May 23, 2016

School District News

From Superintendent

Robert Vian

District

Transparency

For the past three years the District has been using an electronic Board Packet to provide information to the Board of Trustees and any interested individuals.  This packet contains reports from each school principle, the department directors (transportation, food service, Special Education, and technology), the district nurse, and our teacher mentor/test coordinator.  The packet also contains an agenda, a list of bills to be paid, the minutes of the last board meeting, items for discussion, and items that need “action” by the Trustees.  All the information that is given to the Trustees is available at  http://goo.gl/3J6u6E .  That site also has packets for the past meetings.

Elementary Reading

A few days ago a letter writer in the Lewiston Tribune complained about today’s classroom.  She commented that in 1935 six year olds were taught to sit up straight, behave, and how to put on their galoshes.  Today’s Kindergarten five year olds are expected to learn the alphabet, learn letter sounds, to read, count to 100, and be able to do addition and subtraction using numbers 1-20. 

Third grade students learn how to solve math equations with two unknowns (solve the example below). I have forgotten the formula, “Sorry Mr. Rose.”

The property tax payers of Clearwater County have supported full time Kindergarten for the past three years.  The state only pays for one half day.  Our OES Kindergarten students started the year with 55.2% at grade level and 27% needing “intensive” assistance. By the end of the school year 91% were at grade level and 4.3% (2 students) were listed as “intensive.”

Timberline Kindergarten students started the year with 38% at grade level and ended the year with 83% at grade level.

Third Grade Math

Some adults and children went to the movies.  Adult tickets cost $9 each and the children’s tickets cost $6.  The group paid a total of $54 for eight tickets.  How many of the tickets were for adults and how many were for children?

ISAT testing

The district ISAT Math and ELA participation rates were excellent.  Overall district completion rate is 99.8%.  All schools are 100% complete except OES which is 99.4%. For Science, all students participated and 100% completed the test.

ISAT testing

This test allows us to compare Idaho students with students in other states.  I personally feel the tests take too much time, especially at the elementary level, but they do answer the question, “how does education in Orofino stack up against the rest of the state, and how do our students  compare to those in other states?’ since all students are taking the same test.  The amount of money spent on education per student is not a good indicator of the quality of education since economic factors like the cost of living vary wildly.  A physical conservative should be demanding this type of testing.

Orofino Joint SD scores indicate that we were better than the state average in three of the four grades tested in elementary school in both math and English Language Arts.  Unfortunately we fell off at the secondary level and scored below state average in grades 7, 8, 9, & 10 in both math and ELA.

In 12 of 16 grade level math and ELA tests our scores improved from last year, on one test category the scores were the same and in three areas scores declined.

Scores from other states are not available at this time.