By Kristine Snodgrass, Staff Writer
PLAINSBORO — The Community Middle School is in “early warning status” after failing to meet Annual Yearly Progress standards mandated under the No Child Left Behind Act, according to the state Department of Education.
The school was identified in the department’s annual report, released last month, because its special education students did not meet language arts requirements, according to Beth Auerswald, spokeswoman for the state Department of Education.
The No Child Left Behind Act requires that AYP in language arts literacy and mathematics be measured annually for each school in New Jersey. The program was enacted in 2002.
A minimum of 72 percent of children must pass in language arts in order for the school to pass. Community Middle School was the only school in the Princeton area to miss the standard this year.
Steven Mayer, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction for the district, said it is not the first time the school has failed to meet AYP because of that group of students. It also missed the standard in the 2005-06 school year.
”It’s certainly an indicator we care about… but we’re really talking about a very small number of students that swing that percentage,” Mr. Mayer said.
Grover Middle School missed AYP in the 2004-05 school year for the same indicator, he said.
As a result of missing the standard in the past, the school has been working on ways to increase its scores, he said.
Students are taught methods for handling the test situation, he said. They are instructed on how to map out and organize their thoughts before writing, as well as strategies for approaching passages of text.
In the longer term, the school tries to identify students in sixth grade who may under-perform, he said, and after school tutorial programs are offered.
Forty special education students took the test, he said, out of a total student body of 400. As a result, just a few students can be the difference between passing and failing each year, he said.
”You can see how volatile it is,” he said.
The standard is commonly missed statewide as a result of special education students not meeting the requirement, he said.
Out of the 641 schools that missed AYP this year, almost 60 percent missed it because of their special education population, Ms. Auerswald said.
However, fewer than half of the 2,210 schools analyzed this year had enough of a special education population to be measured. A school must have a minimum of 30 students to be included, she said.
If a school misses AYP for the first time in any indicator, it is placed on the department’s early warning list but faces no sanctions. This year, 433 schools in the state are on the early warning list. They must make AYP two years in a row in order to be removed from the list. Last year, 331 schools were on the list.
Schools that receive Title I funds and miss AYP two years in a row are identified as “schools in need of improvement” and face sanctions that increase in severity each year it is not met, Ms. Auerswald said.
Community Middle School currently does not receive Title I funding, she said.
Sanctions for schools that do include parental notification, intra-district school choice, the use of 20 percent of the school’s federal Title I money to tutor struggling students, school improvement plans and technical assistance from the district and state.

