No Missouri school districts scored in the unaccredited range on this year’s annual report cards, but that doesn’t mean that the state’s two unaccredited districts – Normandy and Riverview Gardens – are automatically headed for an upgrade.
And among charters in St. Louis, one – Preclarus Mastery Academy – scored in the unaccredited range for the third straight year. Two others that scored in the same territory, with less than half of the possible points – Jamaa Learning Center and Better Learning Communities Academy – closed at the end of the last school year.
Under Missouri’s accreditation system, school districts need to earn more than 70 percent of the available points to be fully accredited. A score between 50 and 70 percent earns provisional accreditation, while districts scoring less than 50 percent are in unaccredited territory.
For K-12 districts, 140 points are possible, with half of them coming from student achievement and the other half coming from factors such as attendance, graduation rate and how well students are prepared for college or a job after graduation.
Statewide, 98.6 percent of Missouri school districts scored in the fully accredited range. The St. Louis area saw two perfect scores, in the Brentwood School District and by the North Side Community School, a charter school.
This year’s Annual Performance Report (APR) numbers, released Monday, November 7, showed no districts below 50 percent for the first time since the current evaluation system, known as MSIP5, took effect in 2013. Normandy’s score, which was 7 percent just two years ago, was 54.6 percent, while Riverview Gardens, which was at 79.3 percent last year, slipped to 74.6 percent.
Both Normandy and Riverview Gardens, along with Saint Louis Public Schools, are run by appointed boards.
State education officials have insisted that before they will recommend that any district’s classification improve, it needs to show sustained progress, defined as at least two years of growth.
The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education expects to make recommendations for upgrades, if it has any, at the state school board next month. Last year, Riverview Gardens asked for a boost into provisional accreditation, but officials said they wanted to wait to make sure its progress continues.
After touring Moline elementary school in Riverview Gardens on Monday, Gov. Jay Nixon said he thinks the state board should reclassify the district as provisionally accredited.
However, the lower score for Riverview Gardens creates questions around its accreditation status and for the students there who have been able to transfer elsewhere because the district is unaccredited.
Margie Vandeven, Missouri’s commissioner for elementary and secondary education, said last week that if the district is raised to provisional accreditation status, student transfers would be governed by state law, which allows transfers only from unaccredited districts.
One more factor comes into play with Riverview Gardens. State law says that if any district moves from unaccredited to provisionally accredited, then slides back into unaccredited status, it is automatically dissolved.
Riverview Gardens Superintendent Scott Spurgeon said the district’s dip in scores came primarily from science, which has seen a drop in scores throughout the state.
Science also proved to be a trouble spot for Saint Louis Public Schools, which saw an overall drop to 74.6 percent from 76.1 percent. Last year, a big jump from 43.2 percent had prompted the district to seek an upgrade to full accreditation, but the state did not agree.
Superintendent Kelvin Adams said the district would work on bringing science scores up. He also noted that the district is giving students more options for advanced placement and other accelerated classes in the high school, and administrators are paying more attention to data to track where growth is needed.
“We are a district with a number of incredible challenges that we have to overcome, and we are working hard to overcome those challenges,” Adams said.
In the Normandy Schools Collaborative, which began in 2014 after the state dissolved the old Normandy School District for poor performance, the move up to provisional accreditation territory was fueled in part by gaining points in non-academic areas.
In attendance, Normandy had scored no points for two years but got 7.5 out of a possible 10 this year. In graduation rate, the story was similar, from 0 to 22.5 to the maximum 30 points over the three-year period.
Normandy Superintendent Charles Pearson said members of the community had told district officials last year that attendance should be a focus as it worked to improve its APR score. Strong follow-up helped increase the point total, he said.
“They got more of our students coming on time, every day, all day,” he said. “We really give credit for those seven and a half points to the community working alongside us.”
On the academic side, Pearson said, a strong emphasis on reading has paid off, as well as moving to small group instruction and a reorganization that opened a kindergarten center, moved sixth graders back to the elementary school and put seventh- and eighth-graders into a center by themselves.
Pearson recalled what one student told him, as an example of the transformation. “She said there was a time that the adults were feeling hopeless, and the students were feeling hopeless,” he said. “We don’t feel that way anymore.”
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Edited for length and reprinted from news.stlpublicradio.org.
