Two of the three Madison County schools that missed Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) are expected to shed themselves of that label.
With CRCT retakes calculated, Madison County Middle School (MCMS) and Danielsville Elementary School (DES) should both make AYP now.
School leaders were excited, but didn’t want to revel too early since those results come from a “pending report.”
“We have some tentative, very good news,” county schools superintendent Dr. Mitch McGhee said at Monday night’s Madison County Board of Education (BOE) meeting.
That would leave Madison County High School as the only school in the system not meeting AYP this year.
Adequate Yearly Progress is a set of targets in areas such as attendance, test performance and graduation rate which schools must meet under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
Not only must schools meet these marks, certain student subgroups within each school must meet them as well.
Schools that miss AYP in multiple consecutive years are subject to consequences.
All students are expected to be proficient in all areas by 2014.
The principals of Danielsville Elementary, Madison County Middle School and Madison County High School all attended Tuesday night’s school board meeting and discussed strategies to meet AYP in the future.
Though DES principal Angie Waggoner and MCMS principal Matt Boggs were happy to hear that their campuses will likely make the AYP cut, both made it clear they aren’t satisfied with just getting by.
“In our mind, that’s kind of a public reprieve, but I just want to assure you, as I have assured my faculty, that being barely adequate is not satisfactory,” Waggoner said.
She said her staff will continue with the plans formulated when it thought Danielsville Elementary had not made AYP.
Boggs echoed those statements.
“While we’re excited that, preliminarily, that the middle school has reached AYP, for my staff and myself, I don’t think that’s adequate,” he said. “We certainly set our goals much higher than that.”
New MCHS principal Dr. Tommy Craft offered a detailed presentation of his plans to have his school meet AYP.
Craft noted the difficulties in making AYP at the high school level — more student subgroups, higher percentages of students having to make “annual measurable objectives” — but said he wasn’t making excuses.
Craft said teachers ultimately can’t be satisfied until their student succeeds.
“Improvement issues beyond that are really useless, so my emphasis I feel like, this year, is to embrace and nurture that commitment among teachers,” he said.
The initial AYP reports — before retests — were released back in July.
Danielsville Elementary initially didn’t make AYP marks in CRCT math among economically disadvantaged students. Meanwhile, Madison County Middle School didn’t make CRCT math targets among black students and in reading-English Language Arts among students with disabilities.
Madison County High School missed AYP in math, overall, and in the students with disabilities and economically disadvantaged subgroups. It also missed in reading-English/language arts among students with disabilities and the economically disadvantaged.
The school also didn’t show an improved graduation rate, which also caused MCHS to miss AYP.
