The Eastern Pulaski School Corporation continues to face the same challenges as everyone else, when it comes to responding to ISTEP scores. That’s according to Superintendent Dan Foster.
He says school improvement plans for the elementary, middle, and high schools were approved by the school board Monday. “There were no major changes,” he says. “It’s the same thing as everybody else is doing. We’re trying to adjust to new standards and a new test, and it’s just a shame that we get quite a ways through a school year before we get the data back that we can start digging into, to figure out what we might need to work on.”
He says adapting to new standards continues to be a challenge. “We’re not happy. Nobody likes to see scores drop,” he says. “But when you compare some scores and stuff, we don’t feel that we’re that far away from being able to make some adjustments here and there and improving next year.”
One specific area the corporation would like to improve is English/Language Arts at all three schools. Foster adds that Middle School Principal Ryan Dickinson has implemented a schedule designed to increase math instruction. “Within the middle school, in those three years they will get, basically, an extra year of math,” Foster explains. “And he did that a couple years ago with the English/Language Arts, and we were able to do that this year with the math. So we are hoping that, maybe not in the 2017 test, but by 2018 or so, that that extra math is going to start to pay dividends there.”
Foster says a challenge at the high school level was motivating sophomores to pass the test. “At that point the kids weren’t buying into any accountability that if you don’t pass this, you don’t graduate, this kind of stuff,” he says. “Like my daughter, she’s a great example. You know, ‘I thought I was done with ISTEP, now I gotta take it again.’ You know, how much effort did they really put into that? So that’s something that we have to work on with our kids.”
But he points out the elementary school continues to do well, and overall, most of the challenges were expected.
