The Greenwood and Carroll County school superintendents say they are pleased with their districts’ performance on third-grade reading tests, but Leflore County’s conservator says his district has more work to do.
Third-graders were required to achieve a minimum score on the Third Grade Summative Assessments in order to be considered ready to move on to the fourth grade, based on the requirements of state’s Literacy-Based Promotion Act.
Initial testing took place in May, and make-up tests were conducted in June.
In the Greenwood district, 85 percent of the students passed. Superintendent Montrell Greene said the administration is pleased with that number.
“We think it shows hard work on the part of the teachers and staff,” he said.
The students who did not pass have been specifically targeted for “intense remediation,” and the district’s goal is to have those students reading at a fourth-grade level by the end of the year, Greene said.
“We’re making it our responsibility to give them extra support,” he said.
Greene said he was particularly encouraged by the results at Bankston Elementary School, where more than 95 percent of third-graders passed.
Davis Elementary posted an 89 percent passing rate, and Threadgill Elementary’s was 80 percent.
W.C. Williams Elementary School, which has since closed, had a 71 percent passing rate.
The Leflore County School District overall had an 83 percent passing rate.
“I am pleased with the progress we’ve made, but I am not pleased with the result,” said Robert Strebeck, district conservator.
Strebeck said that although the final numbers show a marked improvement over the initial assessment, they are still a long way off from the target passing rate of 100 percent.
In Leflore County, the passing rates were 88 percent at East Elementary, 83 percent at Claudine F. Brown Elementary and 81 percent at Leflore County Elementary.
Carroll County’s only elementary school, Marshall Elementary, had a passing rate of 86 percent on the assessment that Superintendent Billy Joe Ferguson called “the big, bad wolf.”
Ferguson said the district faced several challenges last year, including the retirement or resignation of eight teachers and the implementation of Common Core standards.
The state changed the testing scale with the goal of making the assessment easier to pass, and “we would have had twice the failure rate if they had stayed with the old system,” he said.
Ferguson said his district did have some state literacy coaches provided, but they weren’t as numerous as those provided to other counties facing the same situation.
• Contact Bob Darden at 581-7239 or bdarden@gwcommonwealth.com. Contact Nick Rogers at 581-7235 or nrogers@gwcommonwealth.com.
