When the Department of Public Instruction released its annual report cards on the performance of Wisconsin schools, Clintonville’s schools received a meets expectations designation.
The report cards show how well school districts and individual schools are meeting state expectations for student achievement in reading and math, preparing students for college and careers, and closing student achievement gaps.
The Clintonville School District’s overall accountability rating for the 2013-14 school year is 66.5, which is in the meets expectations category.
The overall ratings for each of its schools are:
• 70.4 (meets expectations) for Longfellow Elementary School.
• 67.8 (meets expectations) for Clintonville Middle School.
• 68.0 (meets expectations) for Clintonville High School.
“We’re pretty solid in the meets expectations rating area,” Clintonville District Administrator Tom O’Toole told the Clintonville School Board at its meeting, Monday, Sept. 22.
School board member Jim Dins said the results show that the Clintonville schools are above the state average for student growth in math and reading.
“That’s what we strive for,” O’Toole said.
O’Toole acknowledged that the measurements will be changing because the testing will be changing.
Amy Bindas, director of teaching and learning for the Clintonville School District, said in a follow-up interview that when the district interprets the results it looks at the percent of students who are proficient or advanced.
“We always are cautiously optimistic when we improve student achievement and take a pretty hard look at ourselves when achievement decreases,” she said.
She said the results show that the elementary school students improved significantly in reading and math from the previous year.
“We are attributing that to a laser focus, especially in math, on content standards and math strategies,” Bindas said. “We have refocused our professional development to be more of a coaching model so after training, coaches go in and work with teachers to ensure fidelity of implementation, meaning that the curriculum we have selected is being taught in the manner it was written.”
A couple of years ago, the district took steps to improve low WKCE test scores, Bindas said. At that time, the district said improved scores wouldn’t happen overnight, as improved results take time.
“Since that time we’ve grown over six percentage points in proficient and advanced at the elementary school in reading,” Bindas said. “We’ve grown 12.7 percentage points in math. That’s huge growth.
“It’s been steadily growing and that’s the first level you’re going to see that impact.”
Bindas said the school report card is used along with other assessments done by the district to monitor student growth.
“It’s an important data point that we use at the beginning of the year. We call it a data dig and we set a lot of our learning goals on what the data shows,” Bindas said.