District Looks at Math Low Achievers

The school district will take a closer look at children who are math low achievers at Walnut Creek Intermediate School.

The Walnut Creek School District school board is planning to schedule a "study session" sometime in October when it will hear from staff at the intermediate school and elementary schools as well.

District staff needs to look at the general math program at the middle school and trace it back to where students start having math problems, said board member Angela Borchardt. The elementary teachers can usually predict their students who will struggle with math going into sixth grade, she said.

"The math gap we find interesting and puzzling," said board President Arthur Clarke. "The seed doesn't germinate well in elementary school for these kids."

Math test scores have dropped at WCI.

With test score progress lacking in some subgroups of students, WCSD was placed on the federal government's list of districts in "Program Improvement," with of rafts of state and federal measurements a week ago. 

This week the district posted a response to the score release on its website, noting that the district as a whole is more than 100 points higher than the 800 the state asks schools to strive for in the Academic Performance Index (API).

As to the federal "Program Improvement" mark, the response states:

"As a district we easily made these targets; however, some of our subgroups did not. If any subgroup doesn't make the target at a school, then the school doesn't make adequate yearly progress. Clearly, the target is quite high for some of our subgroups like English language learners for whom English is not their primary language."