Butler County schools see good APR reports

Butler County schools tested, on average, higher than the overall state in both English Language Arts and mathematics tests during the 2018-19 school year.

The state released its Annual Performance Report (APR) Thursday. The report includes data collected by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education regarding test scores, graduation rates, college and career readiness and attendance of students.

Butler County school districts report being happy with their APR while still seeing areas that could use improvement.

One of the big moves with the APR this year is that DESE did not give the schools or districts an overall score. This year, with a focus more on the data that was behind that score, DESE released statistical data and visual representations of how the district performed focusing on point totals and percentages.

When it comes to Poplar Bluff R-I, Neelyville R-IV and Twin Rivers R-X, all three saw improvement in English Language Arts and Mathematics testing for both the overall student body and subgroup averages. The data for science testing won’t be released until the end of November and the social studies area for DESE is still in field testing so it is not being factored in this year.

Twin Rivers

Twin Rivers is the only one of the three districts that tested below the state average for the general student body — the district did test above the state average for subgroups. For English Language Arts, around the state 49% of students are testing as proficient or advanced. At R-X, 44.8% are testing at the same level.

When it comes to mathematics, the state average is 42% proficient or advanced and R-X tested at 37%.

The scores were an increase from last year with a score of 39.2% in English and a score of 31.7% in math.

Superintendent Jeremy Seibert said the academic achievement metric is one that he wants to focus on improving.

“We always want to improve in all areas,” he said. “We did do better in math, but we’re still always looking to improve there. With the scores being a little lower in Language Arts, we would try to focus our remedial areas a little bit more there in that area with reading and language arts to try to bring those up.”

Seibert said the pros of the report included the district’s graduation rate, which was 100% for four-year graduation, and the attendance rate, which was 93.4% for the year. Both areas saw only minor changes from their rate last year.

In regards to DESE not realizing an overall score, Seibert said he feels confident that if there had been one, it would have been on par with last year’s score.

“Districtwide, our math scores went up, which is good,” Seibert said. “It looks to me as though if we did get a final score, it would have been in the 90s again.”

While Seibert wants to put more focus on academic achievement scores, R-I Superintendent Dr. Scott Dill and Neelyville R-IV Superintendent Debra Parish are both more focused on another standard, College and Career Readiness.

This metric looks at assessments such as the SAT as well as college credit offered through dual enrollment and advanced placement classes. It also looks at secondary placement of what percentage of students are employed, in the military or continuing their education six months after graduation.

Neelyville

Parish said the district is proud that English Language Arts and mathematics scores improved and are above the state average as well as leading the immediate area.

“We’re going to look closely at the college and career readiness,” she said. “Many of these areas, we didn’t have much growth.

“Of course, we already had fairly good scores, so that’s difficult to do with a small school. We are going to look closely at the college and career readiness, the advanced placement and the post secondary placement. We will continue to focus on academic achievement. Some of our goals this year are to increase the analysis of data.”

Neelyville started the District Continued Improvement program this year, which is focused on analyzing student data and adjusting instructional methods to reflect that information. It also allows for the school to do intervention for students who are struggling to try to get them back on track. It focuses on teacher collaboration to address these instructional methods.

Without the overall score, Parish said the district will need to just go ahead with what they’re given.

“In the past, we’ve had the APR number. We were at 100% last year, and we don’t have that number this year,” Parish said. “Most of us like to have a number, a score, to know exactly where we fall. It’s a change not to have that score. It would have been nice if we could have a 100 again. Now that it’s changed, we’ll just have to go ahead with being above the state average.”

Poplar Bluff

Dill said academic performance around the district is a highlight with it being at or above the state average. Relative to past years, he said, the district is holding steady or improving in that area. The subgroup performance ­— which includes students on free and reduced lunch, racial minorities and Individualized Educational Plan students ­­­— was an area he was particularly impressed with. The district saw greater than 5% increase for subgroup testing for both English Language Arts and mathematics testing.

Similar to Parish, Dill said R-I wants to look at the college and career readiness standard.

“There’s so many things that factor into the college and career readiness standard,” he said. “There are opportunities, I think, for us to engage the kids in some new and fresh opportunities and we’re looking at that.”

Dill said one of the nice things about the standard is that it does look at career readiness as well.

Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum Patty Robertson said the district sees their college readiness and advanced placement courses are serving the college-minded students well, but needs to work on utilizing the Technical Career Center better.

“We’re lucky. We have a community college and a technical career center. We’ve got places for all students to go, but what happens on the career side is the assessments that they take, they have to focus on one of those clusters in order to do well on those assessments,” Robertson said. “Some of the kids go there to explore different career paths and then they get thrown into an (assessment) and they’re not making a certain score. We need to figure out how to help them explore earlier so that they can do better on those assessments.”

The R-I graduation rate did decline slightly from a 91.9% four-year graduation rate for 2017-18 to 91.3% rate for 2018-19.

“There’s not much room or opportunity for growth there, but there is room to backslide a little bit,” Dill said. “Even still, our graduation rate ... those are solid numbers.”

Dill said the data is good and the accountability with APR is good, but the data is old since it comes from the year before. When it comes to assessment, the district is already locked into a cycle for the year. He said the APR is good to look at for big trends, but the district is looking at current data about current students daily to make instructional decisions.

“This is big picture kind of things,” he said.

Dill said the move allows the schools to focus more on comparing their scores to last year’s rather than to other districts.

“One of the things I like about how this data is presented to us is that we’re no longer caught up in comparison of ‘how did we do verses everyone around us,’” Dill said. “This allows us to focus our attention and our intentions where they should be, which is ‘how do we compare to us?’ That is really the heart of this work ... As long as we are engaged in a cycle of continuous improvement, we’re good.”

The full reports can be viewed at apps.dese.mo.gov/MCDS/home.