Jefferson Village School and Nobleboro Central School have been recognized by the Maine Department of Education for their performance toward meeting state and federal reading and mathematics standards.
The schools have been designated “High Performance Reward Schools” by the department, meaning they met all annual targets for the standards and are performing within the top 15 percent of Title I schools in the state, Commissioner of Education James Rier wrote in a March 13 post on the DOE website.
Title I, part of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act, provides financial assistance to schools with “high numbers or high percentages of children from low-income families,” according to the U.S. Department of Education’s website.
The state and federal standards in math and reading are measured by the New England Common Assessment Program, or NECAP test, taken by students in grades 3 to 8 each fall until it was discontinued following the test last fall. In its place, students will begin taking the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium tests in the spring of 2015, according to the DOE website.
Both schools have “met or exceeded annual measurable objectives in math and reading for the whole school and each subgroup; has met or exceeded the school’s average daily attendance targets for grade 3 to 8 or the graduation rate for the whole school and all subgroups; and is not in the 25 percent of schools with the highest within-school achievement gaps in math or reading,” according to a letter from Rier.
JVS and NCS were the only two schools in Lincoln County recognized by this program, joining 18 other schools statewide as High Performance Reward Schools, according to the Maine DOE website. There were 19 different schools recognized as High Progress Reward Schools.
Representatives from reward schools will be invited to participate in advisory groups and provide training sessions at statewide conferences and regional workshops, according to Rier.
Samantha Warren, communications director for the Maine DOE, said the rating received by JVS and NCS is part of the accountability system the state uses internally for Title I receiving schools and is not as intuitive for the public as the state’s report card grading system.
The accountability system helps the department direct its resources at schools that need them the most, and also highlights schools with high performance or progress, she said.
“These are really the schools that are showing the most extraordinary performance of Title I schools in the state,” Warren said. “It’s certainly an incredibly accomplishment to these schools.”
Around two-thirds of Maine schools are Title I receivers, according to Warren.
As far as the NECAP scores, which were taken from the tests in the fall of 2010, 2011, and 2012, Warren said Jefferson averaged 60.87 percent proficiency in math and reading, with an almost 10 percent proficiency improvement over those years.
Nobleboro averaged 64.48 percent proficiency, with a 13 percent improvement, she said.
Ann Hassett and Peter Gallace, the respective principals of NCS and JVS, were both proud of the recognition but are focused on continuing to improve student proficiency.
“We’re proud of it, but we still have a lot of work to do,” Hassett said of NCS. “We’re not going to take much time to celebrate. We’re just going to keep working.”
Hassett said the NECAP test is just one of many assessments the school uses to monitor student progress. The school uses the Northwest Evaluation Association test two to three times per year to also evaluate math and reading proficiency, and teachers even use simply daily assessments to make sure the students stay on track, she said.
As such, the NECAP scores “rarely, probably never, surprise us,” Hassett said. “We already know.”
When Hassett came on board in 2010, the school was struggling in math proficiency: only 43 percent of students were proficient, according to data she provided.
“Math was an area of concern for us,” Hassett said. Now, “we’re consistently improving or maintaining in math.”
Responding to that, the school established an after-school program to help students not yet proficient in math, used online tools monitored by teachers to customize learning, and looking closely at the students to make sure the resources get to where they need to be.
“We’re very careful to use the word yet; they’re not proficient yet,” she said. “We’re working toward building proficiency.”
Gallace has also been working to improve the scores he inherited when he was hired five years ago.
“As soon as I accepted the job, we got a letter from the state staying we were a CIPS school, or Continuing Improvement Priority School, meaning we hadn’t made adequate yearly progress for three years,” he said.
Steady gains have been made from there to show the students are learning and the school is doing the right things, he said.
Two major reforms have been enacted at the school: implementing a response to intervention program and professional learning communities among the teachers.
The RTI program uses different levels of approach to ensure students stay caught up on the material, Gallace said.
First, a teacher would try different methods of teaching to help the student. If that doesn’t work, the teacher will give the student increased time to work with the concept, and finally, if necessary, the teacher will pull out a small group from the classroom to work on the subject, Gallace said.
The professional learning communities are teams of teachers that focus on student learning, Gallace said. The communities represent a “mind shift” from teaching in the past, he said.
Instead of teaching content once and putting all the responsibility on the student to learn it, teachers look critically at what the students are actually learning and how the teachers can prove it, Gallace said.
The teachers also use each other as resources, so a teacher with prior knowledge of what worked to reach a given student can be passed on to help the current teacher, he said.
These efforts help avoid gaps in the students’ learning, Gallace said. “We are doing this district-wide.”
Gallace said he wants to give credit to the teachers, who worked “super hard.” The school still has room to grow, though, he said.
“We’re going to keep pressing to find ways for every kid to learn.”
