Although Marlboro High School has been deemed a school in need of improvement based on the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) provision of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, Freehold Regional High School District administrators say the law, more so than the school, is in need of improvement.
During the FRHSD Board of Education’s Feb. 22 meeting at Colts Neck High School, a presentation was given on the No Child Left Behind Act, which dictates standards that must be met by schools throughout the nation.
Administrative Supervisor of Curriculum and Instruction Ellen Horowitz briefed the board members and the public about the law.
As a part of the act, New Jersey students in their junior year of high school must pass the HSPA, an exam that measures mathematics and language arts literacy.
A school must make AYP based on the results of the HSPA. The AYP designates status to all schools based on whether students pass both areas of the exam.
There are various subgroups of students, and under the law every subgroup must reach the AYP benchmark or else the school may be designated as a school in need of improvement, Horowitz explained.
The subgroups include the total population, students with disabilities, students with limited proficiency in English, subgroups based on the students’ ethnicity, students who may be economically disadvantaged, and others.
Each subgroup must meet the benchmark number, or else the entire school is considered not meeting the requirements of the law, administrators explained. There are 41 standards that are required to be met and not meeting one standard can lead to a negative result.
Since the start of the HSPA, the AYP benchmark has been raised incrementally and will ultimately require that 100 percent of students rank proficient in math and language arts during the 2013-14 year, Horowitz explained.
Horowitz said that large increases in the benchmark numbers were seen starting with the 2006-07 testing pool.
The latest results from the HSPA have designated Marlboro High School as a school in need of improvement, having not passed the benchmarks the past two years.
Manalapan High School and Freehold High School have been designated in the early warning stage for not passing the test this year.
The 2008-09 graduating class at Marlboro High School reached the language arts requirement but did not reach the math number, which placed the school in early warning status. The juniors who took the test in 2009 did not reach the benchmark in either subject.
With two years of not meeting both benchmarks, Marlboro was labeled as a school in need of improvement.
Manalapan High School’s class of 2009-10 reached the math benchmark, but fell short in language arts, with Freehold High School missing both benchmarks.
During the public comment portion of the meeting, Marlboro resident Jim Sage asked if this was the first time that Marlboro High School has been designated as a school in need of improvement.
Superintendent of Schools James Wasser said it is the first time the school has been in that status.
According to the AYP Status list for all of the FRHSD, since the 2003-04 testing group, while this is Marlboro’s first year to be designated as a school in need of improvement, it is not the first time a district school has had that designation.
In previous years every one of the FRHSD’s schools, with the exception of Colts Neck High School, has received the school in need of improvement status.
A school must then achieve AYP for two consecutive years to be removed from that status.
The state Department of Education (DOE) states on its Internet website that almost 64 percent of the 2,222 state schools tested met the AYP last year.
“State officials said that the decline in the number of New Jersey schools making AYP – 1,554 in 2008 vs. 1,420 in 2009 – was essentially due to two factors: first, an increase in the percent of questions that must be answered correctly to achieve proficiency, and second, increases over the last two years in the percentages of students in every subgroup who are required to achieve proficiency on the tests in order for the school to make AYP,” the DOE reports on the website.
Wasser said he is not against the idea of the No Child Left Behind Act, but is opposed to the methodology that causes the school to fail if a small percentage of students do not pass the required exam.
FRHSD administrators said that it in the latest testing results it was the special education subgroup, which did not meet the benchmarks.
Special education students are given the same exam that honors students take, administrators said.
Tom Caiazza, the board’s representative from Freehold Township, asked if the special education students received any allowances while taking the test.
Horowitz said students with disabilities are afforded more options than regular education students, including a longer time to take the test and having someone dictate the test to them, among other considerations.
In the most recent test results from Marlboro High School, 10 special education students did not reach the benchmark number, according to administrators.
Marlboro High School Principal Gerald North said six of those 10 students do not attend the high school, but are placed in private facilities.
It was then explained that even though some students are not educated in a particular school, their test scores still affect what is deemed to be their home school.
Assistant Superintendent Patricia Emmerman said that having the test scores of students who do not attend school in the FRHSD affect the district’s No Child Left Behind results is “blatantly unfair” because district administrators have no control over the curriculum or programs other institutions use to educate those students or how they prepare the students to take the exam.
Board President Ronald Lawson of Howell asked Emmerman about the possibility of inviting those students to take part in the district’s tutoring and preparatory programs.
Emmerman said such an offer could be extended to those students.
Stephanie Kayafas, the special education supervisor at Marlboro, became emotional as she was speaking about the students with whom she interacts on a daily basis.
Kayafas said the test that is used as the basis of the No Child Left Behind designation is a one-day snapshot of the students’ abilities and does not show the progress they make throughout the school year. She explained that from their freshman year, HSPA skills are taught to the students.
The supervisor noted that while some of these students failed one or both sections on the HSPA, they are successful young adults. She pointed out that one student who did not reach the proficient level on the HSPA has recently been accepted to Penn State University.
Kayafas pointed to several programs that are offered to special education students that help them prepare for their future to the best of their abilities, even securing them employment following graduation.
The parent of a student at Manalapan High School described the success her daughter has achieved as a result of this type of effort.
Sage also asked if students who attend Marlboro would be given the option of transferring to another school in the FRHSD. The No Child Left Behind Act offers that option to students who are attending a school that is deemed to be in need of improvement.
According to the Department of Education, schools that receive federal Title I funds and do not make AYP for two years in a row in the same content area face sanctions that increase in severity each year that AYP is not achieved.
The sanctions include parental notification, intra-district school choice, the use of 20 percent of the school’s federal Title I money to
provide tutoring to struggling students, school improvement plans and technical assistance from the district and the state.
Any of these schools that receive Title I funding must offer parents intra-district school choice at another school that did achieve AYP
within the district. If choice is not available in the district, the school must offer supplemental educational services, such as tutoring,
and develop and implement a school improvement plan.
Horowitz explained that Marlboro does not receive Title I money, which means those sanctions were not in place. Marlboro does not have enough economically disadvantaged students to qualify for Title I funds, she said.
The only schools in the district to receive that federal assistance are Colts Neck High School and Freehold High School, Freehold Borough.
District administrators highlighted the programs that are offered to help students study and prepare for the HSPA exam.
Those programs include HSPA Saturdays where practice classes are held in February leading up to the test. There are also online programs and summer programs to help skill building.
Also, students in grades nine and 10 take a pre-HSPA test to help teachers and supervisors identify students’ weak points and develop
individualized action plans.