The Caverna school district overall met 4 of 10 target goals or 40 percent in NCLB results. The district did not meet AYP in reading or math.
Caverna Elementary School met 9 of 10 targets for 90 percent and made AYP in math, but not reading. Caverna Middle School only met 4 of 10 targets for 40 percent and did not make AYP in reading or math. Caverna High School met all 9 of 9 targets for 100 percent and met AYP in both reading and math.
In comparison, last year CES met 4 of 10 targets, CMS met 10 of 10 targets and CHS met 7 of 10 targets. Both the elementary and high school improved this year, but the middle school showed a marked decline.
Superintendent Sam Dick was encouraged by the results at the elementary and high schools. He thought the middle school numbers could be misleading.
“As noted, CES made 90 percent of the goals. This is a great improvement over the 40 percent the year before. We are very pleased with the improvements that the elementary school made in reading, but we are not satisfied with the overall results,” he said. “CES was considered to be in safe harbor in our overall reading and free and reduced reading because of the improvements that we made. We did not make goal, but reached safe harbor by reducing the number of students who performed below proficient by 10 percent. We are extremely pleased with our math results (at CES). We increased our number of proficient students by 20 percent over the previous year. We met the benchmark in all subpopulations in math.”
The number of apprentice versus proficient/distinguished students affected results at the middle school, according to Dick.
“While the middle school met only 40 percent of the goals, the scores are misleading,” he said. “As we examined our individual student scores, we found that we had 71 percent of our students performing at apprentice high and higher. In reading, the percentage of students performing at apprentice high or higher was 74 percent. The reason we fell dealt with the number of students around the apprentice high and proficient level. Compared to last year, we had a higher number of apprentice high than proficient/distinguished students. This kept us from making goal.”
Results at the high school improved significantly to last year.
“We are extremely pleased with the performance at the high school. They met 10 out of 10 goals. This is phenomenal considering that high schools nationwide traditionally have had a difficult time meeting AYP,” Dick said. “As we noted in a previous article on the CCR, there is a different set of skills needed than that for the NCLB. This can be seen in the discrepancy between our CCR scores (which were low) and our NCLB scores where we met goal.”
After struggling for several years, CHS achieved AYP this year along with other increases.
“The data released this week shows that Caverna High School is making progress in every area that was assessed last year. This is the first time in five years that the high school has met AYP. Scores for last year’s junior class showed marked advances. Math scores tripled and social studies saw an 11-point increase in the percentage of students scoring proficient and distinguished. Reading increased a total of nine points increasing our scores to 66.67, ranking us among the top schools in our area,” Dick said.