Finding answers
Ontario High School did not meet federal goals and its principal wants to find solutions, not make excuses
By JESSICA KELLER
ARGUS OBSERVER
Thursday, October 16, 2008 12:46 PM PDT
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| Ontario High geometry teacher Dean Solterbeck speaks to his class before students begin their assignments Tuesday afternoon at Ontario High School. |
ONTARIO — Finding a way to boost Ontario High School’s Adequate Yearly Progress scores is a top priority, but the task offers few easy solutions, OHS Principal Bret Uptmor said Tuesday.
Uptmor made his comments during a meeting of the OHS Parent Advisory Group, where he reviewed the 2007 to 2008 final Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) report.
AYP is a federal benchmark under the No Child Left Behind Act to determine how public school districts execute academically.
OHS failed to meet AYP standards during the 2007 to 2008 school year.
The AYP evaluation for each school is broken down into sub-groups. For example, an individual high school is evaluated on such items as how many economically disadvantaged students meet English/Language Arts standards or how a high school does regarding mathematics goals for all students.
OHS did not meet the 60 percent goal set for economically disadvantaged students in the English/Language Arts standards. At the same time, the school’s overall mark of 59 percent for all students meeting state mathematics benchmarks was below the minimum standard. While those statistics are troubling, Uptmor said he is concerned in the overall decline in academic growth among students and various AYP subsections. Academic growth, he said, is calculated by what percentage of students have to improve in each of the AYP categories to help them achieve the targets for reading/language arts and mathematics by the state when they take their annual standardized tests.
OHS experienced a troubling drop it in its academic growth between 2006 and the end of the 2008 school year. For example, in mathematics, 38.12 percent of all OHS 10th-grade students met state achievement/performance standards in 2006 to 2007, and 20.60 met in 2007 to 2008, for a net decline of 17.52 percent. The growth target, however, was 6.19 percent.
“The problem I see with this is we were already low in math and now we’re even lower,” Uptmor said.
Uptmor explained to the group, if enough students make net gains in meeting achievement/performance standards for a certain category to achieve the target growth rate, even if the school didn’t meet AYP in performance, it could still meet AYP for that category under a special provision allowed.
If the percentage of students declined from one school year to the next, which happened in both English/language arts and mathematics for OHS, the curve to reach academic growth success under AYP only increases. For the school to meet AYP in academic growth the next school year, more students must show significant increases in success to achieve the academic growth benchmarks.
“This is one area I look at as a determinant of how next year’s going to go,” Uptmor explained. “So I’ve got a lot of work to do.” One of the parents in the group asked how a school overcomes a dip in academic growth.
“Don’t do bad,” Uptmor said. “You have to stay very constant and stable.”
He said, one of the challenges the high school faces is how to get students to retest if they did not meet state standards on either English/language arts or mathematics on their annual tests.
He said students can take the test up to three times per year in those two categories, but at the high school, if a student does not pass, he or she is not required to take the test again, although they are offered incentives, such as entering a raffle to win a prize at the end of the school year, if they do.
“We’re looking at (extra) incentives in the building,” Uptmor said, adding the parent advisory group members were welcome to make suggestions.
Uptmor said some changes have taken place at the high school, such as the phased switch from integrated math classes, in which algebra and geometry components are taught in the same class, back to the sequential algebra, geometry, algebra II math classes, which have been determined to aid students more than the integrated classes.
In addition, the reading program to help children with their reading, writing and comprehension has been in place for a couple of years. Uptmor said, however, the high school’s site council is going to review the AYP scores very carefully and examine what processes are done now to prepare children for the state tests to see if any changes can be made to help students improve their scores.
Ontario School District Superintendent Dennis Carter said, it is easier to get younger students to retest than older students, plus, at the high school, which only has a minimum amount of computer labs, where the tests are administered online, space and time are two constraints because the computer labs are used for other purposes throughout each day in the school year, and the students have three hours to take or retake the tests.
