CLEARFIELD – NCLB, AYP, PSSAs, these days, school districts are full of alphabet soup.
The Clearfield Area School District recently heard that their latest report on No Child Left Behind (there’s the NCLB) shows that there is good news and bad news for the district, according to Bruce Nicolls, director of curriculum and instruction.
The good news, he said, is: “We have been improving the last couple years.”
Participation on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment test, one of the yardsticks used in measuring compliance with NCLB legislation, is at nearly 100 percent. The suggested participation rate is 95 percent or higher.
Attendance is at about 95 percent, with the suggested attendance rate at 90 percent. And Clearfield’s graduation rate remains at about 85 percent to 92 percent, well above the suggested rate of 80 percent.
The bad news, Nicolls said, is that AYP, or adequate yearly progress, (ensuring that all students have adequate math and reading skills) is not being met.
Right now, the high school is marked for improvement.
The high school has until Nov. 15 to put together an improvement plan. The outline must then go before the Central Intermediate Unit and the school board before it is sent to the Pennsylvania Department of Education.
One area that will be closely monitored is the performance of low-income students in math. Nicolls said there are about 100 students classified as low-income in each grade at the high school who take math.
Being on the list for school improvement isn’t altogether a bad thing, Nicolls said.
“It seems that sometimes hen you get on one of those lists, funds come your way.”
Just last year, the district received $90,000 for tutoring.
But, that doesn’t mean the district is out of the woods, yet.
If AYP is not met next year, the school will be put on a second school improvement plan. Additional tutoring will be added, and then corrective actions will be made with regards to curriculum. If AYP is still not met, the school would enter a restructuring phase with staff members being shuffled and the school being required to reorganize as a charter school.
“The options at that point become fairly serious,” Nicolls said.
The high school was the only one of the six schools in the district that did not make AYP.