In mid-August, the Val Verde (California) Unified School District began the 2020–2021 school year with all 20,000 students engaged in high-quality distance learning. Like districts nationwide, Val Verde implemented full distance learning in the spring and again this school year to protect the health and safety of students, staff, and families during the COVID-19 pandemic. But unlike some districts, Val Verde already had the tools, resources, and plan in place to transition students seamlessly to a remote environment thanks to the district’s preparation and participation in the Future Ready Schools^® (FRS) network.

“Community” is more than a word at UCLA Community School (UCLA-CS). Just as “community” sits at the center of the school’s name, a strong sense of community guides the teaching and learning practices at this unique school located in Los Angeles, California.  

On any given day, about 30 percent of students in Middletown City (Ohio) School District lack the home internet connectivity they need to participate in learning activities outside of school. It’s a reality that Superintendent Marlon Styles, Jr., and his team have worked diligently to address since he arrived in the urban school district three years ago.

Ever since Middletown Township Public Schools (New Jersey) joined the Future Ready Schools^® (FRS) network in 2015, the district has prioritized personalized learning for both its students and staff. At that time, district leaders never expected they would draw on that forward-thinking approach and commitment to innovative practices to educate students during a worldwide health crisis—or that such a crisis would reveal underlying equity issues in their district.

Within forty-eight hours of closing schools to protect students, staff, and the community from the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), district leaders in Rowland Unified School District (California) (RUSD) rolled out their plan for educating students remotely.

Building community partnerships (one of the seven gears in the Future Ready Framework) has been instrumental in supporting Bristol Township School District’s transition to student-centered learning.  Through partnerships with Digital Promise—a Future Ready Schools® (FRS) founding partner—and the Verizon Foundation, Bristol Township launched a one-to-one student-to-device initiative at its two middle schools in 2015. Now, through a partnership with T-Mobile, the district is poised to expand the one-to-one initiative to its high school in January 2020 and its three elementary schools next school year.  

Whether they are teaching multiplication facts with the video game Minecraft or exploring engineering concepts in a Lego-themed makerspace, educators in Pennsylvania’s Montour School District always ask themselves, “Is this best for children?”—not just for today, but for the future students will face as adults.  

The mission of Avonworth School District in western Pennsylvania is to “empower students through authentic experiences to become creative, innovative thinkers.” To fulfill that mission, the district embarked on a strategic planning process to determine what is most important for the district’s 1,856 students to learn and how they should learn it. Through that process, the district identified three focus areas to make learning more engaging for students: (1) personalized learning, (2) project-based and interdisciplinary learning, (3) and use of space and time. Those focus areas demonstrate the district’s alignment with the Future Ready Framework, keeping personalized student learning at the center and emphasizing creative approaches to the framework’s gears of curriculum, instruction, and assessment and use of space and time.

Bobbi-Ann Barnes isn’t shy about how she feels about worksheets.

“I have never cared for worksheets. They are not engaging and simply require rote memorization,” says Barnes, assistant superintendent in Deer Lakes School District in northern Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. “Does a kid go home and say, ‘I had a great time doing a worksheet’? There are so many other things that you can be doing creatively as a teacher.”

In the fall of 2017, advocates from A+ Education Partnership, a nonprofit education policy and practice organization in Alabama, contacted the Alliance for Excellent Education (All4Ed) for help in ensuring that the state’s plan for implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) would hold schools accountable for the performance of historically underserved students.