Students showed enough improvement on standardized tests to lift the Freehold Regional High School District out of a classification as a district in need of improvement.
The designation is part of the federal No Child Left Behind Act that measures adequate yearly progress (AYP) made by students.
FRHSD spokesman James Quirk said administrators are pleased with the results.
“We are glad that the district is no longer classified as a district in need of improvement and that none of our schools are falling into that classification as well. It is a result of a lot of hard work from a lot of people, from the teachers all the way up to the administration … everyone working together to get the most from our students that we possibly can,” Quirk said.
He said that encouraging students to achieve to the best of their abilities has always been the goal of those in charge of the FRHSD. He said administrators and teachers are working hard so that benchmark requirements established by federal law for student achievement can be met.
Last year several FRHSD schools received a designation of being in need of improvement. Schools that do not make AYP face the possibility of sanctions as established in the No Child Left Behind Act.
New Jersey students in their junior year of high school must pass the High School Proficiency Assessment (HSPA), an exam that measures mathematics and language arts skills.
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 (math and language arts).
There are various subgroups of students, and under the federal law every subgroup must reach the AYP benchmark (percentage of students passing the test) or else the school may be designated as a school in need of improvement.
The subgroups include the total population; students with disabilities; students with limited proficiency in English; subgroups based on the students’ ethnicity; students who are economically disadvantaged; and others.
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.
The previous test results resulted in Marlboro High School being designated as a school in need of improvement for not achieving the benchmark for two years in a row, while Manalapan High School and Freehold High School were placed in the early warning stage for not achieving the benchmark in that testing year.
Those test results were from students who graduated in June 2010 who had taken the HSPA as juniors.
For the class of 2011, the test scores have improved in most cases.
According to information from the state Department of Education, all of the FRHSD high schools with the exception of Manalapan made AYP. The documents show that Manalapan’s students with disabilities missed the AYP benchmark for math.
The FRHSD in its entirety had been labeled a district in need of improvement based on previous years’ scores, but with the latest results, the district is now on hold status.
The hold status means that the FRHSD met the requirements to pass this year, but because of the previous year’s designation it must be on hold this year and pass again next year in order to have the designation as a district in need of improvement officially removed.