Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
State report cards on schools and school districts released last week rated Holley and Oak Heights elementary schools as “strong” and the district’s remaining schools as “satisfactory.”
Last year, Foster Elementary and Sweet Home High School were rated “strong,” while the remaining schools in the district were rated “satisfactory.”
The card showed academic improvement at all schools except Crawfordsville and Hawthorne, which declined.
Foster, SHHS and Sweet Home Junior High were rated satisfactory in attendance while Hawthorne, Oak Heights, Crawfordsville and Holley were rated “strong.”
In academic achievement, Crawfordsville, Foster, Holley, Oak Heights and SHJH were rated “strong.” SHHS and Hawthorne were rated satisfactory.
The ratings are based on formulae that include improvement in the number of students meeting or exceeding state testing benchmarks, attendance, test scores, improvement in attendance and a number of other variables to determine a composite rating.
Supt. Larry Horton said he had issues with the accuracy of some of the information on which the state based its assessment. The district found discrepancies in the number of “highly qualified” teachers in the district at several schools. The district has only one or two teachers who cannot be designated “highly qualified” in only one or two periods each.
The state also identified class sizes incorrectly in some schools, Horton said. At Holley, only one classroom was listed for the entire school.
“The overall information on the academics part was accurate,” Horton said.
That includes test results information for the district that was released last month.
The state is correcting the mistakes, Horton said, but the changes won’t affect the final results.
“Our state assessment scores say a lot more about what we’re doing than the state report cards do,” Horton said. The report cards provide information that the state believes parents want to know.
They don’t provide details, he said. For example, behavior is tied solely to attendance and does not take expulsions, suspensions or fights into account.
Last year, the district had more expulsions than any other time in its history, as far as Horton can determine, he said. That might tell a different story about behavior. At the same time, the reason the number of expulsions has increased so dramatically is because district staff are being more proactive in stopping students from using tobacco and drugs, he said.
“We were spending more time on those issues,” Horton said. The telling report will be in the trends over time rather than a single-year snapshot.
“There’s always room for improving,” he said. “Even if we had all ‘excellent’ there’d be room for improving.”
The question is always “how do we do a better job educating our kids, no matter how high the score is,” Horton said.