School Progress Evident (SD)

July 27, 2010

Graduation and attendance rates slipped last year in the Sioux Falls School District, but more schools made academic progress in math and reading.

For the first time in four years, Lincoln High School made academic progress, the only city public high school to do so. In addition, some schools in the city’s poorest neighborhoods also made improvements.

"We’ve just been going great guns at it, especially our special ed teachers. Our special ed teachers and everybody really went after it," said Lincoln Principal Val Fox.

The district released its 2010 No Child Left Behind report card Monday, one day before the state Department of Education was to publish Dakota STEP test scores from every public school.

The high-stakes national testing standards require districts to implement changes and improvements if schools fail to make enough progress in math or reading. Schools that don’t measure up are put on alert and then enter into the school improvement process. If a school consistently fails, parents may enroll their kids in another school at no expense.

Superintendent Pam Homan said a large number of flu absences probably are to blame for the district’s K-8 attendance rate falling from 96 percent to 95 percent.

The graduation rate also fell in the past year, from 86 percent to 85 percent. Homan noted that students who tak e more than four years to finish high school are counted as dropouts, as were the 24 students who completed a new in-school GED program last year.

"To me, they’re not failures," she said.

Of the district’s 34 schools, 20 made "adequate yearly progress" in the past year – three more than the year before. That means that overall and in as many as eight subgroups, students met benchmarks on state math and reading tests.

But making AYP was easier this year for many schools because of new federal rules that don’t hold schools accountable unless they have at least 25 students in a subgroup, such as Hispanic or economically disadvantaged; the old minimum number was 10.

The changes benefited as many as three Sioux Falls schools which made AYP this year after failing to do so last year. Lincoln did not have to count its Hispanic students, Garfield Elementary its Native Americans and Renberg its students with disabilities.

Schools targeted for improvement can get off that list with consecutive years of clean NCLB report cards. In addition to Lincoln, Renberg and Garfield, four other buildings will have the chance to improve their status next year: Lowell, Hawthorne and Jefferson elementaries and Memorial Middle School.

Hawthorne met math and reading benchmarks for all seven of its subgroups, a first for the school since the accountability system began in 2001.

Three schools went backward this year, despite having fewer categories to satisfy. Oscar Howe Elementary and Roosevelt and Washington high schools all failed to make AYP after succeeding in 2009. WHS met cut scores in all 14 math and reading cells last year but only five of 10 this year.

Special education was a dark spot at several schools in the district. At the 22 schools with at least 25 special education students, eight failed to meet AYP in math and six in reading.

Fox said Lincoln’s results are encouraging after all the hard work.

"When you have something like this come up, I think that kind of reenergizes everybody," she said.

Today, the district sees how it stacked up against the rest of the state.