Lee’s Summit R-7 School District agrees to $510,000 contract with Panorama; pays $97,000 to provide teachers and district staff with “racial equity training”

A concerned community member provided Parents Defending Education with contracts between Lee’s Summit R-7 School District and Panorama Education Inc. In a contract dated December 1, 2019, the school district agreed to pay Panorama $76,500 for one year of the company’s services. The school district paid $19,500 for “Student Success Pilot License Fee,” $54,000 for “District-wide Climate Survey License Fee,” and $3,000 for “Equity & Inclusion 2-3 Hour In-Person Workshop.” The services included:

• Panorama Student Success Platform License and Implementation Support (3 schools ~2,600 students):
  • Platform License Fee include:
    • Role-based access for any and all administrators and educators
    • Access to Panorama’s SEL measures (unlimited administrations)
    • Phone and email technical support for end-users
  • Implementation Support includes:
    • Project kickoff and planning
    • Data configuration
    • Integration and customization
    • Preview and account creation
• Panorana Survey Platform: Student, Family and Staff Climate Surveys and 6-12 Equity & Inclusion Survey:
  • Access to Survey Platform and Support (as defined in the Terms and Conditions)
  • Survey administration, analysis and reporting
  • Research-backed Student, Family and Staff Survey measures across the district
  • Ability to administer custom surveys and add custom survey content to existing Panorama surveys
  • Unlimited survey administrations
  • Universal access to Playbook
• Training and Professional Development Included:
  • Virtual Survey Coordinator Trainings in advance of climate survey administrations
  • 90-minute Virtual “Introduction to Student Success” training for district administrators and three pilot schools
  • Day-long set of Student Success and/or survey data workshops developed in partnership between Panorama’s Teaching and Learning team and LSR7
• Equity & Inclusion 2-3 Hour In-Person Workshop:
  • Equpping participants with a shared, precise language for talking about equity and inclusion
  • Guiding participants through reflective inquiry driven by how students respond to questions that ask them about their daily experiences related to equity and inclusion
  • Supporting the prioritization of focus areas and action-planning to help schools take next steps with their data.

In a contract dated December 1, 2020, the school district agreed to pay Panorama $85,500 for one year of the company’s services. The school district paid $19,500 for “Student Success Pilot License,” $54,000 for “District-wide Climate Survey License,” $9,000 for “District-wide Social-Emotional Learning Measurement License,” and $3,000 for “Equity & Inclusion 2-3 Hour In Person Workshop,” as well as receiving complimentary “District-wide Social-Emotional Learning Measurement License.” The services included:

• Panorama Student Success Platform License and Implementation Support (3 schools ~2,600 students)
  • Platform License Fee include:
    • Role-based access for any and all administrators and educators
    • Access to Panorama’s SEL measures (unlimited administrations)
    • Phone and email technical support for end-users
  • Implementation Support includes:
    • Project kickoff and planning
    • Data configuration
    • Integration and customization
    • Preview and account creation
• Panorana Survey Platform: Access to Survey Platform and Support (as defined in the Terms and Conditions). This includes survey administration, analysis and reporting
  • Research-backed Student, Staff and Family School Climate Survey Instruments and custom set-up
  • Research-backed Equity & Inclusion Survey instrument and administration for grades 6-12
  • Research-backed Social-Emotional Learning Measurement and dynamic reporting tools to support tiered intervention
  • 3Ability to administer custom surveys and add custom survey content to existing Panorama surveys
  • Unlimited survey administrations
  • Universal access to Playbook
• Training and Professional Development Included:
  • Virtual Survey Coordinator Trainings in advance of climate survey administrations
  • 90-minute Virtual “Introduction to Student Success” training for district administrators and three pilot schools
  • Day-long set of Student Success and/or survey data workshops developed in partnership between Panorama’s Teaching and Learning team and LSR7
• Equity & Inclusion 2-3 Hour In-Person Workshop:
  • Equpping participants with a shared, precise language for talking about equity and inclusion
  • Guiding participants through reflective inquiry driven by how students respond to questions that ask them about their daily experiences related to equity and inclusion
  • Supporting the prioritization of focus areas and action-planning to help schools take next steps with their data.

