ECISD meets AYP goal

Four of ECISD’s 38 campuses missed the federal Adequate Yearly Progress, the Texas Education Agency reported Tuesday.

TEA officials released final AYP evaluation ratings for the Ector County Independent School District and districts across the state on the agency’s website Tuesday.

According to the results, Odessa High, Permian High, the Career Center and Ector Junior High missed AYP goals.

AYP — which is separate from the yearly school report card that names schools academically acceptable or not — is measured based on various aspects of campus level instruction. As a district, ECISD met AYP goals.

However, several schools missed meeting the results. But there are plans in place to address the shortcomings, administrators said.

Accountability provisions in the federal No Child Left Behind Act determine if public schools, school districts and the state meet AYP each year based on particular criteria.

Three measures make up a rating at the high school and district levels: reading/language arts, math and graduation rate. According to the TEA, elementary and junior highs are evaluated based on attendance rate.

If a campus, district or state doesn’t meet AYP for two consecutive years then it would have to add corrective actions, supplemental education services or other requirements.

At OHS, principal Ron Leach said the school’s attendance has been below the average required for taking the test.

According to the results, the reading participation declined this year, and the performance in math lagged at 56 percent of meeting the standard.

Leach said he and his staff have been looking into offering more tutoring and giving more work in the TAKS-related area where identified students need help.

Also, it’s important to get parents to understand what the results mean and how their children need to be in attendance on TAKS days and throughout the school year.

“We’re trying to be more proactive and try to do some more things to let our parents know what’s going on,” Leach said.

At the elementary level, Wendy Hines said all campuses met AYP goals and most of that is due to successfully addressing the needs of individual students. The 25 elementaries also made AYP goals last year, she said.

At the elementary campus level, schools are providing tutoring services, small group instruction and identifying the individual needs of students in an effort to meet AYP goals.

“It’s very important,” she said. “It’s associated with our Title I funding.”

Hines said the district receives funding for its accelerated math and reading instruction and tutoring through Title I.

At the secondary level, Permian vice principal Shelia Stevenson said Permian missed AYP goals this year due to Hispanic, economically disadvantaged math scores and 10th grade special education student participation results.

“We have to locate the gaps,” Stevenson said. “We have to locate all of those students who didn’t meet the standards in math in those three groups.”

The school recently implemented a technical assistance team to help raise TAKS scores for 2007-’08 due to black student subgroup 2006-’07 scores in math, she said.

With the technical assistance team, Region 18 representatives have been working to train math teachers at the school, she said.

In addition to that, to address AYP and other performance targets, campus administrators will be monitoring teacher instruction and lesson plans, Stevenson said.

The campus administrators and teachers are working closely with the campus improvement team and working off of the campus improvement plan, she said.

All students will be given benchmark testing, daily vocabulary words and questions of the day related to TAKS math questions.

“We’ve got to attain those performance targets,” Stevenson said.

>> Odessa High: Missed AYP in reading (participation) and math (performance).

>> Permian High: Missed AYP in math (performance and participation).

>> Career Center: Missed AYP in math (performance and participation) and graduation rate.

>> Ector Junior High: Missed AYP in reading (performance) and math (performance).

All other Ector County schools met the AYP except Alternative Education Center, Carver Early Education and Lamar Early Education, which are not evaluated for the AYP.