St. Lucie Schools nearly snags an A
June 19th, 2009 by Cara FitzpatrickFORT PIERCE — When St. Lucie County Schools Superintendent Michael Lannon started, he announced an ambitious goal: He would improve scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test and move the district from a C to an A grade.
This year, he did. Sort of.
The school district, which earned a B from the state Thursday, was 19 points shy of an A, a grade they would have claimed easily had the scores of one charter school been included in the calculation. Palm Pointe Educational Research School at Tradition, as a new state charter lab school, is considered a separate entity despite the fact that its students, administrators and teachers all hail from St. Lucie County.
The school, a joint project of the district and Florida Atlantic University, earned an A this year.
“In my view, I’m claiming we have it,” Lannon said of the A rating. “We can say to the people that we performed as an A district, but we didn’t get the designation.”
St. Lucie also earned its only F this year from a charter school, the only other one operating in the county. The Charter School of Fort Pierce, which opened this year, has just 80 students.
Those students, though they were counted as an F when clumped into a small school, would have been statistically irrelevant to the overall score of the district if spread out, said Owen Roberts, the district’s assistant superintendent of assessment and accountability.
Palm Pointe’s 950 students, however, would have made a difference, he said.
“If we had Palm Pointe in our district we would be a solid A, there’s no question about that,” he said.
The school district’s grade may not seem that important — really, how much difference is there between an A and a B? — but for St. Lucie, living alongside A-rated Martin and Indian River counties, it matters. St. Lucie has fluctuated between a B and a C for years.
The school system, though larger, poorer and more diverse than its neighbors, has often been criticized for its lackluster scores, and some in the business community have said such scores make it difficult to attract technology and research companies to the area.
Martin scored in the top six school districts statewide this year.
Lannon, accustomed to the comparisons in his nearly six-year tenure, shrugs them off.
“They’re good, they’re wealthy, but they’re not the only game in town.”
Tags: Schools, St. Lucie County
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June 23rd, 2009 at 5:19 pm
The School Board and the educators of St. Lucie County have done an excellent job in raising student achievement in our community. Congratulations to all who contributed to this worthy effort and success. The District certainly deserves an A, and I am glad Mr. Lannon is claiming it (“St. Lucie Schools nearly snags an A,” http://www.tcoasttalk.com/2009/06/19).
Clearly, the State of Florida’s accountability system does not always represent the whole truth behind districts’ and schools’ performance. As cofounder and principal of the Charter School of Fort Pierce (CSFP), I want to share with you some of the facts behind what the State of Florida has deemed “failure” and behind what the Charter School of Fort Pierce has accomplished in less than a year with some of Ft. Pierce’s most academically needy students.
Although our charter originally targeted mainly sheltered ESOL students, the population who enrolled at CSFP this year was similar to those in the Green Zone’s alternative schools, which do not receive distinct school grades. After 79% of our students qualified for free/reduced price lunch, CSFP was designated a Title I school in the spring of 2009. Considering the type of student CSFP serves, the school would not ordinarily be graded but would instead be measured on Adequate Yearly Progress. CSFP met 87% of AYP criteria.
The reality is that many of the students who finished the year at CSFP made more progress on multiple levels than their previous performance indicated they were likely to make in a traditional setting. Students’ grades, attitudes, ability to focus, motivation, and belief in their own potential—all measures of success and determiners of future success—also rose. Parents, guardians, community members, and students themselves have expressed how much it means to them to have a school like CSFP in Ft. Pierce where they or their children—many of whom had not succeeded elsewhere–can learn and thrive.
The school’s grade obscures the fact that a number of CSFP students performed excellently on the FCAT and that the majority made gains. Some students showed marked improvement even though that level of improvement does not register as significant enough to earn points toward the school grade. Scores of sheltered ELL and ESE students do not count toward the grade although it is among those students that some of our greatest successes can be shown (school grades do take count these students’ gains, but many of our students did not have baseline scores to begin with). It’s important to note, too, that many of our students who did make gains came into the charter school bearing serious deficits in reading, meaning they will require more time than is acknowledged in the Florida accountability system to catch up. CSFP gives them that time and accelerates the process within a small school environment that is tailored to their individual needs.
Research supports what educators know well: it takes longer for low-achieving secondary students to close the achievement gap than it does for their high-achieving peers. (Thus it makes sense that it is at the higher grade levels that the District is also having more difficulty raising achievement than at its elementary schools, and not because of a lack of expertise, commitment and excellence on the part of the schools.) It takes commitment and patience to do the work of educating resistant, reluctant, and/or discouraged learners, but it is honorable work, and CSFP has done its work honorably.
The students who succeeded at CSFP this year, as well as those who did not meet their learning goals, were served excellently at CSFP and will continue to be given the opportunity to actualize their potential as long as they keep their contract with the school to act with respect and to try their best. CSFP remains committed to ensuring that both high achievers and low achievers on the FCAT and in all other areas will continue to show improvement as we go forward.
We welcome the assistance of the District and are always open to opportunities to increase our knowledge of best practices as well as to implement the tried-and-true practices that have helped our students so far. With the support of the community and the District, all of our students will continue to receive academic, social, and moral support as well as the targeted instruction that they need to reach their goals.
Sincerely,
Diane Allerdyce, PhD
Chief Academic Officer/Co-Founder
Toussaint L’Ouverture International School
d/b/a
The Charter School of Ft. Pierce