At the October 2022 Board of Education meeting, the board adopted a new Post-Secondary Readiness policy (IHC). With this action, the Board of Education included the charge for Gwinnett County Public Schools to develop and implement writing assessments. This new policy supports our community’s shared vision for our Portrait of a Graduate. This vision articulates the skills, competencies, and attitudes our community believes are vital for students to possess when they graduate from GCPS, including the critical thinking needed for effective written communication. Additionally, this new assessment program, named Gwinnett Writes, is a key improvement to our Balanced Assessment Program as it will allow GCPS to monitor and assess writing skills for each and every student as they learn to write in elementary school and use writing with increasing fluency for learning in middle and high school courses.  

During the 2022-2023 school year, the district developed a multi-year implementation plan that will begin with field testing in 6th and 10th grades in the 2023-2024 school year. Once fully implemented, GCPS will administer a summative writing assessment to students in grades 3rd-7th as well as in 9th and 10th grades, and we will provide formative writing resources and prompts to support teachers’ inclusion into instructional lessons. Table 1 represents the multi-year implementation plan for writing assessments, which includes a year of field testing when each school will engage in low-stakes implementation prior to full implementation.