The three principals and the Director of Curriculum and Instruction at the Knox Community School Corporation gave the school board members an overview of the corporation’s ISTEP scores.
Superintendent A.J. Gappa said all of the administrators and the board were disappointed in this year’s scores.
“They dropped in most categories at both the elementary school and a the middle school,” stated Gappa. “Everybody’s gathering together and making action plans on how their going to move forward and turn that around. We’re confident that the plans are going to be successful and do a reversal on the scores.”
The Board also looked at the NWEA scores for the elementary and middle school students which showed growth in almost all areas.
“We would like to see more growth because that would equate to better scores on the ISTEP, in our opinion,” said Gappa.
Administrators and teachers are meeting this week to put action plans into place.
“The administrators have already worked and gotten together this summer to develop action plans,” Gappa said. “We have staff members coming in for two days of professional development to develop unit plans and work on student learning objectives. The focus is going to be on using data and instructional strategies that will involve higher order thinking skills to attack the ISTEP scores to improve them in the future.”
School board member Nathan Marcum stated that he’s embarrassed with the scores, and the board, administrators, teachers and students need to work together to bring up those scores.
One of the big issues is reading. It is involved in all aspects of learning and if the students can master reading, they can improve their ISTEP scores.
Board President Harold Welter asked all administrators to present a progress report at the beginning of 2013 on how the action plans are working to improve growth.
