Littlestown Area School District Improves Efficiency and Meets State-Specific Needs with Vector’s Professional Growth Suite

The Challenge

Littlestown Area School District, Pennsylvania

• Provide employees and administrators with an easy, efficient way to track professional development hours. The Littlestown Area School District is a small, rural school district serving approximately 1,757 students in southern Pennsylvania. District administrators were seeking a better way to track district employees’ professional development hours. The district was using a “work-around” in a system that wasn’t designed for this task, which made tracking professional development hours confusing, frustrating, and inefficient. District leaders wanted to implement a system that was specifically built for professional development management to eliminate these problems.
• Create a simplified process for supervisors to approve and provide reimbursement for employee training. The district lacked a standardized process to manage approval of PD events or requests for employee reimbursement. For instance, if a teacher wanted to log certain hours toward their graduate credits or be reimbursed for a course, they had to get prior approval from their administrator. However, there was no standardized process to do this, which made it hard for the administrators to handle these requests.
• Update and standardize the staff evaluation system to manage the evaluation process for both certificated staff members and support staff. The online evaluation system that the district was using could only handle evaluations for teachers; some roles, administrative, and support positions were “shoe-horned” into the teacher system for evaluation. This caused confusion on the part of non-instructional staff and administrators. For some roles, including paraprofessionals, custodial staff, and bus drivers, the district resorted to using Word documents to complete the evaluations. The lack of uniformity and inability to do everything in one online system made the process cumbersome.

The Choice

Littlestown Area School District has been using Vector Solutions’ online staff training courses for several years with good results. So when it came time to look for a system to standardize and streamline the district’s professional development and evaluation processes, district leaders selected Vector Solutions’  Professional Growth Suite including Vector PD Tracking and Vector Evaluations+. Littlestown administrators chose Vector’s Professional Growth Suite because:

• The platform is designed specifically for K-12 professional development tracking and evaluations to handle everything in a single platform.
• The PD Tracking component has features to help administrators approve graduate credits and reimburse employees for PD courses. Administrators appreciate that these events can be separated from other conferences and workshops that don’t qualify for credits and reimbursement.
• The PD Tracking system integrates with Vector Training, allowing the district to track the completion of both the Vector Training courses and any PD events in one system.
• The evaluation system supports evaluations for both certificated and non-certificated staff members.
• Districts can tailor the evaluation process for an individual, a group, or a specific role.
• The platform includes customizable forms and templates to help districts meet state-specific requirements for teacher evaluations. These include:
• The Student Performance Measure (SPM) form is a template some Pennsylvania districts use during the teacher evaluation process. It provides quantitative and qualitative data to support the teacher’s professional growth. Teachers use the form to list a student’s area of need, their plan of action to address that need, and how progress will be measured. Evaluations+ allows for the capture of data to measure progress toward that goal. Teachers love that the form auto-populates their goals when they do mid-year reviews and that it allows them to update their goals and how they want to measure progress. At the end of the year, the evaluator provides a rating on the SPM, which is a component of the teacher’s Summative Annual Evaluation.
• Forms for walkthroughs and formal evaluations that align with the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s Framework for Observation & Practice for Classroom Teachers, a rubric based on the Charlotte Danielson Framework for Teachers used in teacher evaluations in Pennsylvania. Evaluations+ allows principals to make notes during their classroom observations and tag them to the Danielson rubric to indicate the teacher’s performance levels for each rubric component.
• The state’s “Act 13” summative evaluation forms include calculations to determine overall ratings. Components include the building Level Score, Student Performance on Assessment Data, Growth/PVAAS data, IEP Goals, and LEA-selected measures.

The Change

The district began using Vector’s Professional Growth Suite with its certificated employees (principals, teachers, and central office staff) first and then expanded it the next year to all staff members. PD Tracking is used to manage and track employees’ professional development, and Evaluations+ is used for 90-day, 180-day, and annual evaluations. The district has received positive feedback and has experienced multiple benefits since switching to Vector’s Professional Growth Suite, including:

• Improved efficiency and simplified workflows: The district went from using multiple inefficient, cumbersome systems to a single, easy-to-use platform supporting all roles. This has eliminated the need to rely on separate Word documents for some roles and has made the process of managing professional development and conducting staff evaluations much more efficient. It has also helped the district establish a clear process for approval of course credits and reimbursements of PD expenses. “It’s been a more organized process for everyone,” said Timothy Mitzel, Littlestown Area School District superintendent.
• Ease of use:  Mitzel said Vector’s Professional Growth Suite has eliminated a lot of the confusion that was present under the previous system and has garnered a positive response from educators. “If something is cumbersome, the teachers aren’t going to use it,” he said. “So that (positive) feedback was huge.” Administrators also appreciate the tools that allow them to push information out to staff members easily.
• Alignment with state-specific needs: District leaders especially value Vector’s Professional Growth Suite, which aligns with state requirements for teacher evaluations. The customizable forms, especially the SPM form, provide added convenience and help create an effective evaluation process that keeps the teachers—and the students—on top of their minds. “Ultimately, it helps support teachers in a way that directly impacts students,” said Mitzel.

For Littlestown Area School District, Vector’s Professional Growth Suite has been a win for all involved—administrators, teachers, staff, and students. It simplifies and automates processes while also improving efficiency, reducing administrative burdens, and providing more opportunities to focus on professional growth and improving teaching practice. It also supports the district’s work to address the teacher shortage because having a quality professional development program builds capacity and helps teachers feel supported, which is a key to teacher retention.

About Vector Solutions

Vector Solutions’ Professional Growth Suite combines best-in-class professional development content and tools to manage staff evaluations and professional development, streamlining the professional growth process. Easy-to-use tools simplified administrative workflows, and centralized reporting and tracking in one consolidated platform increase efficiency for administrators and empowered professional growth and development for educators and staff.

The professional growth suite includes:

Evaluations+ maximizes professional growth opportunities with easy-to-use tools and customizable forms and workflows that help manage the evaluation and development process for educators and staff from start to finish.​

PD Tracking allows users to easily plan, manage, track, and evaluate all professional development events and activities for educators and staff – improving organization, streamlining communications, and saving valuable time.

Vector Training addresses individual professional development needs and supports ongoing professional growth by providing access to hundreds of high-quality online courses on important safety, prevention, and inclusive instruction topics.​