targets required under the state accountability system.
Trustees spent much of a March 10 workshop refining those goals and discussing how state requirements shape what the district can realistically commit to each year. They settled on three goals focused on student growth and achievement and reducing chronic absenteeism.
Deputy Superintendent Stacey Cooper told trustees the state requires both School Performance Plans and a District Performance Plan, and that individual schools will add supplemental goals once the district goals are finalized.
“We want to make sure our goals are achievable on an annual basis,” she said, noting that school plans are due to the state in August.
Cooper explained that Nevada law requires every public school to identify its own specific goals each year, along with action steps and an evidence-based intervention designed to improve student outcomes and close achievement gaps. She said the district must develop SMART goals that also include equitable objectives aimed at increasing student proficiency. Schools must outline the action steps they will take over the coming academic year, embed monitoring and evaluation throughout the process, and incorporate those goals into their School Performance Plans.
She added that the state expects schools to set small, attainable goals that demonstrate measurable growth each year over a three-year period.
Trustee Tom Hendrix said the district must show measurable improvement each year but cautioned that last year’s goals were misunderstood. Last year’s District Performance Plan included eight goals, but trustees received pushback from administrators who said the goals took away each school’s autonomy to address its own students’ needs.
“We erred because the goals were based on district percentage but did not explain well enough that each school had to meet them,” he said. “I’m a proponent of setting goals high and doing the best you can, but if you don’t achieve them, it kicks you down.”
Hendrix agreed that setting goals too high can backfire under the state’s rating system. “It’s not on what we have achieved, it’s what we have achieved in relationship to the goal that we have set,” he said.
Trustee Darin Farr said the district had “way too broad” a set of goals last year and needed to scale back. “We’ve got to look at what we can measure this year and base it on that,” he said. “We are making progress in areas. It may not be what we set it for last year, but we are making progress.”
Cooper said the proposed goals were “lofty enough, but realistic, palatable and achievable for a one-year benchmark.”
During the March 10 workshop, trustees discussed three districtwide SMART goals for the 2026–27 school year:
Smart Goal #1: Ninth- and 10th-grade students will demonstrate a median growth percentile of 50 percent or greater from fall to spring on the NWEA MAP assessment in reading and math.
Smart Goal #2: For grades K–8, the district will increase the percentage of students demonstrating typical growth in reading and math by 2.5 percent from the end of the 2025–26 school year to the end of the 2026–27 school year.
Smart Goal #3: The district will reduce chronic absenteeism by 2.5 percent from the 2025–26 school year to the 2026–27 school year.
Farr said he realized while attending a parent engagement event at Fernley Elementary School that many families do not realize how tardies affect absenteeism rates. “Three tardies equals one day of absence,” he said. “If you were to just take tardies out of it, our chronic absentee number would probably cut in half across every school in the district.”
Administrators also discussed complications with putting too much weight on assessments at the high school level. Superintendent Tim Logan said he wants to maintain academic assessment without limiting students’ career pathways.
“I don’t want to stop a welding kid from going down the welding path and an ag kid from going down the ag path,” he said. “I still want to assess common-core subject areas, but I don’t want to restrict a kid from going down a path that’s going to lead to their future.”
Executive Director of Data and Professional Development Damon Etter said MAP data can still be useful at the student level but said the growth percentile can be a better indicator that the growth score.
“You can often look at growth percentile of each individual student and then you can see who our lowest growth percentiles are and start to target intervention,” he said. “Sometimes it could just be like if you know the kid, they just didn't care that day and you don't need to intervene. They're doing great academically. But sometimes you could also see that they're low and they've been consistently low, so then you might want to intervene.”
Superintendent Tim Logan emphasized that the district supports accountability but wants goals that reflect reality. “We’re not afraid of accountability,” he said. “We just want to make sure it’s attainable and it’s actually the goal that we want.”
One of the goals from last year’s DPP the Trustees agreed to remove was to increase the graduation rate from 88.7% to 89.7% by the end of the 2025-26 school year. The district’s graduation rate actually decreased to 85.73%, but Executive Director of Education Services Jim Gianotti told the Trustees in November that much of the decrease was attributable to students who transferred into the district’s adult education program. He said students going into adult ed are considered nongraduates by the state and count against the district, but not against the individual schools.
Cooper and Logan told the Board the high schools will address graduation rates in their School Performance Plans. “That won't go away just because we're focusing on something else,” Logan said. “I promise you, our high school principals are doing everything to get kids across the stage.”
The final District Performance Plan was scheduled for board consideration Tuesday so it can be uploaded to the state platform before the April 15 deadline.
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