School board discusses missing federal standards

The USD 234 Board of Education received some bad news during their regular meeting Monday.

The board learned that three of Fort Scott's four schools were among 255 individual campuses in Kansas that did not meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) standards for the 2009-10 school year. Board members received building report cards and heard AYP reports from principals.

According to the Kansas State Department of Education, Eugene Ware Elementary School, Fort Scott Middle School and Fort Scott High School did not make AYP for the 2009-10 school year. USD 234 is one of 82 districts in Kansas that did not meet the standard.

Winfield Scott Elementary School Principal Billie Jo Drake, who was principal of Eugene Ware last year before the district reconfigured both elementary schools earlier this year, said last year was the first time in 10 years the school didn't show signs of improvement in AYP.

"We did not make AYP in any area," Drake said. "After 10 years in which we constantly made improvement, we're down everywhere. ... It's so much lower than any of us expected it would be."

Drake added that last year, Eugene Ware had a high concentration of special education third-grade students.

FSMS Principal Barbara Albright said her school includes a large number of students who are eligible for free and reduce price lunches, and was also affected last year by a wave of the H1N1 flu virus that kept several students home for long periods of time.

"We're very much aware of where we are and what we need to do," she said.

According to the Kansas State Department of Education website, www.ksde.org, Eugene Ware Elementary School, Fort Scott Middle School and Fort Scott High School did not make AYP during the 2009-10 school year. Last year's goals were for 81 percent of students to be proficient in reading and for 76 percent of students to be proficient in math.

For a district to meet AYP, each student group must meet or exceed the annual targets in reading and math. If a single student group does not make AYP, the entire district is labeled as not meeting AYP.

Despite performance targets that increased between 5 and 8 percent over the past year, a majority of Kansas public schools and public school districts continue to meet AYP as defined by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. According to KSDE, 211 of the state's 293 school districts met AYP requirements for the 2009-10 testing cycle, and 1,126 of the state's 1,380 public schools did the same.

AYP is a measure of a school's and district's ability to meet specified targets for student performance and participation on reading and math assessments, as well as in the areas of attendance and graduation. Performance targets must be met for the full student population, as well as for subgroups based on race and ethnicity, income level, special needs and English proficiency. Each year, the specified performance target increases, working toward a goal of having 100 percent of students meeting standards by 2014.

More than twice the number of school districts in Kansas didn't make AYP this year compared to last year. In 2009, 34 districts did not make AYP. In 2010, that number jumped to 82. In 2009, 172 individual schools did not make AYP. In 2010, that number rose to 255.

According to KSDE, USD 234 is one of 24 Title I districts in Kansas that has been identified as "on improvement" in the area of reading for one year after not making AYP in that area during the 2009-10 school year. The district cannot come off improvement until it has made AYP for two consecutive years in the identified area of improvement. Labette County, located in Altamont, is the only district in the Southeast Kansas League that is not included on the "improvement" list.