Educators can use the Ohio School Report Cards for last year to make adjustments to improve their teaching methods, but parents should rely on their children’s own report cards, a Centerburg Local School District principal said.
The Ohio Department of Education released its annual School Report Cards on Oct. 14 but advised that due to the pandemic and limited data, the reports should not be used for comparisons.
The Centerburg school district scored an 86.8 out of 120 in its performance index, below its pre-pandemic high of 93 in 2019. Centerburg Elementary’s performance index was considerably higher at 98.7, just 1.1 points lower than its high in 2018.
“Educators can dig down into the data to see what standards their students did well in and which ones they did not, which can help them adjust their teaching this year,” Centerburg Elementary School Principal Miguel Thompson said.
For Centerburg Elementary, overall progress for English Language Arts in fourth and fifth grades was more than expected. But progress in fifth grade math was less than expected.
“For parents, the individual student report is more helpful to show how their own child did," Thompson said. "The school data isn't going to be very helpful due to COVID."
The assessments used to monitor student progress must be performed at schools, so Thompson and other educators had to ask parents whose students being taught remotely to come to the school building. Centerburg parents were very cooperative, he said.
With the mix of choices by school district including hybrid and in-person learning, districts and schools that taught in those different conditions would skew all state tests, Thompson said.
“We were fortunate to be able to offer in-person schooling the entire school year with some modifications on Wednesdays,” he said.
Centerburg Local Schools report card ratings
Centerburg Local Schools’ 86.8 performance index score for 2021 was within one point of its 2020 score and a little more than six points below 2019. Students had in-person instruction for the entire 2020-2021 school year. The school district did not give students computers for their schoolwork.
Students also did better than expected in English Language Arts (ELA) II in high school and showed progress in high school geometry. But students made less progress than expected in sixth- and seventh-grade ELA, seventh- and eighth-grade math, plus high school algebra.
Since 2017, Centerburg Elementary has not fallen below 91 points on its performance index and sits just 1.1 point lower than its high of 99.8 recorded in 2018.
Centerburg Middle School didn’t fare as well last year, if the limited data are accurate. Its performance index fell to 79 after a high of 90.4 in 2019. But that’s still within 4.5 points of its 2017 score.
If the limited data are accurate, Centerburg High School picked up more than 15 points from 2020 to 2021, scoring 79.7 on its performance index. It recorded scores between 85 and 89 points in pre-pandemic years.
