Published: September 17, 2008 08:40 am      

Most Mineral schools in line with progress standards

All but three meet No Child Left Behind legislation; initiatives in place

KEYSER, W.Va. — All but three Mineral County schools met adequate yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind legislation, according to Superintendent of Schools Skip Hackworth.

Six of the county’s schools, however, made the grade.

Hackworth said Frankfort Middle School, Frankfort Intermediate School and Keyser Primary-Middle School were not able to meet AYP because of the makeup of the student population and the increasing difficulty in meeting the stringent standards.

“We have such a large population of special education students in all three of those schools. It’s just very difficult to meet the standards,” he said.

Parents of students attending Keyser Primary-Middle were sent a letter informing them of their right to transfer their children to another school.

“I think four or five chose to go elsewhere, and we were able to accommodate them at other schools,” Hackworth said.

“We are also offering an after-school program at KPMS to help the students.”

Neither Frankfort Middle nor Frankfort Intermediate is part of the Title I program, which provides assistance to students based on a lower income population, and were not required to offer the “school choice” option.

“It is important to point out that if a school is identified as not meeting AYP, the status should not reflect on the teachers or students,” Hackworth said.

“A school can be identified for a variety of reasons and we will make certain to assist the school as it improves its student achievement levels.”

Hackworth praised the six schools that were able to meet or exceed the AYP standards — Frankfort High School, Keyser High School, Fountain Primary, Burlington Primary, New Creek Primary and Elk Garden Primary.

“We are very proud of our administrators, teachers and students,” Hackworth said.

Wiley Ford Primary and Fort Ashby Primary were not included because they only include pre-K through second grade and testing begins at grade three. The Mineral County Alternative School and the Technical Center are not included because their students are counted in the statistics for their home schools.

All West Virginia students are required to take the West Virginia Educational Standards Test, an assessment that measures student achievement of the West Virginia Content Standards and Objectives .

AYP is determined by WESTEST scores and attendance or graduation rates.

“The standards that a school must achieve to meet AYP are increasing,” Hackworth said. “In 2007, the standard increased approximately four to six percentage points in reading and math.”

Hackworth said Mineral County students’ reading and math scores on the WESTEST continue to improve.

Mineral County’s attendance rate is 97.3 percent, with a graduation rate of 91.5 percent — compared to the statewide average of 96.4 percent attendance and 83.8 percent graduation.

Mineral County will use the recently released data to analyze students’ academic strengths and weaknesses and, in turn, develop specific improvement initiatives.

The school system has instituted the following initiatives to improve student achievement at Keyser Primary/Middle School:

• Continue the Reading First program in the primary grades and introducing the concepts to the middle grades.

• Continue using Title I teachers as academic coaches.

• After-school tutoring, including bus transportation.

• Talent Development, a reading program developed by Johns Hopkins University to assist struggling readers in the middle school grades.

• Summer teacher academies designed to provide teachers with the best research-based teaching practices.

• Ongoing professional staff development by recognized experts in the fields of reading and mathematics.

• Additional laptop computers so that teachers can access state-level educational Web sites.

• Employment of technology integration specialists.

• Tech Steps, a program designed to assess student proficiency in computer literacy.

• NovaNet, an online, standards-based program for remediation of struggling students and enrichment for higher-achieving students in core content areas at the middle school level.