Better scores move city schools off ‘improvement status’ list
By Bobbi Mlynar
Thursday, July 23, 2009
The Emporia school district will be officially off “improvement status” after the state verifies scores on the annual assessment tests in reading and mathematics.
District Superintendent John Heim announced the change during the board of education meeting Wednesday, in a report on the preliminary Adequate Yearly Progress results. The district needed to meet required results for two consecutive years in order to be released from improvement status.
The board also voted 6-0 to approve publishing the proposed budget for 2009-2010, and will hold a public hearing on the budget at 6 p.m. Aug. 5 in Mary Herbert Education Center. Board member Angie Schreiber was out of town at a school board training session and was unable to attend the meeting.
Heim told the board that AYP tallies have improved steadily since testing began in 2002.
AYP goals and remedies are part of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which requires 100 percent of students nationwide to be proficient in reading and math by 2014.
In 2002, 51.8 percent of the “all student” group was proficient in mathematics and 55 percent in reading. In 2009, 80.9 percent of that group was proficient in math and 82.7 percent in reading.
Heim said he was pleased about the continuing improvement; it is unusual, he said, in a district that is rife with English Language Learners, low socio-economic students, and other subgroups that are at-risk.
“We have a 50 percent increase in the number of low-income students in Emporia,” Heim said, explaining the demographic makeup of the city.
When the tests began, about 28 percent of students were classified as “Hispanic or other.” That figure has jumped to more than 50 percent of the students in the 2008-09 school year.
The most dramatic change in demographic makeup came in the English Language Learners subgroup. Heim said that the percentage of ESL students has risen from 7 percent to 30 percent.
In most instances, those subgroups and others tend to score lower on assessment tests and affect AYP results. Emporia’s experience has been atypical, he said.
“In fact, what we’ve seen is the opposite,” Heim told the board.
ELL student scores, tallied separately since 2003, have risen from 39.2 percent proficiency to 75.3 percent in math and from 29.4 percent to 72.4 percent in reading.
Heim said that has been achieved through a strong core curriculum, diagnostic assessments and a host of strategies that involve coaches, collaborations, and other planned responses.
“Our interventions with kids are not haphazard any more,” he said, praising the teaching staff for its execution of the strategies. “We’ve done a lot of good things with the resources that were provided.”
During that time, he said, teacher salaries were raised appreciably, moving the Emporia district pay rates from the bottom third of state districts to approximately No. 40 of 308 districts in Kansas.
Heim said that his favorite graph of the many shown Wednesday evening was one showing a significant decline in the number of students in the “warning” category and an increase in the number of students who ranked “exemplary” on the tests.
This year, 10 percent of students were in academic warning and 20 percent were considered exemplary.
According to documents provided to board members, Lowther South Intermediate School now is on the “watch list” for not making AYP in reading; Lowther North also is on the watch list, for not achieving AYP in math.
Emporia Middle School also did not make AYP in math.
EMS is in the third year of improvement status, and a new corrective action plan is required. It will be presented to the board for approval in October, then submitted to the Kansas State Department of Education.
The board approved publishing the “Option B” budget in preparation for final approval of the budget in August.
The options were discussed during a workshop Monday evening, and were reported in Tuesday’s Gazette.
The estimated budget for the coming school year is $30,740,784.
The audited budget for the 2008-09 school year totaled $32,457,480.
Money from state and federal sources to supplement the district budget varies from year to year.
kseyetie (anonymous) says...
GOOD JOB, Dr. Heim, supervisors and ALL the teachers who are working so hard to serve Emporia's children.
July 27, 2009 at 12:05 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
seriouslyfolks (anonymous) says...
Hopefully involved parents had a little somethin' somethin' to do with that too. Me and the wife certainly do what we can with our offspring. We aint professionals paid by the government or nuttin' but we love em so we try to learn em good. Parents are still supposed to be involved aint we?
Seriously R. Folks
learnin' my little folks as bestas I kin
July 27, 2009 at 9:08 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )