Longview not meeting education benchmark
Saturday, August 25, 2007 7:04 AM PDT
By Stephanie Mathieu
Printable version
E-mail this articleLongview School District is one of 30 state school districts that could face sanctions for not meeting federal learning requirements, state education officials announced Friday.
Longview School District failed to meet "Adequate Yearly Progress" guidelines outlined in the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
Specifically, the district failed to meet several targets:
• Elementary and middle school special education students performed inadequately in reading and math;
• Elementary and high school low-income students didn't meet standards in math;
• Too low a percentage of American Indian middle school students took the state's Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) exam;
• Too few high school students took the WASL, which is the state's measure of student learning.
Some individual Longview and Kelso schools also failed to meet guidelines, according to the preliminary adequate yearly progress results released Friday in Olympia. Schools and districts still can appeal their status to the federal government.
Longview now falls in the "improvement" status outlined by the No Child Left Behind Act. To get out of this category, the district will have to meet standards two years in row. However, if it fails to improve in next year's review, it will face mandatory state action to solve its shortcomings.
To make adequate yearly progress, school districts as a whole must meet as many as 111 goals, and individual schools must meet 37 goals outlined by the law. Those requirements, for example, include how well students perform on the WASL test.
Under federal law, the Longview School District must now spend 10 percent of its federal Title I, money on strategies to pull itself out of "improvement" status. Title I dollars are directed at helping schools with a high percentage of low-income students.
Ann Cavanaugh, the district's curriculum director, said the district has been using 10 percent of its Title I money and other funds to provide math and literacy coaches for students. This year, the district also will hire a specialist to help teachers bring students up to literacy and math standards. The specialist also will perform a curriculum audit, Cavanaugh said.
"She's going to look and make sure that what we're teaching is appropriate for where we want our students to go," district spokeswoman Sandy Catt said Friday.
All other Cowlitz County school districts as a whole met the adequate yearly progress requirements. However, several individual schools fell short.
In Longview, poor math performance of low-income students placed Mount Solo Middle School in "improvement" status, and the same problem kept R.A. Long High School in that status for a third consecutive year.
Kelso's Loowit High School -- an alternative school -- met all standards but remained "in improvement" status because it didn't meet the standards the previous year. It takes two years to shed the "improvement" status.
Kelso High School failed to meet adequate yearly progress requirements based on its low-income students' poor WASL scores, said Mary Beth Tack, Kelso School District's director of secondary education.
Educators in both Longview and Kelso said administrators and staff already are discussing the results.
During an all-district administrative meeting in Kelso, Tack said the discussion focused on math. "That is one of the areas we looked at very much in depth," she said.
"I can tell you we take it really seriously," Catt said of Longview's results. "Teachers were sitting around tables and talking about data. ... I think they are concerned."
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