In a contract dated December 1, 2021, the school district agreed to pay Panorama $510,000 for three years of the company’s services. The school district plans each year to pay $153,000 for “District-wide Student Success,” “District-wide Climate & Social Emotional Learning Survey License,” and “District-wide SEL Check-in Tool License.” The school district also plans each year to pay $17,000 for “Project Management & Technical Support Fees” and “Professional Development Foundations Package.” The services included:

• Panorama Student Success Platform License and Implementation Support
  • Access to Panorama Student Success Platform and Support (as defined in the Terms and Conditions)
  • Dashboards and reporting for teachers, student support staff, school administrators, and district administrators
  • Includes survey administration, analysis, and reporting
  • Ongoing integration of PowerSchool & standard filters into Student Success platform. Includes behavior, attendance, coursework, rosters, and demographics
  • Ongoing integration of NWEA MAP, MAP State Assessment, SAEBERS, Aimsweb+, iReady and ACT into Student Success platform
  • Intervention tracking
• Panorama Survey Platform: Access to Survey Platform and Support (as defined in the Terms and Conditions). This includes survey administration, analysis and reporting.
  • Research-backed Student, Staff and Family School Climate Survey Instruments and custom set-up
  • Research-backed Equity & Inclusion Survey instrument and administration for grades 6-12
  • Research-backed Social-Emotional Learning Measurement and dynamic reporting tools to support tiered intervention
  • Panorama SEL Check-in Check-in Survey Tool
  • Ability to administer custom surveys and add custom survey content to existing Panorama surveys
  • Unlimited survey administrations
  • Universal access to Playbook
• Project Management & Technical Support: Includes dedicated Client Success Manager who will work with the client’s main point of contact to execute a successful project administration and platform implementation
  • Develop project timeline
  • Manage setup and administration
  • Customize configurations
  • Coordinate rollout of reports
  • Data integration and platform maintenance
• Professional Development Foundations Package
  • Unlimited access to Panorama Academy, for on-demand tutorials and training
  • Access to exclusive Panorama Community professional development events
  • Custom design and facilitation of 4 virtual PD sessions up to 2 hours in length for up to 50 participants (larger groups are supported for webinar-style facilitation)

Lee’s Summit R-7 School District’s website has a page dedicated to Panorama. The school district explains that Panorama’s “social emotional learning surveys ask questions about how students feel about current learning – including classes and performance in school – in different school environment situations.” Panorama’s “student support/climate & equity surveys ask students about how they feel about their specific school and experiences at school in general.” The school district explains that “student’s teachers and school leaders are able to see individual survey results.” The school district also has the surveys posted online.

The Social Emotional Learning (SEL) survey for the third grade through the fifth grade includes the following questions:

• How carefully did you listen to other people’s points of view?
• How much did you care about other people’s feelings?
• How well did you get along with students who are different from you?
• How clearly were you able to describe your feelings?
• When others disagreed with you, how respectful were you of their views?
• To what extent were you able to stand up for yourself without putting others down?
• To what extent were you able to disagree with others without starting an argument?
• How often did you compliment others’ accomplishments?

The SEL survey for the sixth grade through the twelfth grade includes the following questions:

• How carefully did you listen to other people’s points of view?
• How much did you care about other people’s feelings?
• How well did you get along with students who are different from you?
• How clearly were you able to describe your feelings?
• How often did you remain calm, even when someone was bothering you or saying bad things?
• To what extent were you able to stand up for yourself without putting others down?
• To what extent were you able to disagree with others without starting an argument?
• How often were you polite to other students?
• How often did you keep your temper in check?

The climate survey for students in third grade through the fifth grade includes the following questions:

• How well do people at your school understand you as a person?
• How much support do the adults at your school give you?
• How likely is it that someone from your school will bully you online?
• Overall, how much do you feel like you belong at your school?
• If a student is bullied in school, how difficult is it for him/her to get help from an adult?

