News to Note...

ESSA School DESIGNATIONS

In 2015, United States Congress passed new legislation around education. The Every Student Succeeds Act or ESSA is the federal law for K-12 education in the United States. States receive funding from the US Department of Education to help districts improve student academic outcomes. In exchange for funding states must have an accountability system for measuring school performance and determining which schools need extra support. New York State Department of Education (NYSED) implemented its new accountability system for the 18-19 school year and beyond. As such, NYSED has established a new set of indicators to measure school performance. Most notably for grades 3-8, these indicators are around student academic performance and growth in math and ELA. Based upon 17-18 grades 3-8 ELA and math state exams, the state has given each school a numeric score from 1 to 4 (one being the lowest and 4 the highest). From that scoring system, the state further ranked schools and then gave each school its ¨designation¨ for the 18-19 school year.

The Groton Elementary School has received a designation of being in Good Standing. This is a shift from previous years of being identified as a Focus School. Efforts at consistently asking the question, ´How are students responding to my instruction?,´ and adjusting instruction based upon those findings, has paid off for teachers, as we have seen a significant increase in student results on our local benchmarking as well as the NYS ELA and math assessments.

Based upon Groton´s 2017-2018 ELA and math scores in grades 6-8, the Groton Jr-Sr High School has been designated as a Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI) school. As a result, we are required to participate in a number of CSI school interventions, including participating in an on-site needs assessment conducted by NYSED, reviewing data to assess needs, and conducting annual surveys of parents, students and staff around areas of potential growth. The Jr-Sr High has developed a School Comprehensive Education Plan (SCEP) for implementation of in the 2020-2021 school year. In that plan, root causes for struggles in academic performance have been identified, with a corresponding action plan put in place to address those causes.

Being a CSI school also means we will get extra help to assist in our improvement efforts, led by educational experts provided by NYSED who will help guide us as we design and carry out our improvement plan. In addition, we will be following the elementary school's model of assessing how students have responded to daily instruction. Due to COVID-19, NYSED "froze" the designation of all schools districts until the end of the 2020-2021SY. It is our goal to be off this list once state testing has resumed for grades 3-12.