LCSD Superintendent Update: School Performance Results
September is here! This month’s Panther Spotlight is a special one. I want to congratulate every single student, teacher and staff member who gave their all to learning and making school awesome in 2025-26. Our schools are green!
Our preliminary 2026 School Performance Framework results from the Colorado Department of Education include several notable accomplishments:
- Lake County High School earned a green or Performance rating (the highest a school can receive), improving from its 2025 Improvement rating.
- Lake County Intermediate School, which closed following the 2025–26 school year, earned a green or Performance rating—also improving from an Improvement rating the previous year.
- Lake County Elementary School earned a green Meets rating for English Language Proficiency, improving from its previous Approaching rating. English Language Proficiency was the school’s only scored category because it did not serve state-tested grade levels during the 2025–26 school year.
- Cloud City High School earned a green Meets rating for Postsecondary and Workforce Readiness on the standard framework. Because Cloud City is designated as an Alternative Education Campus and serves students with specific risk factors, its official rating is calculated using a separate set of measures. The District expects to receive the school’s Alternative Education Campus framework on September 14.
LCSD as a whole improved its District Performance Framework score by 11.4 points from 2025 to 2026—the largest increase of any Colorado school district. The district also earned its highest total framework score since 2017.
Additionally, CDE’s recently released attendance data provide another reason to celebrate. During the 2025–26 school year:
- The district’s chronic absenteeism rate—the percentage of students missing 10% or more of the school year—declined from 25.7% to 18.5%.
- The district’s overall attendance rate increased from 91.7% to 92.3%.
These gains reflect the work of school leaders, counselors, educators, students and families to make sure students are at school and learning!
Overall, our 2026 results prove that the work we are doing–as a district and a community–is the right work. Our new five-year Strategic Plan isn’t about new initiatives or shiny objects. It’s about staying focused, staying consistent and staying the course. Little by little, it is working.
Click here for a congratulatory video from me to all of our students & staff:
Go Panthers!
Kate
Kate Bartlett, Superintendent