The climate survey for students in sixth grade through the twelfth grade includes the following questions:

• How likely is it that someone from your school will bully you online?
• At your school, how unfairly do the adults treat the students?
• How often do teachers encourage you to learn about people from different races, ethnicities, or cultures?
• How often do you spend time at school with students from different races, ethnicities, or cultures?
• How often do you have classes with students from different racial, ethnic, or cultural backgrounds?
• At your school, how often do students from different races, ethnicities, or cultures hang out with each other?
• At your school, how common is it for students to have close friends from different racial, ethnic, or cultural backgrounds?
• How fairly do students at your school treat people from different races, ethnicities, or cultures?
• How fairly do adults at your school treat people from different races, ethnicities, or cultures?
• How often do you think about what someone of a different race, ethnicity, or culture experiences?
• How confident are you that students at your school can have honest conversations with each other about race?
• At your school, how often are you encouraged to think more deeply about race-related topics?
• How comfortable are you sharing your thoughts about race-related topics with other students at your school?
• How often do students at your school have important conversations about race, even when they might be uncomfortable?
• When there are major news events related to race, how often do adults at your school talk about them with students?
• How well does your school help students speak out against racism?

Panorama Education Inc. is an organization known for helping schools throughout the country survey the race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender identity of students in an effort to push “equity and inclusion” in school systems. The organization offers an “Equity and Inclusion Survey” to “help schools and districts track the progress of equity initiatives through the lens of students and staff, identify areas for celebration and improvement, inform professional development, and signal the importance of equity and inclusion to the community.”

The parent who reached out to PDE was concerned with what happened to the Panorama data collected from students and how the entities involved used that data. She claimed that the students’ educational records were disclosed to the outreach director of Panorama. In a complaint of a Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) violation, the parent explained:

It was not until January of this year that I became suspicious of the way Panorama survey data was being collected and analyzed. After several communications (email and in-person) between district administrators, my understanding and concern was formally confirmed. I was finally informed by Dr. Rexanne Hill via email on April 1, 2022, that, “There is a direct integration from PowerSchool (student information system) to Panorama.” This same email explained that the District “can view the information [I] mentioned in [my] question (gender, race, ethnicity, grade level, etc.).

She pointed out a work session meeting that the Board of Education held on February 25, 2021. In this meeting, Associate Superintendent Christiana Barger stated:

Panorama gives us a very clear breakdown in terms of sense of belonging, cultural awareness, collectively by demographics, so we’ll say our white students are communicating this in terms of their sentiments. Our black students are communicating this in terms of their sentiments. What it doesn’t give us is that ability to say Christy Barger responded this way on Panorama, and she has this number of D’s. And I mean, to some degree it does on our dashboard, but not in a like report from an aggregate analysis kind of way. [Time Stamp: 26:20]

The parent explained in her FERPA complaint that she was told by a school district official that “the physical location of the data and servers is in the US-East-1 AWS data center, located in Virginia.” She was also told that “Panorama directly manages those servers and processes on those platforms and controls how they receive client data.” The parent explained that “the fact that student record data is stored on Amazon Web Service servers in Virginia that are managed by a consulting company contracted by the District was concerning, so I studied laws regarding student record privacy and protection of personally identifiable information.”

In the parent’s complaint, she stated that she emailed the “Executive Assistant to the Superintendent and Lee’s Summit R-7 Board of Education Secretary, asking for guidance to the Annual Notification of Rights that is required to be sent to parents every year.” This executive assistant directed the parent to a policy that stated: “The district may disclose education record information without consent in accordance with law, including when the disclosure is: to organizations conducting studies for or on behalf of the district or other educational agencies or institutions to develop, validate or administer predictive tests, administer student aid programs, or improve instruction if the legal requirements for disclosure are met.”

However, the parent explained that “when I referred to documents between Lee’s Summit R-7 School District and Panorama Education, Inc., I found no evidence of their contract satisfying any of these requirements that permit disclosure without consent.” The following document is the parent’s FERPA complaint.

