Mountain Creek on ‘alert schools’ list

Mountain Creek Academy has been named to the state’s “alert schools” list under a waiver designed to replace the academic achievement mandates under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Alert schools are those that didn’t meet certain guidelines under the waiver and will receive three years of state-supported assistance to get back on track. Mountain Creek was named to the list because its graduation rate in 2011 was 30.6 percent, far below the 80 percent required to make Adequate Yearly Progress under the old system.

Principal Paula Martin referred questions about the status to the Murray County Schools central office. Barbie Kendrick, who oversees federal programs for the school system, said Mountain Creek is already performing most of the required actions and interventions alert schools must put in place.

According to state documents, those actions include providing additional learning time (such as tutoring) for students, working with the state Department of Education to analyze data and come up with a plan to address areas of under-performance, giving high needs and underperforming subgroups of students priority access to programs and resources, and providing time during the regular school day for teachers to plan instruction that includes collaborating with special education and English language learners teachers.

Alert schools must also analyze several other kinds of data, including teacher and student attendance and student discipline referrals and develop a leadership team that meets at least twice a month to develop plans for students who need help the most.

“It’ll be a three-year process in which we will work toward improvement, and we expect to see gains each year,” said Kendrick.

Secondary curriculum director Cheryl Thomasson said the designation is an opportunity for the school to receive additional state help. Officials said it isn’t clear yet whether alert schools will receive additional funding for programs, but they will at least receive some assistance from the state’s Regional Education Service Agency to provide training and guidance for teachers.

Under the old Adequate Yearly Progress system, schools not meeting certain testing, graduation rate and attendance requirements were labeled “needs improvement” and faced escalating sanctions up to the possibility of a state takeover if they did not improve. The goal of the system was to have every child achieving on grade level by the 2013-2014 school year, a task educators have said is impossible given it includes children with mental and learning disabilities as well as other special circumstances.

“It’s no secret that we need to improve the graduation rate at Mountain Creek Academy,” Thomasson said, yet she added the school isn’t “a bad school.”

Many students enroll in Mountain Creek after dropping out for a year or so, she said. Even though those students may eventually graduate, they aren’t able to do it in the roughly four-and-a-half-years time state officials use to calculate the graduation rate. Mountain Creek also has a much smaller student population than surrounding area high schools. Only about 200 students are enrolled there.

Kendrick said the state waiver is more flexible than AYP and less punitive. In it, schools are identified as reward schools, priority schools, focus schools or alert schools. Reward schools are among the highest performing or have the highest progress. Priority schools have a graduation rate of less than 60 percent or a lack of progress over three years based on several standardized tests. Focus schools have a graduation rate of less than 60 percent or have the largest within-school gaps between the highest achieving and lowest achieving subgroups of students based on factors like race, ability to speak English and disability.

Park Creek School in the Dalton Public Schools system was named a focus school earlier this year for because of only 30 percent of special needs students met or exceeded standards on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests, creating a gap between that subgroup and the highest performing subgroup.

A list of priority schools, those with the largest educational deficiencies, was released earlier this year. No local schools were on that list. Lists of higher achieving schools will be released later this year, officials said.

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Mountain Creek on ‘alert schools’ list

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