Tri-parishes exceed state test scores

Tri-parish school districts continued to meet or exceed Louisiana averages for the percentage of students who performed at or above grade level on standardized testing from third grade to ninth grade.

St. Mary and Terrebonne parishes each had 68 percent of students score at or above grade level. Sixty-six percent of the students in Lafourche hit the benchmark, which matched the Louisiana average.

Test scores make up 90 percent of School Performance Scores at the elementary level and 70 percent at the high-school level.

There are five scoring categories in both the LEAP and GEE. From highest to lowest, they are designated as advanced, mastery, basic, approaching basic and unsatisfactory.

The St. Mary school district made the 8th-largest gain in the state over the past four years in the percentage of its students scoring basic or above. The spring 2011 test results represent an 11 percent gain from spring 2007, when 57 percent of the district’s students scored at least basic.

“We use data to make our instructional decisions,” St. Mary Superintendent Donald Aguillard said. “We rely exclusively on data, really, to make instructional decisions. When we choose various intervention pieces to our instructional program, we always try to implement those intervention pieces with a high degree of fidelity to the program.

“We target kids, we target them effectively, and we give them research-based, proven intervention packages that remediate deficiencies. Coupled with our professional development that we provide to our teachers and our attention to the curriculum, we’re seeing evidence that our district is headed in the right direction at an incredibly fast rate.”

Using the same data, Terrebonne Parish and Lafourche Parish jumped 9 and 6 percent, respectively, since 2007. All three districts made at least a 1 percent gain from last year, and Terrebonne Parish jumped 2 percent.

On the high-stakes tests, versions of the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP) administered in fourth and eighth grade with a requirement to score “basic” in all four subjects in order to pass to the next grade level, the results varied by grade level.

St. Mary and Terrebonne parishes exceeded the state average in the percentage of their students who scored well enough on the fourth-grade LEAP test to be promoted to the next grade, with 87 percent and 85 percent, respectively. Lafourche was right on the state average with 80 percent of its students meeting the promotional standard.

“That’s incredible,” Aguillard said of the promotion rate. “We have a strong, strong elementary division in this parish.”

But on the eighth-grade level, each of the three districts fell below the 74 percent state average for the breakout of their students who met the LEAP promotional standard. Lafourche led the way with 73 percent, Terrebonne followed with 72 percent and St. Mary had 69 percent of its students meet the standard.

“[Meeting the eighth grade promotional standard] got better by 13 percent, which is our greatest improvement in any grade level,” Terrebonne Superintendent Philip Martin said. “It still is not where it needs to be or where it shall be. We’re shooting for 85 percent proficient, scoring basic or above. We’re pushing that, but we’re not there yet.”

Lafourche Superintendent Jo Ann Matthews said there was room for eighth-grade improvement in her district.

“We will not quit,” she said. “We will continue moving our students in continuing to implement strategies to help them move forward. We use response intervention. We have a variety of teaching strategies that are out there, that our teachers are implementing in the classroom.”

Matthews said the test scores in her district, which has been plagued by teaching position cuts the past two years, would not suffer due to less personnel or larger class sizes.

“I think we’re going to be able to maintain,” she said. “Certainly, we would have loved to continue with some of the positions we had previously, and certainly, it would have made it a little bit easier to meet those needs. However, our staff has continued to do whatever it takes to move our students on.”

Also at the fourth and eighth-grade level, Terrebonne Parish met or exceeded the state averages in each subject in both years.

Lafourche fell short of state averages in eighth-grade English and language arts (ELA), eighth-grade social studies and fourth-grade mathematics.

St. Mary missed the mark in each of the eighth-grade subjects and fourth-grade social studies.

Of the subjects that St. Mary fell short of state averages, the district saw one-year improvements of 1 percent in eighth-grade ELA, 2 percent in eighth-grade science and 4 percent in eighth-grade social studies. It fell 3 percent in fourth-grade math and 3 percent in eighth-grade social studies.

In order to graduate, students must pass English and language arts, mathematics and either science or social studies on the 10th and 11th-grade administered Graduation Exit Examination (GEE).

Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes met or exceeded the state average in each subject, while St. Mary Parish fell short of the 86 percent ELA state average and 84 percent social studies state average.

The three superintendents were in agreement that while progress has been made across the Tri-parishes, there is still much room for improvement.

“We have teachers in schools that are swinging the hammer very hard, and sometimes we hit the nail,” Martin said. “We’ve been missing the nail in some instances, but we’re going to get more focused, more directed as we continue to analyze these results and see what the data tells us.”

South Terrebonne High School history teacher Blaise Pellegrin offers what he can to help students in his part of the Tri-parish region continue to meet and exceed Louisiana averages on standardized tests. FILE PHOTO