PRINEVILLE — Crook County School District’s superintendent needs to know more about the district’s students. To do that, Sara Johnson wants to know what the data say about student achievement, struggling children and teaching methods that work.

Armed with the information, she says she’ll be better able to help students succeed with the assistance of Joel Hoff, the current Crook County High School vice principal.

“One of our big priorities is putting faces on the data,” Johnson said. “When Joel begins to look at the data, then part of what he does is help administrators connect to who that child really is — the strengths, the needs … and what might be missing that would help serve that child.”

Hoff will leave his position in early January to become the new director of school improvement.

Johnson said Hoff has already been helping the district after his normal hours helping administrators analyze and interpret data, and it made sense to have him use those skills in a full-time position.

“The demand for his time and skill kept increasing and increasing, to the point where I started to feel guilty about how much we were making him work on systemwide improvement, as opposed to high school,” she said.

One of Hoff’s data systems addresses students’ risk factors such as absences, falling grades and past academic performance, which is a way of ensuring that “no kid falls through the cracks,” he said. If a student needs assistance like tutoring or other programs, an administrator is alerted.

Elementary school teachers are already using a spreadsheet to let Hoff know if their students are meeting math standards. For every standard, if a student gets a question wrong, the teacher submits a zero. If the student gets it right, the teacher submits a one. Hoff said this lets teachers know which math standards to spend extra lessons on and which the students quickly understood, saving instructional time.

Both Hoff and Johnson emphasized that these data compilations were chiefly meant to help individual students find success.

“Data is a student. That’s someone’s child; that’s a little one who gets on the school bus,” Johnson said. “It’s the teenager that has some things that are stressing them out — maybe boyfriend/girlfriend issues, maybe athletics, maybe a hard test. It’s not just about data, but it’s about the kid, the actual student.”

Furthermore, Hoff said that he wants to make sure any potential slip-ups are fixed early on, not just when there’s an immediate crisis. Or as he put it, “predictable is preventable.”

Johnson said having Hoff do this work full-time is necessary in her small school district, where every other administrator already has lots on her or his plate and there’s no designated position for helping staff understand and analyze data.

The idea of a data-focused administrator in Crook County isn’t new; former Superintendent Duane Yecha, who retired this summer, floated the idea last year. However, it was rejected. This time, the board agreed after Johnson and Hoff retooled and expanded the position.

School board Chairman Scott Cooper said the board believed Crook County had “reached a plateau in terms of our academic achievement,” and that Hoff could get the district over the hump.

“I think we’ve done some really good work in helping our students get to a higher level, but we’re realizing that we need to add some administrative support to take this to the next level,” he said. “We think Joel has the unique skill set to do that.”

Cooper said Hoff’s work will refocus the district toward looking at a trend from kindergarten through senior year.

“What you learn in kindergarten and eighth grade has a big impact on high school,” he said. “We need the whole system to be looked at … in order to be responsive to improving school performance.”

Hoff’s vice principal role at Crook County High will be temporarily filled by Marsha Moyer, an Oregon School Personnel Association officer and former Salem-Keizer School District human resources director, until the district begins to search for a replacement in the spring. Hoff’s new salary will be approximately $105,000, he said.

Hoff said he hopes to help Crook County serve its students and community more efficiently and effectively.

“We want the parents of our students to know that they’re sending their kids to some of the best schools in the state,” he said.

— Reporter: 541-617-7854, jhogan@bendbulletin.com