CAMDEN — During the Preble Shawnee Local Schools Board of Education meeting earlier this month, Superintendent Todd Bowling shared the district’s most recent Local School Report Card information and discussed how the district aimed to improve its performance index scores.
Bowling shared a presentation explaining the LSRC rankings the district received.
“Permanent improvement is how are we doing for all of our students, those students who are low because of test scores, those who are medium because of test scores, those who are high because of test scores and some would qualify for gifted. But looking at each achievement area is what performance index does and it’s the best way to measure how our students are doing,” he noted in his report.
“Overall, you’re seeing an increase in student growth as they move forward. So what are we trying to do to make sure that all students in our district are improving? We are working on the achievement component of our strategic plan,” he said. “Part of that comes from what is a new rating system for the state of Ohio. Our schools used to get graded based on a set of numbers that nobody really understood. So they tried to make it almost like our preschool. It’s a star system. So there’s five stars, four stars, three stars and two. If you’re a five-star school you exceed state standards.
“In the state of Ohio, there are about 624 districts at last count. You’ve only got about 10 percent or something meeting the four stars. Most school districts are at three stars. Two stars means that you are in state academic loss. And so that qualifies us for support systems if we would be there and gives our school additional funding to help with that,” Bowling said.
“Our middle school stayed at two stars. Our high school went from two stars to three stars. The two stars at the middle school are concerning, but we’re making changes academically to get the kids the support they need,” he noted.
Bowling also noted the challenges due to students not being in school during the closures due to the pandemic, and discussed the performance index score further.
‘This the picture of our district, that when you sit in a classroom, do the percentages — so you have 20 kids in your classroom, you’re gonna have one or two that are accomplished or advanced, you’re gonna have 28 percent of that 20 that is right where they need to be, and then the other 40 percent need remediation in order to get where they need to be. So if we can show a year’s growth, which is the key to what we want to do, we can move kids up from one level to the next,” he said.
Personalized learning is the district’s focus right now, according to Bowling.
‘We look at this data and we look at the basic kids, where their scores are. Maybe it’s just specific in math per se. So there’s numbers, number sense, fractions — maybe they’re just having trouble with fractions. And if we can hammer them on fractions, get them the extra support, then they can improve on that test when they go to the next level and do a better job. But what we don’t want to happen, and why we’re trying to work with personalized learning, is that we don’t want our proficient, accomplished and advanced kids — as few as they are — to not be able to continue to grow to where they need to be. We don’t want them to have to wait. We don’t want them to have to sit and not learn or continue to grow.”
Bowling continued, “When we look at what we want to do as a group, and through our strategic plan, the personalized learning helps us do that. It gives our teachers strategies, where they’re not just standing at a board and teaching one’s script to everybody. There’s different group activities going on in the class. You might have variety of learning groups going on where you’re higher kids are working on this, your middle kids are working on this. Lower kids may not even be in the room because their out getting intervention. But then they can switch and be moved around. It also allows our higher kids to teach some of our lower and middle kids, which if you can teach something, you are demonstrating mastery of it. So grouping them like that helps also. Personalized learning is the biggest thing we’re attacking right now.”
Teams are being trained at each level to teach the process.
“We began our three year plan to support innovative instruction and improve state achievement scores by implementing personalized learning — to help us understand how key elements of personalized learning are progressing, scaling and or spreading within the schools and across the district,” Bowling noted. “We plan to administer a survey to all Preble Shawnee staff and all students in grades four through 12 to see what their likes are in learning, to see — maybe they’re not catching on to the way we’re teaching. So listening to a kid and making it even individualized for that kid is going to help them in a far better way than just having to sit there and get the same strategy that you get. So we’re training to train — teachers will come back and train the rest of the teachers in the building and we felt like this is the best way to change your academic success.”
Receiving 3.5 stars overall, the district’s report card showed Preble Shawnee met the state standards in academic achievement (3 stars;) met student growth expectations (3 stars;) needs support in closing educational gaps (2 stars;) exceeds the state standards in graduation rates (4 stars) and meets state standards in early literacy (3 stars.)
