A is for ABC School

For the first time in its decade-long history, the Apalachicola Bay Charter School has earned back-to-back A grades, marking the fourth time in the last six years the school has been able to earn the top mark.

In doing so, the school bucked a statewide trend that saw more than 300 elementary schools that had been As drop to Bs.

Meanwhile, since grades for all Florida high schools won’t be announced until November, both the Franklin County School and the entire district await the announcement of their letter grades.

Preliminary indications are that the district will earn, for the second year in a row, a B grade, further ending a five-year stretch of C grades.

Chimene Johnson, about to embark on her first school year as the principal of the ABC School, said she was both “thrilled and delighted” at the school’s letter grade.

“We are extremely proud that we were able to maintain that A status,” she said. “I think the work of all of our staff, including teaching assistants and remediation teachers, helped to further the progress of our kids in their reading and math.

“It’s very difficult to maintain that A and it takes the cooperation of teachers and staff,” she said. “We’ll be analyzing the data and see where we have areas to improve, like any good business. It’s wonderful to be on top, but to be on top, you have to maintain that mindset at looking at areas where you can improve upon and keeping in place those strategies that are working.”

State data showed an exceptionally strong performance last year at the ABC School, with among its highest percentages of the last decade in students meeting high standards in reading, math and writing. There was a slight tick downwards in students meeting high standards in math, but at 75 percent, the amount was among the highest since 2002.

The percentage of students meeting high standards in science at the kindergarten through eighth grade school dropped from 58 to 52 percent, but that too was among its best showing since 2006.

The state also awards points when students overall make learning gains, and when those students in the lowest quarter of the class bring their scores up. In both cases, the ABC School saw a slight drop in these percentages, but that is to be expected after a particularly successful year.

The biggest drop was in low-performing students making learning gains in reading, which went from 74 to 62 percent, while in math the number slid from 70 to 63 percent. “We’ll try to find the right components that you can put in place so that you can help those students continue to make the learning gains each year,” said Johnson.

For their effort, the ABC School will receive school recognition monies in the amount of $75 for each full-time enrolled student, to be divvied up as it sees fit. The school enrollment is in the neighborhood of 338 students, including pre-kindergarten students, so that would translate to about $25,000.

Johnson said the certified teaching staff will sit down to decide how to divide the recognition money. “Our ship here is a team and a family,” she said. “Each time we have received an a grade, certified staff has disbursed money among everyone that works at our school, bus drivers, teaching assistants, anyone that is a part of our ABC School community.

“That will be a nice thing for our teachers,” she said. “This will be a nice way to thank our teachers and staff for a job well done.”

As the school district awaits word on its school grade for 2009-10, Superintendent Nina Marks has joined with superintendents throughout the state’s 67 counties in expressing concern about the FCAT testing and evaluation process this past year, which was marked by disputes and delays.

The state completed an audit and said the results were valid, but superintendents said the state’s “hastily prepared analyses” did not focus on their biggest area of concern, which were the learning gains, especially the gains in 4th and 5th grade reading.

The educators say that the delays occurred because the private company, paid $254 million by the state to score the test, had problems in matching student scores with student demographic profiles, a key criterion in tallying learning gains.

Because learning gains can be used for several important purposes, including principal and teacher evaluation, and recognition dollars based on school grades, the superintendents have urged the state to reconsider the release of school grades “until all concerns have been addressed and to proceed with caution as it labels districts, schools, teachers and most importantly, students, with a grading scale which is, at best, controversial and unpredictable.”

The superintendents note that the number of elementary school receiving an A grade dropped by 312, more than one-third, which translates to “the greatest decrease in the number of ‘A’ elementary schools since the beginning of the Florida Accountability system.”