Are our schools failing our children?

Individual school scores on the LEAP and GEE as released by the state Department of Education last month paint a grim picture of some of the Tri-parish area’s lowest performing high schools and their feeder systems.

Through analysis of the scores at the high school level, Ellender, Franklin and West St. Mary high schools stand out as the Tri-parish’s lowlights, with more than half of their students failing to meet the basic standard on the Graduation Exit Examination.

On the English exam, nearly 60 percent of Ellender’s 10th graders scored approaching basic or unsatisfactory, the lowest two distinctions on a five-level scale. Students only need to score approaching basic to “pass” the exam, but the abundance of low scores has Terrebonne Parish Superintendent Philip Martin searching for remedies.

“Ellender is in our sights and our targets in that we’ve got to make improvements,” Martin said. “We’ve actually seen improvement, but it’s focused, targeted instruction and strong RTI (Response To Intervention), those things that are driving the improvement across the district.”

The final GEE was taken last spring. Beginning next year with the class of 2014, students will instead have to pass an End of Course exam, which is a more focused assessment that is administered after a student completes a class on the tested subject.

The change in testing protocol takes away the state’s opportunity to gauge a student’s long-term retention, but it provides a less-convoluted method to determine proficiency. On the science test, for example, students will no longer be tested on physical science, biology and chemistry in one sitting, often 12 to 18 months after completing the class.

Each of the Tri-parish superintendents was in favor of the transition.

“It’s using a rifle rather than a shotgun,” Martin said. “It’s targeting specific subjects and ensuring that the kids, when they finish that subject, have a mastery of the basic skills that they should have in that subject.

“You would like to think, ‘Oh, well they are going to retain all of that.’ Well I don’t. The stuff I learned a year ago, a lot of the fine nuances may escape me, whereas if I’m testing on it right at the end of the course, when it’s still fresh … I think it’s fairer to the kids.”

Excluding math, where 32 percent of its students scored mastery or advanced, West St. Mary High School ranked in the Tri-parish’s bottom three in GEE testing, with more than half of its students failing to meet the basic standard in English, science and social studies.

B. Edward Boudreaux Middle School, which feeds into West. St. Mary, is a stalwart in the bottom-five list of schools with the highest percentage of students failing to score basic on the eighth-grade Louisiana Educational Assessment Program.

Raintree Elementary, which feeds into B. Edward Boudreaux, was futile in science and social studies, but had 75 percent of its students score at least basic in English and 67 percent in math.

“These are our lowest-performing schools,” St. Mary Superintendent Donald Aguillard said. “They are our targeted schools. Every day we work to improve instruction in those schools.

“I think you have to attack the problem at the earliest level, which is the elementary schools,” he continued. “We are doing that quite well, and unfortunately, it takes time for these stronger kids to move up, and get into middle grades and into high school.”

On the other end of the spectrum, Berwick High School paced Tri-parish secondary schools. The high school led the way, in all four GEE subjects, in the percentage of its students who scored mastery or advanced.

Fifty-one percent of tested students scored in the top two levels in mathematics, 16 percent higher than the next closest school in the Tri-parishes, Terrebonne High. In science, Berwick was 11 percent higher than South Lafourche, with 41 percent scoring mastery or advanced.

Buffy Fegenbush has served as the Berwick High principal for nine years. She credited a multitude of reasons for the school’s success on standardized tests, including assessment and proper placement of freshmen, a high retention rate as students progress through school and autonomy within the school district.

Advanced Berwick graduates, because of the freedom the school has from the district, can leave the school with 16 to 21 college credit hours through the Louisiana Virtual School, Fegenbush said.

“Each school has their own set of children that come in,” the Berwick High principal said. “We always talk about individualized plans. In order to do that for our own kids, we have to be able to individualize our own school plans. Not neglecting the parish goals, but how do those parish goals reflect what we need to do at Berwick High School.”

Berwick High’s feeder schools, she added, play a “vital” role in the high scores. “We really feel the pressure to maintain that, and that’s why we work extra hard to try to build on them, because they’ve done so well, not only at Berwick Junior High, but at Berwick Elementary as well.

“I just think it’s a reflection of the community mindset of the importance of education in Berwick,” she added.

Based on the results from the spring high-stakes tests, a number of Tri-parish schools are barely keeping pace with the state’s demands. FILE PHOTO