District Wide Performance Review Presented at Picayune School Board Meeting

Picayune School District’s Curriculum Director, Mary Williams, presented the iReady, Math and Reading performance review for the district’s elementary age students at Tuesday’s School Board meeting.

The iReady statistics in the review showed that 17 percent of kindergarten students were at grade level in the fall 2016, however by spring 2017, over 80 percent of kindergarteners were at grade level. By national comparisons, kindergarten was above the national average at 74 percent.

In terms of growth by grade level, all but one passed the district’s target growth of 100 percent in math, and that was third grad at 93 percent.

“Just by looking at this I would say that the only issue we have is with third grade math,” School Board member Frank Feeley said. “But I know you all are working on that.”

“It’s a weakness, we addressed our math this year and we are going to continue to address not only math but our ELA,” Williams said. “We don’t want to put ELA on the back burner and lose the momentum we’ve gained.”

The report also showed that while the other grades came close, only Kindergarten, 5th and 6th grade passed the District’s target growth benchmark in reading.

However the problem with the growth statistics, according to Williams, is that the tests were taken too early this school year, before many standards were even taught. In fact Williams stated that she believes all grades would have surpassed the target growth in reading had the tests been given at a later date. The date was set for district testing in hopes of avoiding interference with state testing, but Williams said they plan on testing later next school year.

“This is all good stuff. We know what we need to be working on,” Feeley said. “Overall, these statistics are a huge improvement in my opinion.”