New Jersey Department of Education

Annual School Planning

Comprehensive Needs Assessment

The Comprehensive Needs Assessment allows school-level teams to reflect deeply on practices of the previous year and identify areas of strength, as well as areas needing focus. There are two components to a comprehensive needs assessment. The first is data analysis, including both qualitative and quantitative data, and examining trend data to determine progress over multiple years. The second component of a comprehensive needs assessment, which may be done in tandem with data analysis, is to complete a needs assessment rubric. A document of guiding questions, to support completion of the Needs Assessment, can be found in the Resources tab.

As annual school planning teams work through this process, areas of strength, as well as areas requiring focus, will begin to emerge.  The team should identify areas needing focus that could be contributing to negative data trends in preparation for the next step of the process, the Root Cause Analysis.