Smackover-Norphlet look to improve grades by focusing on individuals

Editor’s note: This is the fifth installment in a six-part series looking at Union County schools and the grades each received from the state. The first part looked at how the state calculates each grade. Each installment after that covers a different school district in Union County.

For the Smackover-Norphlet School District, the way to improve the district’s letter grade is through focusing on the needs of individual students.

In the grades released from the Arkansas Department of Education in October, Smackover Elementary School received a B, Norphlet Elementary School received a C, Norphlet Middle School received a C and Smackover High School received a C.

Arkansas released the grades for the 2017-18 school year in the beginning of October both to the general public and to the schools. The grades and breakdown are available at myschoolinfo.arkansas.gov. In Union County, no school received an A grade.

“I think if you ask any school district in Arkansas, we are all still learning about (Every Student Succeeds Act) and the new plans,” said Jennifer Lee, curriculum director. “We have been giving our interim assessments and we had seen our test scores so we were very hopeful when the reports would come out that we would see improve and we did. That being said, we don’t want to stop there. We are constantly looking for improvement, but we were anticipating to see some of our scores going up and they did so we were glad to see that.”

Lee said leaders in the schools have been looking at the data within the ESSA reports and pushing past which students are doing well and which are struggling to look instead at what students’ strengths and weaknesses are.

“When we look at the report and we delve down into the data, because our teachers and our principals live in the data, you see a letter and we see a kid,” Lee said.

One of the automatic questions when looking at standardized testing scores is whether struggling comes from a curriculum issue, Lee said.

“Any time you look at standardized testing, you look at is this a curriculum issue, because sometimes you just have a bad curriculum and you need to change it,” Lee said. “We’ve looked at our stuff and that's not the case here so we’re looking at individual students’ strengths and weaknesses and that’s really where we try to live.”

Lee said the school district has updated literacy, math, science and social studies curriculums over the past couple years and has started to see the effects of that change reflected in improving test scores. However, she said individual schools are still working on improving individual subject matters.

For instance, Lee said the middle school is working on reading comprehension and as a result has seen improving test scores in that area. The ESSA score looks at the number of students reading at grade level. For the 2017-18 report, 92 out of 241 students were reading at grade level compared to 81 out of 232 in the 2016-17 report.

When it comes to goals going forward, Lee said the district is working to implement the RISE program. Teachers with the district are gradually getting training in the program to learn about how to implement it not only in reading classes, but going into other subject areas as well.

The Reading Initiative for Student Excellence (RISE) program is put out by the Arkansas Department of Education and is focused on encouraging a culture of reading with a campaign to get parents, teachers and community partners to establish the importance of reading in homes, schools and communities.

“Our teachers are saying the RISE training is some of the best training they’ve ever had,” said Superintendent John Gross.

Lee said that a few years before RISE came along, the school district changed phonics programs to Saxon Phonics and when RISE came along they were told that the two programs were similar.

“When those students have had this in first, second, third, fourth, we’re going to see an upswing in test scores,” Lee said.

Lee said the district is also focused on it’s special education students. According to the report, 10 percent of the students with the Smackover-Norphlet School District are eligible to receive special education.

“We want all students to do their best,” Lee said. “Not just the general education population. One thing we’ve looked at is in the past, we didn’t have a full time LEA (Local Education Agency) supervisor here so one of the things we did over the summer was hire a full time LEA supervisor. She has come in and looked at what we’ve been doing and gone ‘there are things we can do things better so that we can make learning for our special education students better.’”

Lee said the district is looking at co-teaching, which is the practice of pairing teachers together in a classroom to share the responsibilities and is common for special education and general education students. She said the district is also looking at different curriculum programs for the special education students.

Lee said new programs are being implemented for English Language Learners and they’re starting to see the impact of those programs.

“Those are some of the things that are hidden in the report that you won’t see just with the letter, but those are things that we’re looking at to make sure our programs are good for all students,” Lee said.

Another thing that isn’t directly on the report that Lee said the schools are trying to work on is the mental and emotional health of students. She said the school is trying to set up a mentorship program within the towns and find ways for older students to be role models for the younger students, along with the counseling offered by the school-based health center which includes a licensed clinical social worker.

“Smackover and Norphlet are two separate towns, but they’re one community,” Gross said. “In saying that we’re a community, that opens up a lot of opportunities. We can work with the governments in the community, we can work with the organizations in the community, we can work with the churches in the community and bring all that together to support these kids and give them what they need. That’s going to make everybody better.”

Michael Shine may be reached at 870-862-6611 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter and like him on Facebook @MichaelAZShine for updates on Union County school news.