Hicks: TCS makes AYP
Published 11:00 pm Wednesday, August 8, 2012
The Troy City Schools system made AYP for performance during the 2011-2012 school year..
“As a school system we made AYP,” Superintendent Lee Hicks said this week. “As a system, we’re happy with our results, but are we perfect yet? No.”
Hicks was referring to the reading scores for Charles Henderson Middle School.
“We have one red cell in special education reading at the middle school,” he said, adding that a red cell indicates the school failed to meet the performance benchmark in that subset or group.
Adequate Yearly Progress or AYP is a measurement defined by the United States federal “No Child Left Behind Act” that allows the U.S. Department of Education to determine how every public school and school district in the country is performing academically according to results on standardized tests.
In the prior year, the Troy City Schools failed to make AYP in three areas: reading and math at Charles Henderson Middle School and reading at Troy Elementary School. “These areas saw significant improvement this year,” Hicks said.
And, in the one area that remained below the benchmarks, Hicks said the district already is working to address concerns.
“We’ve already sat down and had a meeting concerning that,” he said. “We’re talking about what we can do to better help those students and to figure out where we’re falling short.”
Hicks pointed to the progress made at the elementary school in reading performance and at the middle school in math performance as examples of the how the district has focused since last year to help students improve.
He also cited efforts within the state to change the performance measurement from AYP to another standard. “The issue many systems have regarding AYP is that you’re judging the whole school by few students.”