TONASKET – Tonasket School District is preparing to begin its mandated roll out of TPEP – Teacher/Principal Evaluation Pilot – that needs to be fully implemented per OSPI (Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction) during the 2015-17 biennium, said District Superintendent Paul Turner at the board’s Feb. 27 meeting.

“By December we’re required to do three things,” Turner said. “We need to adopt rules for what this looks like; we need to adopt descriptors of each rating in the system; and we need to choose from one of thee instructional frameworks.”

The three include Marzano, University of Washington and Danielson’s. Tonasket and most of Okanogan County districts have been exploring the Marzano method.

“We need to determine how this logistically is going to be done,” Turner said. “How will we pay for training and agree on the framework?

“We’ll be giving the three framweworks to the board, staff and administration for their feedback.”

Also, he said the state has submitted a request to the Obama Administration to waive some No Child Left Behind requirements from the previous administration that have hamstrung portions of school funding.

“If this is accepted, the AYP (Annual Yearly Progress scoring) as we know it would go away,” Turner said. “No more setting 20 percent of Title I funding and no more letters going home explaining how we’re failing as a district.

“It still leaves in place the criteria and benchmarks that we have to achieve. It specifies 2011 as a baseline. We would have to improve by 50 percent by 2017 in all categories.”

Turner said that, with the levy election about to be certified on Feb. 28, votes trickling in had brought the majority to 59.4 percent. The levy easily passed, requiring just a 50 percent majority.

Attendance numbers were also positive as the district’s enrollment rose to an official count of 1,068.72 students. January is typically a month of enrollment decline; the rising figure brought the average enrollment for the year up to 1,061.