Osseo Area Schools — Maple Grove, Minnesota

At a glance

• Setting: Suburban public school district, transition programming
• PAES in place since: TBC with district
• Students served per year: TBC
• Outcome markers: Community-college enrolment in graphic design (previously withdrawn student); Employee of the Month recognition plus on-time graduation (previously attendance-flagged student)

The challenge

Jess Kline had two students on her caseload before the PAES Lab arrived. Both had been assessed multiple times using conventional tools. Both looked on paper like students who did not engage. One rarely made eye contact in the classroom. The other had attendance below the state graduation threshold.

Jess was responsible for evidencing post-secondary goals under Indicator 13. For both students, the existing evidence base was thin. The students themselves were not engaging with the planning process. Paper-and-pencil vocational inventories produced the same result every time: students declined to complete them, or completed them in ways that told Jess nothing she did not already know.

What Jess needed was an assessment that would work with students who had already disengaged from the standard transition assessment toolkit.

The implementation

Osseo installed a PAES Lab configured to serve multiple student cohorts across the district. Jess and a team of special education teachers and paraeducators completed PAES certification training on-site. The lab was integrated into the district's existing transition planning process.

Students rotated through PAES sessions two to three times per week. Supervisors scored in real time using the PAES Scan app. Data accumulated over the full assessment cycle. Jess integrated the outputs into IEP updates and transition plan annual reviews.

The outcome

For the withdrawn student: Once the student started engaging with lab tasks, staff observed behaviors they had never seen in a classroom. Concentration on detailed work. Precise following of instructions. Focused interest in graphic design tasks in the Computer Technology area. The student began attending sessions voluntarily. By the end of the cycle, they were making eye contact, asking questions about college options, and exploring graphic design as a post-secondary direction. They enrolled at the local community college the following year.

For the attendance-flagged student: Attendance did not resolve in the first weeks of PAES. What did start was completion of Construction and Industrial job cards, with notable accuracy. Staff used this as the basis for a conversation that reframed the student's relationship to school: not as a place to fail, but as a place that recognized what they were good at. The student completed 248 of 264 scheduled jobs by year-end. They earned Employee of the Month recognition. They graduated on time and returned to finish the remaining jobs while working paid positions on school payroll, in the school store, and in a peer-mentor custodial role.

For supervisors: Jess's team now have an assessment that produces data students engage with, that parents can read, and that survives external review. The IEP evidence base is stronger than paper inventories ever produced.

What's next

Osseo has continued to operate the PAES Lab across multiple cohorts and is exploring expansion to neighbouring districts through a cooperative model. Jess has referred PAES to colleagues in several other Minnesota districts through the state transition network.