The largest annual investment ($296,475) is going to three targeted schools: Rachel Freeman Elementary ($65,140), Forest Hills Elementary ($80,744), and Williston Middle School ($150,590). It’s called the Comprehensive Support & Improvement (CSI) grant for schools in the bottom 5% of all Title I schools, a federal designation that aims to close educational achievement gaps for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
The state’s report card gives individual schools a letter grade and also indicates whether they’ve met, exceeded, or fallen below expectations for student academic growth.
For last year’s state report card, Williston Middle was designated as an ‘F’ school, down from the previous year’s ‘D’. The school also didn’t meet expectations for student growth. Forest Hills has maintained a ‘D’ status over the last two years, but has met student growth expectations. Freeman has been an ‘F’ school over the last two years, and it hasn’t met expectations.
North Carolina school report card grades are measured by 80% proficiency (what NHC students achieve on those tests) and 20% growth (meaning year-over-year improvement). That’s determined by the Education Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS), which is a proprietary algorithm owned by SAS, a software company. The program essentially measures educator impact by comparing where students start at the beginning of the year to how well they do by the end.
Chief Financial Officer Ashley Sutton gave several examples of student subgroups to the school board at their agenda review meeting on Tuesday; they include those designated as exceptional children (EC) and those of varying ethnicities or who are multilingual. Students who are economically disadvantaged are another category.
The district also has 12 schools that have received additional funding, each receiving $14,253 for student subgroups that perform below the ‘All Students’ subgroup score of the highest performing CSI-identified school. Another set of 11 schools will receive $5,183 each for being designated as “consistently underperforming.”
The district is charging 8% or about $45,611 for ‘administrative fees’ for the grant, but said the federal government allows them to charge up to 20% for these fees.
Williston Middle
Over half of Williston’s funds (55%) over the past three years will go towards tutors. Overall, the money will be directed first to staff salaries, then to professional development, and finally to supplies and materials.
Sutton said Williston’s plan includes conducting additional CHAMPs training, which helps instructors address student behavior, as well as targeted tutoring, and paying for substitutes so that tutors or EC teachers can be pulled out of classrooms to do additional planning with general education teachers.
Williston’s goals each year are to improve test scores and attendance rates by 5% and to achieve a 10% annual reduction in office discipline referrals.
Rachel Freeman Elementary
Rachel Freeman still has a low-performing designation because they're still in the bottom 5% for school performance.
The school is spending the bulk of its funds (59%) on tutors, followed by professional development (27%), with the remainder allocated to software programs such as i-Ready Diagnostics to monitor students’ academic progress.
The school's long-term goal is to have 70-75% of its students meet their growth rate, as measured by EVAAS.
Forest Hills Elementary
Forest Hills previously had a low-performing designation, but the school has moved out of the bottom 5%. However, Sutton said the school didn’t have a large enough subgroup of multilingual learners for “them to be able to come out of the designation.” She added that they needed a minimum of 30 students to meet federal government requirements.
The school is spending 91% of its funds on tutors, followed by professional development.
They are monitoring success through end-of-grade tests and EVAAS scores.
Sutton said that she contacted the state to see if the district could get a waiver for Forest Hills, but it was denied, adding that the “benefit would be they wouldn’t have that designation, but the downside would be if they would lose the funding.”
Democratic board member Dr. Tim Merrick said he wanted the public to know that this grant was not part of the board’s original budget discussions.
“This is something extra that's going specifically to these schools for this, for these purposes,” he said.
NHCS presentation on Comprehensive/Targeted Support & Improvement
