Standard of Excellence
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
By Bobbi Mlynar
mlynar@emporiagazette.com
Superintendent Steve Mollach was a little apprehensive talking about the preliminary Adequate Yearly Progress scores in North Lyon County school district in October. It wasn’t that the scores were bad.
The scores were so good that Mollach wanted to wait until all of the appeals and adjustments had been done statewide, to make certain the final figures were the same as the preliminary ones had been.
“I think we blew them out of the water,” Mollach said at the time.
When the final tallies came in this month, he saw that he was right.
The district as a whole scored 25.7 percentage points higher than the goal set by the Kansas State Department of Education for reading and 35.6 percentage points higher than the KSDE goal for mathematics.
North Lyon County also received Standard of Excellence ratings for all four buildings — Admire, Americus, Reading and Northern Heights High School — and Standards of Excellence for 14 specific classrooms within the district.
Standard of Excellence ranking is defined by weighted criteria, based on five levels of performance: “Exemplary,” “Exceeds Standard,” “Approaches Standard,” “Meets Standard,” and “Academic Warning.” The rankings are based on different formulas for grade levels.
“We were very pleased with our scores this year,” said Becky Clopton, school improvement coordinator. “It’s always nice when you know how hard everybody’s working, and you reap the benefits of it. That’s what everybody’s working for.”
All of the district’s subgroups also achieved AYP expectations.
The district has subgroups in free and reduced-price lunch students, special education and ethnicity. A subgroup is created when there are 30 or more students in a group designated as a potential subgroup by the state.
Clopton said the district had reached its goals with cooperation of teachers and staff, and solid support from its board of education. The district has an improvement plan, and the individual buildings have improvement plans as well.
“I would think the biggest thing is a coordinated effort of everyone to make things happen,” Clopton said. “We do our best to involve all teachers, not just a committee that figures out what our figures are showing.
“You get them involved to dig deep to see what’s happening.”
The district also holds a summer academy, with a large percentage of teachers present.
“We use that time to go through our state assessment data to determine our areas of strengths and weaknesses,” she said. “... You have to pick out your lowest areas and that is what you focus on, and the other areas will be pulled up because of it.”
The results of the assessments and the direction of the improvement plans determine what topics will be dealt with during in-services for teachers during the school year.
Clopton said the district also has a “very solid” program for at-risk students to evaluate needs and, utilizing paraprofessionals, to make sure they are receiving the help they need.
An on-line Academy of Reading is available for students who need a “little extra boost” in reading, she said.
“Our board of education also has a goal that all of our first- and second-graders be on grade level by the time they leave first and second grade,” Clopton said of the reading goals.
The board, she said, has provided the district with up-to-date technology and access to it. Students are able to take tests on-line and to see the results and deal with them immediately.
“Our board of education has been very good when we’ve come to them asking for funding for certain programs,” she said.
The board provides the ability to use Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) testing as a supplement to the AYP tests. The MAP tests can be given up to four times a year for grades two through 11.
“Once we give the tests, we have immediate results because it’s on-line. Teachers go through the data. It’s used to drive the instruction just as the state assessment does,” Clopton said. “You can’t rely on just one day of the year for testing” to give accurate results.
When the state tests are given in the spring, again with immediate access to results, teachers use the results to give the students any additional or supplemental instruction needed.
“They jump on it right away and help out next year’s teachers,” she said. “Our teachers work hard, and the kids take the tests seriously, for the most part.”