South Pike curriculum director Susan McGehee gave board members an open and honest assessment Tuesday of student progress this school year, and by all accounts, the district still has a lot of work to do.
“I think it’s OK to be candid,” board president Dr. Luke Lampton said in introducing McGehee. “I think this is a district that is trying to go forward with openness.”
Students have been taking a practice test called the STAR reading assessment, which gives a percentage of students in each grade who are reading on or above grade level and charts progress over the course of the year with tests every two months.
At Eva Gordon Lower Elementary, third-grade students started low, with only 18 percent reading at grade level in August, but the scores improved tremendously, more than doubling between August and October.
However, the progress came to a complete halt, and almost no change occurred between October and December. McGehee said this stems from students being promoted from grade to grade without grasping the essentials of reading.
“It begins to show up in the third grade, and it’s a point at which you have to go back and reteach the skills, or the child is bogged down from then on,” she said. “You had children who moved into the third grade who had never gotten the essential elements of reading in kindergarten, first and second grade, and when they get to the third grade, it gets more difficult. And it really gets difficult when they get into the fourth grade and they don’t have these essential elements.
“What we’re trying to do, in essence, is go back and teach many of these third-graders who were moved along and who had not gained the essential elements for reading. What we’ve done is to actually go back and teach them those elements, even though they’re in the third grade.”
Board member Clara Conerly has been a third-grade teacher in the past and expressed concern that going backward was not necessarily the most beneficial for the students. McGehee, however, insisted the only path to success was making sure the essentials were taught, no matter how late.
“That’s the only way to help them. That’s the only way to do it,” McGehee said. “They have missed skills, and they can move forward, but they’re at risk for dropping out of school and just not being successful. To be fair to the child, that’s the only way to do it.”
Of the first- through sixth-grade classes at Eva Gordon Upper, Eva Gordon Lower and Osyka Elementary schools, no class has more than 60 percent of its students reading at grade level.
Eva Gordon Upper principal Angela Benefield is facing an exceptional challenge in her first year in the role, with seven first-year teachers and a school on the brink of being taken over by the Mississippi Department of Education for failing three consecutive years.
“Ms. Benefield has worked very hard to pull the schools around,” McGehee said. “Not only is she having to work on improving test scores, but she’s also having to develop a different school culture. That doesn’t happen overnight. It’s been a lot of work on everyone’s part.”
According to pretest results for Eva Gordon Upper Elementary, fifth-grade reading scores, with 24 percent of students performing at grade level, are the best campus wide. No children are recorded as performing on grade level in sixth-grade science.
South Pike also tests students district-wide at the beginning and end of each nine weeks, tracking progress in reading, language arts, math and some science, depending on the grade level.
Students’ scores are placed into one of four categories: minimal, basic, proficient and advanced. Students who are in the proficient category are performing at grade level, and advanced students are performing above expectations. Minimal and basic scores indicate a child is not performing at grade level.
The most recent pre-test scores from the beginning of this semester were presented at the school board meeting Tuesday. Of the South Pike classes, Eva Gordon Lower’s first-graders had the highest percentages of its students in proficient or advanced across the board, with more than 50 percent at or above grave level in language arts and 31 percent at or above in reading.
Most students across the district fall into the minimal category, including 100 percent of eighth-graders at South Pike Junior High in language arts.
South Pike High School test scores show most students rank in the minimal category for algebra, English, biology and U.S. history, with no student in the advanced category and less than 3 percent in any proficient category.
McGehee said the district has shifted the way it teaches reading and language arts to focus on the needs of these students and better address them in the classroom.
The Accelerated Reader program is used on a teacher-by-teacher basis now, but McGehee said she and Superintendent Dr. Estes Taplin have discussed implementing the program throughout the district to encourage reading at home and during free time instead of only during classroom instruction. The program also comes with reading incentives for students who read the most books and earn the most points, turning reading into a fun competition with classmates instead of a learning chore.
“That, in and of itself, would increase parental involvement as far as making sure your child reads at home, that they read during the summer, and that they spend 15 or 20 minutes a night reading,” McGehee said.
The elementary schools also have reinstituted a structured, 90-minute reading block every day, formatted so that teachers hit certain language and reading development skills. The children are divided into groups based on reading level, so students who are more advanced do not unintentionally intimidate students who may be a grade level behind and not a confident reader.
