The Churchill County School District Board of Trustees met last week in their regular meeting where they heard a report from Dr. Summer Stephens regarding assessments and achievement results along with and update to the Board Goals.
According to Stephens, “There is nothing new or different.” The state has paused the Star Rating system under the Nevada Ready plan that before COVID assigned “Stars” to public schools across the state to indicate where each school was scoring in relation to state assessments. Nevada schools use the Smarter Balanced Assessment to measure student progress in grades three through eight towards success in college and career. The ACT is used to assess content that correlates directly to Nevada Academic Content Standards that high schools are currently teaching and reflects what students have learned throughout high school.
Stephens said the district is reporting results to the state in two ways, through grade level which means each year is a look at a different group of students, and through a cohort which looks at one grade as those students move one year to the next. She cited last year’s third-grade class which shows 45.64% of the students as proficient which is the highest score any class has received since she became the superintendent. Over the past two years, the fourth-grade class lost 14% proficiency, showing a 40.38% proficient rate in 2020-21 and 25.66% in 2021-22.
“We have had two years of very challenging times,” said Stephens, “and the SBAC, which is given over several days doesn’t take into account any of the variables that affect education.”
The goal of the district over the next two years is to improve the math proficiency of students by showing a 15% growth. To that end, there are several interventions the district has taken on including working with the Northwestern Regional Professional Development organization for math support for teachers.
In discussing the high school achievement and assessment Stephens said, “we have been proud of our scores in ELA (English Language Arts) and math is certainly an area we want to continue to work on.”
During the 2020-21 school year Churchill County High School Students showed a 51% proficiency rate in ELA, and an 11.6% rate in Math. In plain English that means 51 percent of the local high school students were proficient in ELA and 11.6 percent of them were proficient in math. During the 2021-22 school year students showed proficiency in ELA of 45.8 percent, and in math of 15.9 percent.
“If you took the ACT now,” said Stephens, “I guaranteed you no one in this room would score as well as they did at the time they were taking that. I just think its fair to think about that.”
She said that the Lyon County school board “throws out test questions to their board from the SBAC or the ACT, so we are going to do that through the years so we can get experience looking at those and thinking about them.” She said it is easy to look at the scores and say they are terrible.
“Collectively we would be putting all of the things about a kid from a four-hour window of time and that does not make up who they are. There is more to you than this number. I would like this number to be better, but I believe in our kids and I believe in our staff and we are doing great things for them.”
In other business, Stephens reported that the district has received a college and career-ready grant and will be “standing up” a career center and staffing it to support work-based learning and scholarship opportunities for students. “We have a good solution to staffing that and it will be a forum to engage the community and provide CTE and combine that with services to help students.”
She also reported on a “weapons detection” grant that was submitted to the Pennington Foundation but has since been put on hold. The grant is specific to devices only, both handheld and a machine that Stephens said the district envisions using at games and random events. The foundation pulled the grant request because staff there thought the district meant to screen students for weapons every day. The district will continue working with the school safety operations person at the foundation and will resubmit the application at a later date.
Stephens also reported on the iReady assessment tool that the district is trying through the ESSR grant for the next two years. iReady is a diagnostic tool that also provides interventions and has a full curricula that staff can use in addition to the MAPS assessments the district is already using. Elementary math teachers are currently using the program as another tool to improve math proficiency. “Both MAPS and iReady have predictive value related to the state testing,” said Stephens.
Additionally, the board ratified the Negotiated Agreement between the district and the Nevada Classified School Employees Association. “We have been working on this for two years,” said Stephens, “and we are happy to get to a resolution.” The cost of the contract over the next two years is $118,180 and includes step and column increases as well as five paid holidays.
The board also approved contracts for seven employees who are not represented by any of the associations.
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