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Central Comprehensive Center September 2026 Quarterly Highlights

Celebrating Connection and Regional Collaboration

Last month, the Central Comprehensive Center (Central CC) Advisory Board met in Denver. It was great to bring people together for a day of sharing, learning, and idea generation. Representatives from all seven states—Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming—attended.

Our Advisory Board is critical to guiding our work. We rely on their perspectives and feedback to help ensure our technical assistance is responsive, relevant, and aligned with regional needs. During the meeting, we engaged in a thoughtful discussion about the Central CC’s services, focusing on strengths, opportunities, and ways to best support states’ evolving needs. These conversations provided valuable perspectives that will help inform our ongoing work.

Board members emphasized the importance of delivering evidence-informed support, remaining adaptable to state contexts, and recognizing the time demands facing education leaders and practitioners. In addition, members learned more about projects across the region, creating opportunities to connect around shared needs, challenges, and learning opportunities. Discussions highlighted common areas of focus, including chronic absenteeism, literacy, and mathematics.

Stay tuned for more resources from these projects. In the meantime, below you will find project share-outs from Kansas and Wyoming, as well as our continuing work on assessments.

If you have any thoughts about our services, send us an email. We’d love to hear from you.

Resource Recap

Read about Kansas’ cross-agency partnership, Wyoming’s process for supporting districts with resource allocation reviews, and accountability assessment considerations in our most recent blog posts.

Kansas Leaders Collaborate to Ensure High-Quality Instruction for Students
Wyoming Strengthens School District Supports for Resource Allocation Reviews
Exploring the Accountability Side of Assessments

Highlighting Our Work

Improving outcomes for students means strengthening the systems, policies, and people behind them. Members of our Central CC team share insights about our projects and work in this video, created by NORC at the University of Chicago.

To learn more about NORC and NORC’s work within the education field, sign up for their education newsletter here.

In Case You Missed It …

Here are a few additional Central CC resources we’ve shared recently.

> Exploring Within-Year Assessments

> Report: Considerations for Assessment Flexibility Approaches

> Brief: Innovation in Assessment and Accountability Systems

We are grateful for your time and support. Please stay in touch and be part of the conversation. We’ll also be sharing updates regularly here on the blog and on our LinkedIn page. If there’s a topic you’d like to hear more about, reach out and let us know!

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September 18, 2026
Video: Central CC Leadership Shares Examples of Current Work

Improving outcomes for students means strengthening the systems, policies and people behind them.

Members of NORC’s Central Comprehensive Center team explain how we partner with education agencies in our seven Central region states—Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming—to help improve academic achievement, accountability systems, educator working conditions, student attendance, and leadership.

Watch the video to learn more.

August 21, 2026
Wyoming Strengthens School District Supports for Resource Allocation Reviews
Ensuring resources are spent wisely is a universal goal for state education agencies. The Wyoming Department of Education (WDE) is proactively strengthening its resource allocation review (RAR) process with support from a partnership with the Central Comprehensive Center and the Center for Strategic Funding and Finance (CSFF). The project’s approach aims to enhance the WDE’s collaboration with local school districts.

Merging Federal, State, and Local Expectations

An RAR is a review of a school district’s use of money, staff, instructional time, and programmatic resources.

Federal Requirement. While used in a variety of settings, the RAR is required under the U.S. Department of Education’s Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) for school districts with a significant number of schools implementing school improvement plans.

ESSA requires the state education agencies help those school districts conduct their RARs, but each state has flexibility and autonomy in designing their own review process.

State Response. Wyoming’s ESSA state plan—approved by the U.S. Department of Education—details the state’s approach to identify, support, and monitor schools through a multitiered system of recognition and improvement. The plan outlines the WDE’s review of building-level resource allocations alongside student achievement data to identify any underserved subgroups. State report card data is used to ensure that schools identified for improvement are not underfunded compared to others. Any issues found are reported to the school district for resolution.

Local Complexities. In local-control states like Wyoming, this federally mandated, state-created plan includes another layer of complexity. The WDE can make requests of their 48 school districts, but districts determine how they respond to some state requirements, like defining curriculum based on state standards.

“The WDE can’t tell school districts exactly what they must do to meet the RAR requirements the WDE outlined in its ESSA state plan,” explains Joe Simpson, one of the Central Comprehensive Center Wyoming project leads. Instead, those decisions are left up to the school boards and leadership teams that manage each school district.

Merging federal, state, and local roles is at the heart of this project. The WDE request for support will help them guide school districts to effectively allocate resources to ensure schools implementing improvement plans uniformly deliver high-quality education to all students.

“While ESSA compliance is important, this project is about so much more than compliance,” said Simpson. “The WDE is creating a system of technical assistance supports that will bring value to its schools, educators, and students.”

Creating Tools School Districts Want to Use

Before the WDE creates a comprehensive statewide process for school districts to use, they need to look inward. Together with the Central Comprehensive Center and the CSFF, the WDE began this project by strengthening its own capacity to support RARs. Support from the CSFF was particularly critical at this point, as they drafted an RAR Guidebook to help school districts conduct effective reviews and implement evidence-based strategies.

As a next step, the WDE will conduct two rounds of school district piloting and reviews to ensure the updated RAR process, RAR Guidebook, and tools support reflective decision-making, collaborative problem-solving, and continuous improvement at the school district and individual school levels.

Based on feedback from pilot districts, the WDE and the Central Comprehensive Center will then develop an RAR implementation and evaluation plan. At that point, the WDE will disseminate the RAR Guidebook and accompanying tools to districts conducting RARs.

Improving Outcomes
The updated process is re-centering the RAR request on school districts from a compliance practice into an impactful, insightful practice.

“This state-level work is done with a district-focused lens,” explains Simpson. “The WDE wanted to create a comprehensive process that provides districts with results and information they can use.”

Ultimately, the updated RAR process should improve student outcomes by guiding schools and districts in a process to determine:
- Are the resources reaching the students who need them most?
- Are the investments producing the outcomes we intend?
August 11, 2026