Up to Date, with SST8

News and Events for December 8 through December 19, 2025

Now Accepting Applications for the

2026 Community Collaboration Challenge!

The Partnership for Student Success (PSS) at the Johns Hopkins University Everyone Graduates Center is excited to launch our fourth annual Community Collaboration Challenge! With support from the Leon Lowenstein Foundation, the Challenge provides $5,000 - $10,000 awards to communities and is designed to support collaboration that expands and pilots evidence-based K-12 student supports in the form of high-impact tutoring, mentoring, student success coaching, postsecondary transition coaching, and/or wraparound/integrated student supports.

We encourage nonprofits, schools, districts, higher education institutions, and state and local government agencies and intermediaries to apply for these awards to facilitate collaboration to expand or improve evidence-based and people-powered supports for local K-12 students.

The application will close on January 16th at 5:00 pm ET. Awardees will be announced in mid-February, for award periods that will run from mid-February through October 2026. Learn more here.

Students with Disabilities Can Read Too!

Do you want to improve literacy outcomes for students with disabilities (SWD) in your district/community school? Join us for a series dedicated to addressing literacy practices to support SWD. SST8 will host these collaborative viewings of the DEW series, All Students Can Read (ASCR).

SST8 will also facilitate one-hour virtual ASCR Prep Sessions prior to each of the DEW sponsored events. These sessions will be critical to get the most out of the ASCR training. Benefits of these Prep Sessions will be to frontload and organize information, prioritize content based on regional feedback, and support the development of critical questions to increase engagement and maximize learning.

The ASCR sessions will be facilitated by SST8 in person and viewed as a collaborative group at Summit ESC/SST8 with processing time during the sessions. The series will culminate in a one-hour virtual Wrap-Up Session to support teams to apply the learning by developing an action plan with defined steps to implement evidence-based approaches for teaching students with disabilities to read.

The ASCR sessions are sponsored by DEW and therefore all participants MUST register for all three with this link in order to receive 9.0 DEW contact hours. In addition, all participants must register for the virtual Prep, in-person Collaborative Viewing, and virtual Wrap-up sessions through SST8.

Event Details:

📅 In-Person Dates: January 13, 2026, February 10, 2026, March 10, 2026

🕘 Time: 11:45 am - 3:15 pm

📍 Location: SST8 / Summit ESC 420 Washington Ave. Cuyahoga Falls, 44221

📅 Virtual Dates: January 6, 2026, February 3, 2026, March 3, 2026, March 12, 2026

🕘 Time: 8:30 - 10:00 AM (Jan ONLY) All others 8:30 - 9:30 AM

📍 Location: Zoom link provided for each session upon registration

Who Should Attend:

We request participation from at least one Curriculum Director and one Special Education Director per district to encourage cross-department collaboration and planning. Additional beneficial team members may include: building principal, literacy coaches, instructional coaches, and other special education leads.

Ohio Online PBIS Training

Interested in learning about PBIS for the first time, taking your knowledge about positive behavioral supports even further, or advancing your understanding about how to implement this important framework? Check out Ohio's free online PBIS professional development. Sign up for a free account at ohiopbis.org.

Current modules include:

PBIS for All Learners -Tier 1 and 2 (Option C)
Taking Your Knowledge Further-Classroom Practices (Option B)

There is a new teams portal for administrators and regional and district coaches. In the portal you can assign modules to team members, monitor the progress of team members, generate completion reports, and email reminders to the team.

These modules support Ohio law and rules.

Strengthening Mathematics Learning Across Ohio: Ohio’s new Plan for

K-12 Mathematics

Ohio’s Plan for K-12 Mathematics establishes a common statewide vision of high-quality, research- and evidence-based mathematics instruction, as well as guidance on the system-level conditions and structures needed to bring quality instruction to scale. It is intended to serve as an anchor for local, regional, and state education leaders, policymakers, partners, and others who can play a role in improving students’ access to rigorous mathematics instruction and overall academic achievement.

More resources will be shared throughout the year. Until then, please find the plan here: Ohio’s Plan for K12 Mathematics

Submit Reading Achievement Plans by Dec. 31

Districts and Community Schools that meet the following criteria are required to submit a Reading Achievement Plan to the Department by Dec. 31:

» For two consecutive years, the district or community school met both of the criteria below:

The district or community school received a performance rating of less than three stars for the early literacy component of Ohio's School Report Card.
Fifty-one percent or less of the district or community school's students scored "proficient" on Ohio's State Test for grade 3 English language arts.

Find the list of districts and community schools required to submit Reading Achievement Plans on the District's Read ing Achievement Plans webpage. Please direct questions to ReadingPlans@education.ohio.gov.