Boulder Valley School District

Academic Return on Investment

teacher helping a student

We have begun the process of carefully reviewing projects and programs within the district, as part of our Academic Return on Investment (AROI) initiative of the All Together for All Students Strategic Plan.

What does the most good… and for whom?

Academic ROI works to evaluate proposed and existing initiatives.

We are looking to replicate efforts that provide the best results for the district resources invested.

We are also working to identify and decommission efforts that are relatively expensive or are not sufficiently helping our students achieve our Long Term Student Outcomes, so that we can drive more money to initiatives that will meet our objectives.

Academic ROI graphic, showing areas to focus and sunset based on impact and cost

 

Our A-ROI Framework

The Academic Return on Investment process helps us to focus on data-driven decision making.

Moving forward, BVSD is focused on ensuring initiatives, especially those that require a significant investment of district resources have: 

  • Clear objectives
  • Measurable success measures
  • Systems to collect and analyze data

For this reason, when an initiative is proposed or reviewed, we collect the following information:

Icon showing paper and pencil, representing outcomes

Objective

Icon of circles around three students, representing targeted student population

Target Student Population

Stack of coins, representing costs

Costs

Icon showing bar and line graph, representing outcome measures

Outcome measures

Icon showing graduate holding a paper with the BVSD logo, representing alignment to the district strategic plan

Alignment to district strategic plan


In addition to being an initiative within the All Together for All Students strategic plan, it helps to focus the district and its resources on fulfilling all of our strategic efforts.

Reviewed Initiatives

Literacy programs are essential to student success, and significant resources are budgeted. Following careful review by the staff at BVSD, utilizing the AROI process, we have decided that we will not renew the Reading Recovery (RR) and Descubriendo La Lectura (DLL).