Performance scores good, bad for Iberia

The annual school performance scores are in and there is good new and not-so-good news for Iberia Parish and the state as a whole.

The good news locally is all three school districts in the Teche Area, including Iberia, St. Mary and St. Martin parishes, continue to show academic growth overall.

According to numbers released Friday by the Louisiana Department of Education, Iberia Parish increased its district performance score by 3.1 points this year, which means the district performed better as whole last year than the year before.

The district’s performance score of 87.5 is also slightly better than the state’s overall score of 87.2. Officials greeted the results with measured enthusiasm. The increased scores represent progress, they said, but, like most districts in the state, they still have a long way to go in meeting state accountability requirements down the road.

“We’re extremely pleased with the results,” Iberia Parish Schools Superintendent Dale Henderson said. “This shows phenomenal progress.”

Carey Laviolette, assistant superintendent of instruction for the Iberia Parish public schools district, said a three-point performance score gain should be appreciated even more in Iberia Parish because there are 30 schools in the district, a relatively large amount.

Across the Teche Area, St. Martin and St. Mary parishes also saw increases of 2.8 and 4.4, respectively.

In St. Martin, the news was accepted with acknowledgment there is still much room for improvement.

“Overall, we’re very excited that after two years of decline, we’re seeing some real growth,” St. Martin Parish Superintendent Richard Lavergne said.

St. Mary made the largest gains of any district in the Teche Area with a 4.4 increase in its district performance score and 73 percent of the district’s schools showed academic progress. Superintendent Donald Aguillard was not available for comment this morning.

Meanwhile, the potentially discouraging news is that while all three districts continue to make small but gradual gains, they also continue to slide in the state rankings at the same time. That could be because they’re growing at a slightly slower rate than other school districts and the rest of the state, which increased its overall score by 1.5 performance points this year.

But Laviolette said it could be attributed to the fact other school districts have not been assessed by the state in the past few years because of Hurricane Katrina are slowly being re-added to the mix.

Iberia schools fell four rankings to 32nd place overall while St. Mary, a district that’s made substantial gains over the past five years, fell three places to 37th.

A school performance score is like a report card, but for an entire school or school district. Standardized testing, retention rates and attendance all factor into the assessment.

Adding to the pressure on public schools statewide is an ambitious goal the Department of Education recently set for the year 2014, when each school — not just the districts as a whole — is expected to achieve a school performance score of at least 120.

Just 3.2 percent of Louisiana public schools — many of which are magnet schools — achieved a score of 120 or more in last year’s testing. Privately, local school officials have acknowledged the 120 mark presents a daunting challenge that has many school officials concerned.

For the time being it remains unclear what will happen to school districts that don’t meet their target growth. Henderson said school officials across the state have made clear to state Superintendent Paul Pastorek their concerns with not being able to reach the 120 mark so quickly. But Lavergne said an accountability commission has been meeting to reassess the plausibility of the current growth requirements.

“You always want to have high expectations but high expectations have to be met with being reasonable,” he said.

“If you look at the scores across the state right now, everybody’s in trouble.”

With the future of accountability, there seems to be a consensus among local school officials that having a high goal has led to at least some improvement.

In Iberia, the local report card largely reflects that of Louisiana as a whole — the majority of schools resemble academic growth and performance comparable to schools in Iberia Parish.

More than half of the schools assessed by the state improved their performance scores from the 2006-07 to 2007-08 testing period. Four schools, however, failed to exhibit any academic growth and 16 schools failed to meet their academic growth targets.

This year, more schools were recognized, 10, than last year, and more schools this year earned a performance score of more than 100. Still, none of the schools reached the magic number of 120.