School officials pleased with report card

Administrators in the Fairfield Community School District braced themselves for bad news.

The state of Iowa was about to release a report card on how public schools measured up on performance. The report is called the Iowa School Performance Profiles, and is required by the federal education law called the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, which replaced the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

Based on a few prior scores, Fairfield school district officials feared they may be near the bottom. The district's consultant at Great Prairie Area Education Agency told them to expect every building to be marked down.

When the report was finally made public on Dec. 17, Trojan teachers were shocked.

'We were expecting doom and gloom,” said district curriculum director Chuck Benge. 'And then we looked at the scores. We had done better than the state average.”

Fairfield was either at or above the state average on a few critical measures assessing growth in math and reading. The state average for both fields was deemed a 50. Fairfield scored a 50 on its growth in math and a 53 on its growth in reading.

Benge said the administrators were so thrilled with the results that they organized a big breakfast the following day to celebrate.

'The growth in our students' learning was so exciting to see,” said superintendent Laurie Noll. 'We're keeping up with the state, and even surpassing it.”

The district's report card included one small demerit. The four school buildings received passing grades (being given a 'comprehensive status”) in every category except one. The Fairfield Middle School received a 'targeted status” in one category, meaning it was in the bottom 5 percent of schools in the state.

The category was the participation rate of students who speak English as a second language. Their participation rate was just over 90 percent (28 of 31). Add just two of those three missing students in the subgroup taking the test, and the school would have earned a 'comprehensive status” for that category.

Benge and Noll pointed out that there was nothing to worry about. The academic scores of the English-language learners is higher than other subgroups assessed. It just so happened that, for whatever reason, three of them were gone from school the day the test was given, and thus the school was marked down for lack of participation.

FMS principal Laura Atwood wrote a summary of the report card's assessment of her school. FMS is above the state average in its overall score, and FMS's low-socioeconomic subgroup is performing above state average in proficiency. Its special education subgroup is performing above average, too.

Noll remarked, 'There is so much to celebrate in the district. Because of the hard work of administrators, teachers and parents, we're moving the needle in the right direction.”

What happens now that FMS has received a 'targeted status?” The school will develop an action plan to submit to the state by May. The action plan needs to address why the school was targeted but also include details about how it will improve reading, math and social/mental health. To help it complete this goal, the middle school will receive $16,000 per year for the next three years.

Noll and Benge said they would talk to FMS staff about how to best spend the money, with a particular focus on increasing participation of the English-language learners since that generated the targeted status. They said the district has 53 students who speak English as a second language, and that they come from many different countries.

'When I was principal at Pence Elementary, we had a lot of Vietnamese students, and I know that now there are a lot of Koreans,” Benge said.

Benge said the district has used staff or students from Maharishi University of Management to assist in interpreting. Noll said the English-language learners are often children of students who have come to study at the university.

'It's wonderful to see a whole family come to another country and learn the language,” Noll said.

Benge said he downloaded the program Google Translate onto his phone. The program can translate English text into more than 100 languages.

Beginning next year, students in Iowa will be graded on a new kind of test. It will include a writing component, which the state's standardized tests have never had before. The test is administered to students in grades 3-11.

Apart from the good news about this report card, the district received more good news earlier this year when it learned fall enrollment was up 30 students over last year to about 1,620. That is a welcome change to the prevailing trend in enrollment. In the 12 years prior, the district lost an average of 37 students per year.

'When Fairfield is strong economically, people are more likely to move here and put their kids in school,” Noll said. 'We just have to keep growing Fairfield.”