ShawneeDispatch.com

Preliminary results from the Kansas Department of Education show that six schools with Shawnee students did not meet Adequate Yearly Progress as mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind Law.

In the Shawnee Mission School District, Broken Arrow and Nieman elementary schools and Trailridge Middle School did not meet AYP in math and reading. Shawanoe Elementary School and Hocker Grove Middle School did not meet AYP in reading.

In the De Soto School District, Monticello Trails Middle School did not meet AYP in math.

Failure to reach AYP in these cases was a result of lagging scores in one or more subgroups, but the districts did not release the exact subgroups and their scores. Subgroups include students who are learning English or those from lower-income families.

In reading, districts strived to achieve a proficiency target of 69.5 percent for third- through eighth-graders and 65 percent for high school students. In math, the proficiency target was 66.8 percent for third- through eighth-graders and 55.7 percent for high school students.

No Child Left Behind requires standards to increase every year until 2014, when 100 percent of students must be proficient in reading and math.

Preliminary districtwide results for De Soto show that the district as a whole did make AYP with all students achieving 89 percent in reading and 86.9 percent in math. This is a 3.5 percent increase from last year in the district's reading scores and a 4.3 percent increase in the district's math scores.

Tobie Waldeck, principal at Monticello Trails, said the school has classes in place to target students who are struggling. One of them is called discovery math and it assists students with areas of weakness to get them back on track by helping them improve their skills and motivation, Waldeck said. Another class called essential skills helps students develop better note taking and study skills.

"We work as hard as we can to identify as quickly as we can students who need assistance based on test scores," Waldeck said.

Last year, Monticello Trails did not make AYP in reading, but was able to improve those scores to meet AYP this year even with increased standards in place. Waldeck said he expects the same thing to happen with math.

"Just because you don't make it doesn't mean it's not possible to fix it," he said. "It puts more focus on what we've been doing already. We've been focusing on test scores and focusing on best instructional strategies to best teach students.

"The fact is we have a great school, we have great teachers and we are all focused on student learning."

Districtwide results were not available for release from Shawnee Mission. Last year, all students in the district achieved 86.6 percent in reading and 83.8 percent in math. However, students with disabilities, English language learners and Hispanic students did not meet standards in reading.

Gillian Chapman, associate superintendent of educational services, said every school in the district makes a concerted effort to help students improve by using special assessments to track students' proficiency.

Shawnee Mission has a big challenge when it comes to AYP because of its large number of subgroups, especially English language learners, Chapman said.

"It's just an awful lot to ask someone new to the United States to read in English," she said. "Now they are coming in and are having to take a test and they don't have the ability to do."

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