St. Mary schools show marked improvement

St. Mary Parish School District Assistant Superintendent Keith Thibodeaux said that data released late last week by the Louisiana Department of Education reflects improvements made among 23 schools that now rank 26th among the state’s 70 school districts in terms of overall performance for the academic year ending in 2011.

St. Mary’s current listing represents a grade improvement from 82 in 2007 to 96.7 for the past year. At the same time, the school district posted a ranking of 31 in the state as performance scores improved from 94.3 in 2010 to 96.7 in 2011.

“I think we are making progress,” Thibodeaux said. “We have over the last few years and we continue to work to get better. Our district school grade was a C and we would like to get to a B, so we are going to continue to work to do that.”

When it came to letter grades, newly instituted by the LDE, St. Mary Parish had five schools earning a B and Berwick High School posting the only A. Remaining school grades earned Cs and Ds.

Like other district in the Tri-parish region, Thibodeaux pointed out that the St. Mary School District should be judged on improvements made rather than raw data presented.

Between 2008 and 2011, the St. Mary Parish School District posted a constant pattern of improvement for an 11.9 percent gain in its performance score of 96.7 this past year.

The St. Mary Parish School District was ranked at 20 in terms of achieving its growth target during the 2010-2011 school year, with six of its schools making that grade.

In terms of gains on its baseline, 16 St. Mary Parish schools demonstrated improvements of better than 69 percent.

“We have a number of different programs we have in place [in our effort to improve performance],” Thibodeaux said. “We have been trying to concentrate on elementary [grades] to get them kick-started so it will roll over to junior and senior high schools. We are focusing on student retention and getting them to high school on time to graduate.”

Thibodeaux said that after school tutoring and remediation programs have helped in students making up credits that otherwise might have been lost. “There is a whole bunch of things we have been doing to keep them on tract,” he said.