Web: Adequate Yearly Progress reports are available for all districts and schools in the state at www.sde.state.id.us.

    POCATELLO — Sometimes, headlines are misleading and sound bites fail to tell the entire story.

    Obscured in last week’s Department of Education report showing the Pocatello/Chubbuck School District failed to achieve Adequate Yearly Progress was a host of test results that show the district is making big strides toward ensuring every student is proficient in reading, math, language and science.

    “Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) isn’t the only measure of success,” School District 25 Superintendent Mary Vagner said Tuesday during a press conference where district officials explained the results of this year’s Idaho Standards Achievement Tests and AYP reports.

    “Our schools are meeting state standards or achieving at a higher level of state standards in nearly every single grade in every single category,” she added.

    The district provided the media data showing that while some schools and the district itself failed to make AYP, every school is showing improvement in the number of students who are proficient.

    “I was very impressed when I was looking through all this test data,” said Marianne Donnelly, chairwoman of the district’s board of trustees. “I think it shows what we have accomplished over the last five years or so. The trend lines are all in the right direction.”

    Included in the test data is the fact that the district’s high school graduation rate has soared from 84.2 percent during the 2005-06 school year to 94.9 percent in 2009-10.

    “This is an extremely optimistic set of test results,” Donnelly said.

    Vagner said achieving AYP is an enormous task and one the district spends the entire year addressing. But she said the board, administrators and teachers all agree it’s a goal worth striving toward.

    “Students may not opt out of their learning,” she said. “Success is our only option.”

    Under the provisions of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (formerly No Child Left Behind), every school and district in the nation must demonstrate AYP with the goal of 100 percent proficiency by 2014.

    All students, including various sub-groups, must achieve a certain level of proficiency in reading, math and language. The benchmarks increase each year.

    The sub-groups include ethnicity, students with disabilities, limited English proficiency, and economically disadvantaged students, and a school could have 41 total AYP targets to meet. If a school meets 40 of those targets but fails in one, it does not meet AYP.

    For example, School District 25 as a whole only failed to meet AYP in reading and math for students with disabilities, and math for Hispanic or Latino students. Highland and Century high schools failed to make AYP only because math scores among economically disadvantaged students were below the state’s proficiency level.

    Schools move from being in “alert” status, meaning one or more sub-groups have fallen below the required proficiency level, to “school improvement” status following two straight years of not meeting AYP. Likewise, it takes two years of meeting AYP to be removed from that list.

    Schools that do not make AYP for five consecutive years move into “corrective action” status.

    Twelve of the district’s 13 elementary schools made AYP during the 2009-10 school year, with only Washington not meeting that standard in reading and math for economically disadvantaged students. One elementary school (Washington) is on alert. Two schools (Tyhee and Wilcox) met AYP but remain in “school improvement” status.

    None of the district’s middle schools (Franklin, Hawthorne, Irving and Alameda Center) made AYP.

    Three middle schools (Franklin, Hawthorne, Alameda Center) are in school improvement status. Irving has undergone significant restructuring and is expected to obtain “new school status,” which will enable it to start over on the AYP accountability timeline. 

    All four of the district’s high schools (Pocatello, Century, Highland, New Horizon) failed to make AYP in 2010. Century is on alert, while the other three are in school improvement.

    The Pocatello Community Charter School met AYP.

    Most of the district’s schools that failed to make AYP failed in only a few categories and Vagner said the district’s successes this past school year far outweigh those AYP insufficiencies.

    Those successes include:

    • All three middle school Mathcount teams placed in the top four in a national competition.

    • Highland’s debate team took first place in Sweeps in the largest high school debate competition in the area.

    • Nine professional/technical students won 12 medals at the spring SkillsUSA conference.

    • The Pocatello High School Business Professionals of America students took first place and won the Professional Cup at their state competition.

    • Eight teachers were recognized as outstanding teachers in their respective specialties by state and national organizations.

    • Four high school athletic teams were named state academic champions.

    • Over 300 students took concurrent enrollment courses and earned college credits while attending high school.

    • Eighty-two students graduated with highest honors.

    • The district earned the “What Parents Want” award by School Match. Selection is based on test scores, accreditation, recognition for excellence by a national foundation, competitive teacher salaries, average instruction expenditures, library/media services and class size. Only 16 percent of the nation’s school districts have received this recognition.

    “AYP is only one measure of a school’s success,” said Chuck Wegner, the district’s director of curriculum. “We have quite a number of other successes....”

    The benchmarks for AYP increase every year and making the cut next school year will only get tougher. For example, the reading requirement jumps from 85.6 percent proficiency to 90.4 percent, math goes from 83 to 88.7 percent, and language increases from 75.1 to 83.4 percent.

    “Incrementally, each year that target gets a little bit higher and consequently a little bit more difficult to achieve,” Wegner said.

    Vagner said the district embraces the increasingly difficult standards because “high expectations promote high levels of student achievement. There is no stopping. We are on a journey and we know from past evidence that we are making a difference for all children in their learning capacity.”

    “Success really is the only acceptable option,” Donnelly said.