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UPDATE 09/22/2020: Senate Bill 820 has been signed by Governor Newsom. Amongst other things this bill suspends the administration of the Physical Fitness Test (PFT) for the 2020–2021 school year. SB 820 prescribes that, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the need to comply with state and local health guidelines, the administration of the physical performance test shall be suspended for the 2020–2021 school year. Therefore, the PFT will not be required to be administered for, and the California Department of Education (CDE) will not be collecting PFT data for, the 2020–2021 school year. Although LEAs are not required by the state to administer and submit their data for the 2020–2021 PFT, LEAs have local authority in deciding how to successfully serve their students. Please review the full verbiage of the bill with experts in your district.

Updated Information:  Please review CDE's Update on COVID-19 and the Suspension of Statewide Testing to see status of Physical Fitness Testing for the 2019-20 school year.

On January 23, 2020 SJCOE held a webinar on PFT Testing for the 2019-20 administration. LEA's are required to administer the PFT to all 5th, 7th and 9th grade students this testing administration, but LEA's will not be submitting the PFT results to the state for the 2019-20 year. From this point on CDE will be collecting PFT results once every two years, in accordance with California Education Code Section 60800. LEA's, however, are still responsible for reporting aggregate results of the PFT in their annual school accountability report card.

With the LEA's inability to receive the Pass/Not Pass status for the PFT categories from the state they will need to look for another solution to populating those values. During the webinar CDE suggested that schools use the charts provided in the PFT Resources to look up and determine the Pass/Fail statuses for each of the PFT results. Unfortunately the calculations and Healthy Fitness Zone lookup tables are proprietary information created by the Cooper Institute. At this time we believe we cannot legally include this analysis within our system. We are well aware of the difficulty that the LEA's will have in populating the Pass/Not Pass statuses for each of the categories in the PFT records. We will be checking with our legal team and are in discussion with districts to see how we can aid them in ways to make population of this information easier. 

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