The Soft Launch took place across schools in Virginia with representative demographics of students enrolled across the Commonwealth in Grades K-3. We rely on fall data for 63,076 students in kindergarten through third grade. There were 17,303 students in kindergarten, 18,340 students in first grade, 19,058 students in second grade, and 8,375 students in third grade. These students attended school in regions representative of the Commonwealth in terms of urbanicity, sociodemographics, and culture. This ensured we would examine VALLSS with a diverse student sample with respect to regional considerations such as dialects or regional accents.

Table 11 presents the number and percentage of students overall and within each grade who belonged to various demographic groups. Around 40% of the students were classified as being economically disadvantaged. There were roughly equal percentages of male and female students. Roughly half of the students were non-Hispanic white. The next largest racial/ethnic groups were Black and Hispanic students, with each making up around 16% of the sample. Only around 12% of the students in the sample were classified as being English learners.

The percentages for each grade were generally similar to the overall percentages across all students. The only exceptions were seen in the set of third-grade students. The third graders appear to have larger percentages of economically disadvantaged students and white students, and they have smaller percentages of Asian students and of students who are designated as English Learners.

Table 11.
Student Demographic Break Down for Fall Soft Launch, by Grade

Appendices 2-4 Coming Soon! 

DRAFT V1 (February, 2025)