In February 2019, the school district’s Board of Education approved an “Equity Plan.” Goals of this plan include to “support the integrated focus and analysis of equity into organizational policies, procedures and leadership,” “increase staff participation in equity based professional learning,” “increase student exposure to culturally relevant teaching and learning,” “increase curricular materials that reflect diversity,” “implement district-wide equity decision making protocols to narrow achievement gaps, monitor academic progress of targeted student groups,” and “increase staff diversity representative of the student population.”

The school district has a 2021-2024 “Comprehensive School Improvement Plan.” A core component of the plan is “diversity, inclusion, and equity.” A task for the school district in this plan is to “align instructional framework with Real World Learning (RWL), Equity Plan, and Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS).” The school district will also “establish regular collection and analysis of student outcome, student experience, and school climate data that are disaggregated by race, ethnicity, socioeconomic level, English Learner (EL) status, and different ability status.”

The plan also states that the school district will change its curriculum to implement equity. The plan states that the school district will “identify and utilize rubric(s) to complete a comprehensive audit of curriculum and resources through the lens of supporting diverse learners, ensure the selected rubrics are in alignment with the LSR7 Diversity, Equity and Inclusion commitments.”

The plan further states the the school district will “utilize the teacher Panorama survey tool to gather adult feedback on belonging.” The plan refers to “belonging” as meaning “diversity, inclusion, and equity.” The school district will also begin to “include bias training for hiring supervisors and/or interview panelists.” The district intends to additionally “review and maintain the public dashboard of hiring demographics/data.”

A major goal of the improvement plan is to “embed culturally relevant pedagogy into the curriculum (standards and resources), instruction, and professional development.” The phrases “culturally relevant” and “culturally responsive” are often used to describe a method of teaching that includes the race and ethnicity of students as part of the lessons taught in classrooms. From 2021 to 2024, the school district intends to “train staff on culturally relevant pedagogy.”

The school district has an “Equity Policy” that the Board of Education updated on December 8, 2021. The policy explains that the school district will embrace the idea of equity and further states:

Educational equity involves the intentional allocation of resources, instruction, and opportunities according to need. We recognize that based on factors including, but not limited to, citizenship status, disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity (including gender expression), language, mental and physical ability, national origin, race, sexual orientation, and/or socio-economic status our students may be deprived of equitable educational opportunities.

The policy then explains how the school district will “promote equitable educational experiences” for students. This includes mandating that staff participate in “equity training.” The policy lists what the school district will do to promote equity:

• Systematically gathering and using a broad range of data and stakeholder feedback to enhance equitable educational opportunities
• Providing frequent, formative, growth-oriented feedback that affirms high academic expectations and support for each student through differentiated educational opportunities
• Families, students, and staff working together to improve student learning through the evaluation and sharing of information and resources
• Representing, affirming, and supporting students and staff identities to create authentic belonging and to proactively dispel stereotypes
• Continually evaluating hiring practices, and the recruitment and retention of a diverse workforce
• Building the individual and collective efficacy of staff through mandatory, continuous, equity training while supporting their personal well-being

The school district also has a document titled “LSR7 Beliefs and Commitments.” The document states that the school district’s “efforts, structures, resources and people align around a clear, district-wide vision of equitable learning and development and a shared understanding of why and how this drives everyone’s work.” The document states that the school district will commit to “representing, affirming, and supporting students and staff identities to create authentic belonging and to proactively dispel stereotypes” and to “systematically using a broad range of disaggregated quantitative and qualitative data to enhance equitable opportunity, experience, and success.”

The school district’s website has an equity page titled “Belonging.” The page states that the school district’s “efforts, structures, resources and people align around a clear, district-wide vision of equitable learning and development and a shared understanding of why and how this drives everyone’s work.” The page then further explains that the district’s equity policy “reflects our expectations to provide an equitable education for every student and our LSR7 Beliefs and Commitments outline our vision.”

