According to a press release from the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development (DEED), new designations and grades have been given to schools across the state. This is meant to provide information to parents about the quality of their schools, and to help school officials know where they are succeeding and where there is room for improvement. This new rating system is a part of the ESSA, or Every Student Succeeds Act, which was passed in December 2015.
“There are three types of school designations: Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI), Targeted Support and Improvement (TSI), and Universal Support,” the press release reads. “The primary purpose of these school designations is to provide information for families, tribes, communities, educators, and policy makers to plan and support an equitable education for each student in Alaska’s public school system.”
All three schools in Wrangell’s school district have received designations of Universal Support, the highest of the three designations. Universal Support means that the school did not have index values that fell within the range of the lowest five percent of Title I schools. This also means that the school’s graduation rate exceeded 66.66 percent.
These designations were determined by a grading system provided by DEED. Each school is graded in several categories, which are worth a certain percentage. For example, math proficiency is worth 20 percent of a grade. Evergreen Elementary received a grade of 68.07 percent, Stikine Middle School received a grade of 59.63 percent, and Wrangell High School received a grade of 59.67 percent. Wrangell Superintendent Debbe Lancaster said that it was not a simple designation system to understand, but it was a good way for the schools to know where improvements need to be made.
“It’s taken us a number of meetings to be told by the commissioner how this is done and what it means,” she said. “But basically this is our guideline, or our baseline, so that we can look and say, ‘Oh, this isn’t maybe where we want it to be. Let’s put our heads together and figure out how to support our district.’”
Lancaster said that she and other school officials have been working to improve the school district in several ways since the school year began. One of the major things that organizations rely on to stay healthy is continuity of staff, she said. The school district does not have many areas of need, but she said the ones they do have are a result of personnel turnover. Lancaster added that she and several school committees are working to set realistic, feasible goals of improvement for the district.
“We want to address students and their individual learning needs, or plans, that’s a better word,” she said. “Since the beginning of the school year several committees have been meeting regularly to identify or assess needs, choose a direction, set a SMART goal … and then just lining up those action steps, and looking at refining as we go along.”
More information about the new school designations can be found online at http://www.education.alaska.gov.
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