BY CHRISTINE VARNO
Staff Writer
LONG BRANCH – The state Department of Education (DOE) upheld its decision that the Amerigo A. Anastasia School failed to meet the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) benchmarks last year.
The DOE denied an appeal by the Long Branch School District, concluding that the grade 3-5 Anastasia School failed to achieve its NCLB Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) in the special-needs and economically disadvantaged categories for the second consecutive year.
The district is still waiting to hear from the state on the results of its appeal of the grade 3-5 West End School AYP results, which also failed to reach the benchmarks in the special-needs category.
The school district challenged the state’s results and filed an appeal in September, according to Long Branch Abbott Implementation Liaison Roberta Freeman.
Freeman said in December that the district received the results of only the Anastasia appeal.
“The West End School appeal has not been settled yet,” Freeman said in an interview last Thursday. “That was the big one.”
Freeman said that although the Anastasia School appeal did not turn out in favor of the district, she is hopeful that the West End School appeal will be upheld.
“I went through the data on the West End School with someone at the state level and it seemed to be working in our favor,” Freeman said. “But that final determination has not been made yet,” she said.
Freeman said she is waiting to hear back from the DOE on the results from West End School, and added that no projected date for the results has been released by the state.
The Anastasia School will be placed on an “In Need of Improvement” list for failing to meet the requirements of AYP for the second year.
When a school fails to achieve AYP for the second consecutive year, the school is placed on an In Need of Improvement list, which requires the district to offer the school technical assistance to address the areas that caused the school to be in need of improvement, according to the DOE Web site.
Freeman said that although the Anastasia School was placed on an In Need of Improvement list, district students, as a whole, improved on the test scores.
“The district, as a whole, was In Need of Improvement in the past,” Freeman said, adding, “Last year, we improved our test scores.”
Freeman explained that the district is now in a “hold” status and has two years in which to continue to improve the schools before it is removed from the list.
“Although the Anastasia School failed to achieve AYP, that does not keep the district as a whole from meeting AYP,” Freeman said.
The DOE released the test results of its No Child Left Behind AYP report Aug. 22. In addition to the Anastasia and West End schools, the middle school and the high school did not meet the benchmarks, according to Freeman.
The Anastasia and West End schools both failed to achieve AYP, according to Freeman, who added that when school officials revisited the data that comprises the test scores, it was found that the schools may have reached AYP.
According to Freeman, the preliminary scores released by the DOE included data that may not be applicable toward the final AYP results.
The initial results distributed by the state included the test scores of students who entered the school system after July 1 of the previous year, Freeman said.
The students who entered after July 1 had not received an entire year of instruction at the school, therefore disqualifying them from being counted toward the final test scores, Freeman explained.
According to Freeman, the district believed that the Anastasia School reached AYP after calculating the scores after the July 1 scores were pulled.
“When I went through the Anastasia data with someone at the state, there was a mistake in our data,” Freeman said.
“I was able to fix it,” she said, adding that the final scores still resulted in Anastasia not reaching the AYP benchmarks.
Freeman added that the state also permits schools to participate in an Alternate Proficiency Assessment (APA) program for students with severe special needs who are not required to take the standardized test. The APA is a portfolio assessment of the students whose proficiency is tested by the DOE through samples of their work collected from throughout the year.
When the results of the students entering the school system after July 1 were pulled and the scores of the APA students were applied to the West End school’s AYP results, the figures possibly qualify the school for AYP, according to Freeman.
The Long Branch school district has approximately 5,000 students in 11 schools, with approximately 600 students categorized in different areas of special needs.
In order to achieve AYP, students must meet both the proficiency targets and a 95 percent participation rate in math and language arts assessment for each grade span at the school for each of 10 subgroups, which include the following:
Total grade population, students with disabilities, limited English proficient students, economically disadvantaged students, and white, Hispanic, African American, Asian/Pacific Islander and American Indian/Native American students, according to the DOE Web site.
There must be at least 20 students in each subgroup in order for that group to be counted toward AYP results.
There are 40 indicators determined by DOE officials that are based on four primary categories. The categories are grouped into two areas: participation rate and performance by all students. Those groups are then applied to the 10 subgroups that classify the students.
The Long Branch student body consists of a diverse population with a student body that fills most of the 40 indicator categories, according to Freeman.
If a school misses achieving AYP in any one of the indicators, the school is placed on an “Early Warning” list, according to the DOE Web site.
At the Anastasia School, 78.3 percent of the students passed the language arts test and 76.2 percent passed the math test, according to Freeman.
And at the West End School, 81.7 percent of the student population passed the language arts test and 84.3 percent passed the math test.
Freeman said that even though the percentage of students passing the tests in both schools is high, an entire school will fail to meet AYP if just one category falls below the requirements.