5 Testing Problems to Solve Before Next Year

Testing season may have wrapped up, but the coordinators who feel calmest next year are the ones making a few key decisions right now.

In this Conversations with Educators webinar, Katie Gomez, Lead Coordinator of Student Assessment at Humble ISD, and Kelly Bertholf, Director of Accountability & Assessment at Pflugerville ISD, sat down to talk through the testing problems that come up every year, and what it actually takes to get ahead of them before the next school year begins.

Both of these testing leaders head up assessment work for large Texas districts, and both had refreshingly honest, practical answers to some burning questions. No pretending it's ever perfectly smooth!

Key Takeaways from the Session

• Getting accommodations organized starts with a strong partnership between assessment and special programs, built well before testing season.
• Consistent, predictable communication (one email, one newsletter, same day and time every week) does more for campus coordinators than frequent check-ins.
• Last-minute issues aren't a communication failure; they're the work. Reframing "scrambling" as "adjusting" changes how a team handles it.
• A CTC-and-backup model protects a campus when someone is unexpectedly out during testing.
• Summer isn't downtime for testing offices; it's when next year's consistency gets built.
• Exporting and saving data before systems reset for the new year can save real headaches in August.

What does it take to build a strong accommodations process before the year even starts?

Gomez: Developing a strong accommodations process as early as possible, before you're even into the next school year, is really important. For us, that means building a strong partnership between our assessment team and our special program leaders across the district, with a shared vision for how we manage accommodation and eligibility decisions.  

We have a standing meeting once a month to touch base, and we've established a clear process and set of deadlines for documenting committee decisions. We call it our Collaboration for Assessment Decisions process, and it includes roles, responsibilities, training, and deadlines for finalizing decisions.

Bertholf: I'd only add to what Katie said. One of the very first things I teach my campus testing coordinators (CTCs) to use is the master accommodations report in TestHound. There are a lot of reports they'll learn about as the year goes on, but we start there, understand every field on it, which ones they'll need often and which they won't, and make sure that report stays part of their routine all year, not just during testing.

How do you keep communication consistent across campus coordinators with different experience levels?

Bertholf: One of the things I learned years ago as a campus testing coordinator was that my staff relied on a calendar I used to make. That's stuck with me. Now I create a key dates document for every administration and share it a couple of months ahead with principals and assistant principals. I update it as we go.  

The most recent addition was a reminder to make a plan for homebound students, since that was falling through the cracks. From there, I try to send just one email a week to my campus coordinators with all the updates they need, and the very last section is always a TestHound section with our tune-up and training schedule for the week.

Gomez: We prioritize supporting our CTCs by providing consistent resources and clear, repeatable steps for each administration, especially since many of our CTCs are managing multiple administrations at once. We publish a weekly newsletter that goes out on the same day, at the same time, every week, so people can plan ahead.  

Beyond that, we rarely send additional emails unless something truly needs its own attention. My teammates have also built internal how-to manuals for our testing systems, so the way we work in TestHound and Cambium stays consistent no matter who's doing the work.

Has anything about your communication approach not worked the way you expected?

Gomez: A lesson I've learned working in a large district is that it's typical not to have 100% success on every task and deadline, but that isn't always a communication failure. We ask two questions:  

• Did our process lead to success for the vast majority?
• If an issue did come up, did we catch it before it affected students?  

If we can say yes to both, we feel good about the system. When we can't, we've learned that a one-size-fits-all training document usually isn't the answer. One-on-one support, tailored to that specific coordinator or campus, has been far more effective.

Bertholf: I love Katie's two questions. No method is perfect, and it helps to put yourself back in the shoes of a campus administrator. Their work is so varied that assuming testing is their top priority every day is often just wrong. I ask them to make it their priority on the days we have scheduled testing events, and the rest of the time, I remember it isn't the most important thing on their plate, and that's okay.

How do you handle the things that inevitably come up at the last minute?

Bertholf: I have strong feelings here. I don't call it scrambling, I call it adjusting. I ask my campus coordinators to be prepared a week or two ahead of time and to expect that in those final two weeks, things will come up. That's just the work, not a failure. Students keep enrolling, TELPAS decisions have to be made close to the test, our doors don't get to close.

For accommodations that need TEA approval, I've had a lot of success asking campuses to bring those requests to a working session in January, where someone from the Special Education department can help write them.  

And honestly, when something does go wrong, I try to assume it's my fault first, not the software, not the vendor, not TEA, because 95% of the time I can actually find a fix. That keeps it from feeling like it's out of my hands.

Gomez: Very similar to what Kelly shared, it's almost like we should expect the unexpected. For us in Humble, the more common issue is a CTC or co-CTC can't be present on testing days. Our goal is to always have both a CTC and a co-CTC trained at every campus, with shared system access and shared responsibility in TestHound and Cambium. If we know in advance that one of them might be out, we work with the principal to identify and train a third backup. It comes back to brainstorming the what-ifs ahead of time and having a plan ready.

What are you doing right now to set next year up for consistency?

Gomez: It's important to create highly repeatable processes from year to year, especially with a changing assessment landscape ahead. We try to keep our training, platform management, communication, and test execution consistent, while still refining based on reflection. A lot of that work happens in summer. It's not downtime for us, it's the start of the new year. We're already thinking about next year's calendar and training schedule. We know we've succeeded when we hear coordinators say something like, "STAAR wasn't so bad" or "I learned a lot through TELPAS," because that means the rhythm and repetition worked.

Bertholf: I'll piggyback on that. It's not wash, rinse, repeat, it's wash, upgrade, repeat. You're constantly reflecting and improving. I spend some of my summer pushing back on the idea that "clear is kind." Sometimes I think unclear is kind, meaning I give my campus coordinators the framework and then leave room for them to make their own decisions. I don't need to review every supplemental aid; I can train people to do that themselves.  

I also spend time every summer looking for things we can delete. Just because we did something ten years ago doesn't mean we still need to, especially heading into new systems and new tests.

What's your best piece of advice for coordinators right now?

Bertholf: Export a lot of stuff this summer. Save it in a file and call it "end of year." Export your students out of Cambium, your test attributes, everything that's uploading into TestHound every night. Save a copy right now, because some of that will be useful at the start of next year, before all your systems are back up and running.

Gomez: For me, having a strong, well-defined process takes the edge off the work and creates a sense of control, and I think that's true for the people we support too. We try to operate from a place of trust in our systems rather than uncertainty.  

One thing that's helped: we work with a small group of CTCs each year in a focus group and ask them what we should start, stop, or continue. That feedback loop has given us some of our best ideas for refining the process.

Final Thoughts

Neither Katie nor Kelly described a perfect system. They described one that gets a little better every year, because they treat the messy parts (the last-minute changes, the imperfect processes, the things that didn't work) as information instead of failure.

For test coordinators contemplating summer planning, the takeaway is simple: the work you do now, the exports, the reflection, the honest look at what to cut, is what makes next spring feel less like scrambling and more like adjusting.

Want a head start on next year?

TestHound is built to help coordinators manage accommodations, communication, and testing logistics in one place, so your team spends less time chasing information and more time supporting students.

Book a quick demo to see how TestHound will support your team going into the new year.