PARKERSBURG - Officials say the spring's WESTEST 2 results highlight areas of concern for Wood County Schools.
Superintendent Bill Niday told Wood County Board of Education members Tuesday a drop in test scores had been expected, but he still was "disappointed" in some areas of the district's performance.
Twenty-two schools in Wood County made adequate yearly progress (AYP) for the 2008-09 school year, while five did not. The district overall fell short of AYP in two main areas: Reading for middle school low-socioeconomic (low-SES) students and in both reading and math for special education students across the board.
Niday said while school systems throughout the state and nation have struggled with improving special education scores, he was surprised by the number of schools which saw declines in low-SES scores.
"I didn't anticipate seeing as large a gap as we have between the all category and the low-SES students," Niday said. "It is certainly something we've got to take a much harder look at to see how we can reduce that gap."
One factor in the lower scores for some schools, Niday said, was a district grade shift, which moved ninth-graders into the high schools and sixth-graders into the middle schools.
The federal No Child Left Behind legislation allows states to set a cell-size limit on subgroups, meaning any group lower than the limit would not be counted as a subgroup. The idea is to prevent a "group" of one or two students from resulting in an entire school or district not making AYP.
In West Virginia the cell-size limit is 50.
"For the middle schools, they now are being tested in all three grades, not just two grades, so in many cases that caused them to have a special education cell size of more than 50," Niday said. "Almost none of the schools that had a cell size of more than 50 were able to make AYP in special education."
Niday said cell size definitely was a factor for VanDevender Middle School, which would have been removed from school improvement status this year if it had made AYP in its special education subgroup. The middle school has shown improvement in all areas each year, but has struggled to generate enough improvement among its special education students to meet the benchmarks.
However, Niday said special education cell size does not explain the drops in low-SES scores at schools such at Blennerhassett Middle, which showed only 34.1 percent and 34.68 percent of its low-SES students proficient in math and reading respectively.
Franklin Elementary Center is another school which has struggled with declining test scores. Franklin received the lowest marks in reading/English language of any school in the state for the 2008-09 school year. Franklin also was among the bottom 15 schools in mathematics among the 657 West Virginia schools which took the exam.
Only 31.37 percent of Franklin's students tested at or above proficiency in reading, while 37.25 percent tested at or above proficiency in math.
"Nobody is pleased with those test results," Niday said.
Changes already have been made at the school, including a new principal. Franklin is in its second year of school improvement, undertaking new initiatives to help bolster both the staff and students and working hard with an in-house curriculum specialist.
"I'm optimistic the improvement model they have in place now is going to lead to a positive change," Niday said.
Niday said he plans to present at the Wood County Board of Education's Sept. 22 meeting a more in-depth analysis of the test scores and what they mean for individual schools.
"We know the numbers. Now we need to know what the numbers are saying to us," Niday said.