The school district’s website has a “Portrait of a Graduate” that promotes teaching students to embrace the ideas of equity by the time they graduate. The school district states that “our graduates” will “contribute globally.” A student’s ability to “contribute globally” includes the following “characteristics”:

• Appreciation for Diversity
• Artistic and Cultural Appreciation
• Global Awareness
• Representing diverse cultures, religions, and lifestyles in a spirit of mutual respect, and open dialogue in personal, work, and community contexts
• Actively valuing equity
• Participating in global citizenship

The school district appears to have a focus in its social studies curriculum for kindergartners on the identity of students. Kindergartners will learn to “describe cultural characteristics of your family and class members including language, celebrations, customs, holidays, artistic expression, food, dress, and traditions.”

The school district’s website has a page promoting “Mental Wellness.” This page links to a document labeled “Community Resources.” One section in the “Community Resources” document is titled “LGBTQIA.” In this section, the document provides resources for transgender students. One resource links to the organization GLSEN.

GLSEN is an organization known for promoting LGBTQ issues to young children. GLSEN states on its website that “while many LGBTQ+-inclusive school supports begin in middle or high school, it is critical for elementary schools to establish a foundation of respect and understanding for all people.” The organization has also appeared to show support for children taking “hormone replacement therapy” to transition to another gender:

Upon birth, we are typically categorized into one of two genders (boy or girl) depending on how our genitals are read. Throughout our lives, however, our many bodily characteristics work together to create a unique path of development, causing some of us to grow really tall, and others to remain short, or some of us to grow hair under our armpits and legs, while others remain bare. While this development often happens on its own during puberty, this change can also be administered through medicine, such as hormone replacement therapy. Since our society often conflates our bodies (or genitalia) with our gender identity, it is critical that we allow space for people to self-identify.

Another organization listed on the school district’s “Community Resources” document is “The Transgender Institute.” The organization’s website has a “services” page that states it offers “individual therapy for [female-to-male] and [male-to-female] adults, teens, and children.” The organization also offers “vocal feminization services in both group and individual settings,” a “feminine immersion program,” a “mentoring program” for “children, teens, and adults,” and “referrals and letters” to “endocrinologists, psychiatrists, general practitioners and surgeons.” The organization additionally has a “FAQ” page that asks: “Do you work with small children and teens?” The organization responds: “We work across the entire age spectrum.”

The school district’s website has a page titled “Legislative Advocacy.” This page links to a document labeled “2022 Legislative Platform.” The school district states that it will “support legislation that promotes equitable and inclusive educational opportunities in service to our diverse learners.” The school district also supports the legislative issue of having “authority” over “curriculum and instruction materials” and “professional development.”

The school district also has an “Assistant Superintendent of Equity and Student Services.”

The school district promotes “Dignity, Inclusion, and Belonging Teams” online. The school district states that “staff, parents and students have formed Dignity, Inclusion and Belonging teams in Lee’s Summit R-7 Schools.” These teams were planned to meet “three times during the 2021-22 school year to provide input on R-7 efforts to promote inclusion and belonging throughout our district.” The district further states that these groups will “focus on school specific action plans to build belonging and a culture of dignity in our district and examine Board Policy ACIB and its impacts.”

The school district also promotes “Team LS” online. The school district states that the team “is a representative group of employees who work to provide the best possible work environment for LSR7 employees” and that the team meets several times a year. This team advocates for “promoting caring, safe, equitable, and enriching work environments.”

On June 19, 2019, the American School & University magazine reported that the school district’s Board of Education “voted to hire a consultant to provide racial equity training for teachers and district staff.” The news outlet reported that the Board of Education “approved $97,000 worth of training for a year, with an option for it to continue for three additional years.”

On August 5, 2019, KMBC News reported that the school district had plans to “hold its back-to-school assembly at a local church.” The school district picked the church because “it was free and large enough to hold the district’s 2,200 employees.” However, the school district canceled the plan to hold the meeting at the church after “teachers organized a protest against holding the assembly” due to the church’s beliefs on homosexuality. KMBC News reported that “teachers in the district planned to wear rainbow shirts and gay pride stickers.”