Topeka ? The U.S. Department of Education announced Thursday that it has given Kansas a one-year extension on its waiver from requirements of the No Child Left Behind law and removed the state from the list of those at “high risk” of having their waivers revoked and losing federal funds.

“We are pleased that the USDE approved our waiver, but we’re even more pleased that we have been able to gain their support for the unique approach Kansas is taking to using student growth in teacher and leader evaluations,” said Brad Neuenswander, interim Kansas Education Commissioner.

Under NCLB, all states were supposed to demonstrate by this year that 100 percent of their students were scoring proficient or better on state reading and math assessments by 2014, or risk losing their federal funds.

That law was one of the first major domestic policy initiatives of former President George W. Bush, who signed it into law in 2001. It was scheduled for renewal in 2007, but to this date, Congress has not passed a reauthorization bill.

As the deadline for achieving 100-percent proficiency neared, the Obama administration began offering states waivers from the law, on the condition that they adopt other education reforms that the new administration preferred. Chief among those was a requirement to establish new teacher evaluation methods that would use student test scores as a “significant” factor.

That has proved difficult in Kansas, where evaluation systems are negotiated locally between school boards and their teachers. The Kansas State Department of Education developed one system known as KEEP, the Kansas Educator Evaluation Protocol, that districts may use if they choose. But some districts, including Lawrence, have adopted their own.

During the last round of contract negotiations in Lawrence, both the district and teachers expressed frustration over the new evaluations. Among their concerns is the fact that test scores will be used to evaluate early elementary teachers — kindergarten through second grade — even though students don’t start taking the tests until third grade.

At the secondary level, teachers in subjects such as music, physical education and art were frustrated that they’ll be evaluated on the basis of how students perform in other subjects that they don’t teach.

Under terms of the original waiver, the use of student test scores as part of evaluations was supposed to be pilot-tested last year, and fully in effect by this school year. But Kansas officials insisted they would not move that quickly, mainly because the state was also implementing the new Common Core reading and math standards and a new testing system to go along with them.

As a result, the federal agency put Kansas on a list last year of states at “high risk” of losing their waivers.

Although many districts, including Lawrence, have started pilot-testing the new systems that include student growth this year, those evaluations won’t be used as the basis for promotions or firing decisions until the 2017-2018 school year.

“We had concerns about the timeline for incorporating student growth measures into the evaluation process as well as the extent to which those measures should influence the evaluation,” Neuenswander said. “The USDE listened to our concerns and ideas and we were able to win their approval for our model.”