Schools improve on State Report Card

DAVE MOSIER/independent editor

All three Van Wert County school districts saw improvements on the 2016-17 State Report Cards released on Thursday — although some improvements were negated by implementation of higher standards this year — and all three also saw areas where improvements can be made.

The test measures a school district’s results in six categories: Achievement, which includes a performance index and how many state indicators are met; Gap Closing, how well schools are meeting the performance expectations for their most vulnerable populations of students in English/language arts, math, and graduation rate; K-3 Literacy, which measures improvements in struggling students’ reading skills; Progress, which measures overall student improvement, as well as improvements in three subcategories — gifted students, students in the lowest 20 percent of a class, and students with disabilities; Graduation Rates; and Prepared for Success, which measures how well students are prepared to move on to college and the workforce after high school graduation.

The state report card program has frustrated educators the past few years because standards change from year to year, while data from the previous year has come too late to incorporate the changes into the next year’s curriculum.

Van Wert Interim Superintendent Staci Kaufman said that, for the first time in several years, school districts received testing and other data from last year — although some curriculum tweaks will still have to come during the school year — instead of two-year-old information, as has been the case in the past.

That’s much more helpful, Kaufmann added, particularly when state standards have change so often, which they have over the past three years.

Although the Van Wert City School District improved in several achievement areas, higher standards caused the district to regress overall on the Achievement portion of the test. Because proficiency test passage percentages were raised from 75 percent to 80 percent this past school year, Van Wert, which saw some improvements from last year in testing, still received an “F” in indicators met, rather than the “D” it earned last year, while lowering its overall grade to a “D”, rather than a “C” from last year.

Van Wert also received an “F” in Gap Closing, an area the district has struggled with since letter grades have been given out. The district also earned an “F” in Gap Closing last year.

The city schools did see a major improvement in its K-3 Literacy ranking, earning an “A” this year after getting an “F” last year. To compare, Crestview, the only other county district to receive a grade in this area (Lincolnview didn’t have enough eligible students), earned a “C” in K-3 Literacy.

After earning all “F”s in last year’s Progress category, Van Wert earned a “B” this year, as did Crestview and Lincolnview.

All three schools also earned “A”s in Graduation Rates, while Crestview and Van Wert earned “C”s in the Prepared for Success category and Lincolnview received a “D”.

Both Lincolnview and Crestview earned “C”s in the Achievement area, while Lincolnview, like Van Wert, received an “F” in the Gap Closing category. Crestview earned a “C” in Gap Closing.

Kaufman said the creation of data teams at Van Wert to study report cards results has helped the district improve in several areas, especially the K-3 Literacy category. She also noted that, in the short time she has been at Van Wert, she has been very impressed by the district’s educational initiatives.

Meanwhile, the interim superintendent said district educators would continue improvement efforts after this year’s results.

“I’m confident the Van Wert City Schools staff is prepared to study our report card results and move the district forward,” Kaufman added. “We are going to look at where we can improve, and I know that it’s in the best interest of the district to try to continually increase progress for all students.”

Lincolnview Superintendent Jeff Snyder was more positive this year about the district’s results than he was last year, largely because of lateness of last year’s State Report Card release.

“Overall, we were very satisfied in a number of areas with our results on the 2017 State of Ohio Report Card; however, in some areas we were not,” he said. “We did take into consideration that the state passage rates on all of our state achievement tests increased to a much higher mark.”

Snyder said he was proud of the Lincolnview faculty and staff and their commitment to district students, and said educators will continue to work to improve test scores.

“We are always up to the task to get batter, and we have been (focusing), and will continue to focus on providing quality and highly effective instruction in our classrooms,” he added. “We have also focused on the need to enhance, enrich, and empower our students in areas that the report card does not reflect, or even evaluate, such as school pride, a community-centered focus, serving and leading, and a career connection of employability and college readiness.”

Crestview Superintendent Mike Estes said he was “cautiously optimistic that we’re headed in the right direction, having moved up, especially in the indicators, by 10 percentage points. I think that’s a good place for us to be.”

Going forward, all three county school districts would love to see the “moving target” of state proficiency standards, as quantified in the State Report Card, stop moving. Area educators have said in the past that having a stable State Report Card program would make school districts’ task of meeting state proficiency standards much easier.