Lawrence district gets passing grades

Yearly progress goal falls short for students with disabilities in three junior highs

The Lawrence school district announced Friday that it passed the federal Annual Yearly Progress goal for reading and math.

But not every school in the district gets to pull out the party hats and balloons.

Preliminary figures show three local junior high schools – South, Central and Southwest – failed to make the AYP goals in one subgroup: students with disabilities.

And that means officials at those schools are re-examining what they can do before the next test period starts in February, said Terry McEwen, the district’s director of assessment.

“We’ve been grappling with that since the school year began,” McEwen said. “We have things in place to help all students be successful.”

McEwen plans to give Lawrence’s school board a report about AYP at Monday’s board meeting, at 7 p.m. in the district’s Educational Support and Distribution Center, 110 McDonald Drive.

AYP is the federal government’s method of determining if schools are meeting the No Child Left Behind Act’s goal of having 100 percent of students proficient in reading and math by 2014.

The Kansas Department of Education plans to release a preliminary list of schools and school districts that didn’t meet AYP on Wednesday at the State Board of Education meeting in Topeka.

McEwen released the preliminary Lawrence information Friday, which shows the district met the AYP goals, overall. Final results will be released in December.

Students were tested throughout the district between March 1 and April 24 in grades three through eight and in grade 11. To meet AYP, they have to score a “proficient” or above score on the reading and math tests for their grade level.

AYP also has to be met by subgroups in a district. Subgroups are groups of 30 or more students in the following 10 categories dealing with ethnicity, income, English proficiency or special needs:

All students, students qualifying for free or reduced lunches, students with disabilities, English language learners, white students, black students, Hispanic students, Asian students, American Indian students and multi-ethnic students. Students may fall into one or more subgroup.

McEwen said the preliminary numbers show that all of the city’s schools met AYP for “all students.”

However, for the subgroup “students with disabilities” Central and South missed the mark in reading, and Southwest didn’t make it for both reading and math.

The latest figures are an improvement over the previous year, when four local schools didn’t make the AYP mark in three subgroups, McEwen said.

When a school does not meet AYP for two consecutive years it is considered “on improvement.” No Lawrence schools are “on improvement,” he said.

The “students with disabilities” subgroup, which includes 857 students in reading and 876 in math, made AYP targets in all the other schools, he said.

McEwen said that 86.4 percent of Lawrence’s schools did make AYP for both reading and math.

“So obviously, lots of things are going in the right direction,” he said. “There is just some additional work that needs to be done. We’ve got the focus in place to make sure that happens.”

The next testing period is Feb. 28 through April 16.

“Overall, the report is a credit to the community, the kids and the teachers,” said Bruce Passman, deputy superintendent. “But that doesn’t mean we rest on our laurels, because for some groups, we still have a long way to go. We’ve got to continue to focus on progress and growth for each kid. The work’s not done yet.”