At its January 11, 2018 meeting, the PA State Board of Education passed a resolution endorsing K-12 computer science standards developed by the Computer Science Teachers Association and encouraged local education agencies across the Commonwealth to voluntarily adopt these standards to guide their practice in the delivery of Computer Science instruction.

Also, Pursuant to Section 2603-B of the Public School Code of 1949, 24 P.S.§26-2603-B, the State Board of Education provided a report on its activities for the year 2017 including:

• Immunizations – The Board adopted final amendments to 22 Code, Chapter 11. The amendments align the provisions of Chapter 11 pertaining to non-immunized students with revisions to immunization requirements for student attendance made by the PA Department of Health (DOH). Among the key changes made by DOH was a reduction in the provisional admission time frame for students who are not fully immunized from eight months to five school days and a requirement for school administrators to review a student’s medical certificate for becoming up-to-date with immunizations on a more frequent 30-day schedule.
• Act 70 – The Board offered seven recommendations for improving instruction with regard to the Holocaust, genocide, and human rights violations.
• Act 86 – The Board produced a report per Act 86 of 2016, which directed the Board to conduct a review of existing public school entity data collection requirements in the areas of finance, human resources, food services, transportation, child accounting, athletics, health, and special education.
• Master Plan for Basic Education – The Board initiated a necessary update to its Master Plan for Basic Education. The Board anticipates that a draft update to the Master Plan will be completed in Spring 2018, after which time the Council of Basic Education will conduct a stakeholder engagement effort to gather additional input on the draft plan before it is presented to the Board for adoption.
• Pennsylvania Alternate System of Assessment (PASA) – The Board approved changes to the cut scores for PASA, the state assessment administered to students with the most severe cognitive disabilities. The Board also approved updates to certain Alternate Eligible Content to which the PASA is aligned. In May, the Board approved new Alternate Eligible Content for Writing and updated Alternate Eligible Content for Science. In July, the Board approved revised Performance Level Descriptors and cut scores for the PASA.The cut score revisions were necessary to reflect changes to the Alternate Eligible Content in English Language Arts and Mathematics that were previously approved by the Board in 2015.
• English Language Development Standards (ELDS) – The Board updated ELDS that replace PA’s prior English Language Proficiency Standards. ELDS standards are required by federal law. PA’s updated standards include model performance indicators – examples of how students use language at the various proficiency levels – that are broken down by grade levels, content areas, English proficiency levels, and language domains. The content-related examples in the new ELDS also were updated to reflect the rigor of the new PA Core Standards.