Berg Middle School no longer on SINA list

It seems like a curriculum director could look at pages of detailed district assessment results for hours, and come with a nearly endless amount of positives and negatives.

However, one result Newton Community School District Director of K-8 Services Jim Gilbert can unequivocally point out as a sign of progress was made by Berg Middle School — the kind of achievement that garnered a round of applause at a recent NCSD board of education meeting. After nine years on the Iowa Schools in Need of Assistance reading list — and 10 for math — students scored high enough on the 2014-15 Iowa Assessments to earn a removal from the list.

Gilbert delivered the uplifting news as part of a presentation he made at the board’s Aug. 10 meeting. Berg Middle School’s progress was one of dozens encouraging statistics Gilbert presented about Newton schools, and while there are areas of concern, there are a lot of reasons to be encouraged about how well area students measure up with their peers around the state.

“The main point is to share is that with regard to student achievement, Newton is hanging right in there with its counterparts across Iowa, in spite of any demographic differences,” Gilbert said. “We certainly have areas identified for improvement. However, our teachers continue to work diligently to help move students forward.”

Gilbert also stressed the complexity of the results, and the way progress is relative. If a school, grade or district has 99 percent of its students meeting a federal Adequate Yearly Progress standard, it would need to have 100 percent of students make AYP the following year in order to show the required improvement.

“I really want to give credit to the staff at the middle school,” Gilbert said. “They were able to track the students who weren’t reading at grade level, and made sure those students had access to extra help. These teachers took their time at the end of the day, giving up their traditional ‘Cardinal Time’ for reading interventions.”

Newton is not significantly above or below any averages for the Heartland Area Education Agency or for the state. Gilbert believes this is significant, not only with the overall decline of the NCSD enrollment, but also because of the demographics of the city that tend to contribute to slower reading and math-skills development.

Berg Middle School moved into a “safe harbor” category in the SINA designations.

The curriculum director said some of the statistics need to be taken with a grain of salt. For example, Thomas Jefferson Elementary School did very well, in terms of meeting standards, in reading, but is now on a SINA list in math because it didn’t improve enough.

“Last year, they were 93 percent proficient, and are about at that level again this year,” Gilbert said. “But they didn’t improve enough. The closer you get to 100, you have to just about be at 100, and that gets down to nickels and dimes with a handful of kids.”

Colfax-Mingo and Baxter elementary schools are also on the SINA list, but Newton is the only Jasper County district on the “Districts in Need of Assistance” list. One disadvantage Newton’s elementary schools and the other small-campus districts in the county have is that smaller numbers skew statistics more easily; one or two students not making proficiency in a class of 29 has a bigger impact than, for example, a Newton High School class of 200 or 300 students.

The biggest areas in math in which the Newton district trails the AEA or statewide averages were in the sixth and eighth grades. However, those deficits were not large, as Newton was eight percentage points below the area average, and six points off of the state average.

Newton third-graders had 85 percent make reading proficiency in 2014-15; the state average is 76 percent.

The Heartland AEA includes large suburban schools such as Southeast Polk, Waukee, North Polk, Norwalk, Urbandale and Johnston.

Newton measures up against the state even better in reading. Of the eight grade levels assessed — the third through the eighth grades, as well as the ninth and 11th grades — the eighth grade was the only grade where a slightly fewer percentage of Newton students met AYP than the state average. Iowa had 76 percent of its eighth-graders make AYP in reading; Newton had 73 percent.

While there are areas in which a “cohort” group of students haven’t always improved consistently while moving up from grade to grade, there are also areas in which a group has made huge jumps. For example, Berg’s 2013-14 eighth-grade class only had 72.2 percent of its students make AYP in reading, but as Newton High School freshmen in 2014-15, that group leaped to 87.3 percent making proficiency.

Gilbert said one message he hopes students, teachers and parents take from Newton’s standpoint is that regardless of how anyone views AYP and the No Child Left Behind Act, assessment scores are one area in which Newton is holding steady and improving.

“This just shows that we can do it,” he said.

Contact Jason W. Brooks at 641-792-3121 ext. 6532 or jbrooks@newtondailynews.com