Education Officials Look To Improve Academic Performance

The Board of Education is looking at ways to improve academic performance starting in the lower grades and extending to the later grades where standardized test results show students appearing to lag behind, officials said.

Over the past couple of weeks, officials have presented recently released standardized test results. There have been highlights, such as third-graders placing second in percent scoring at goal or above in math when compared with others in the same District Reference Group. Newtown, Monroe, Brookfield and New Fairfield are among the communities in DRG-B.

But then there have been less stellar results, such as seventh graders placing second from the bottom in DRG-B in percent of students performing at goal or above in writing and 12^th in reading. Seventh graders placed higher in math scores, however,  at fifth.

The relatively mediocre CMT scores also translate to flat scores at the high school where Newtown placed in the middle to bottom range in SAT and CAPT scores when compared to others in DRG B, according to high school principal Chip Dumais who presented the scores during an education board meeting on Tuesday.

"We are dramatically falling behind our peers," he said.

The issue is not that Newtown high school students are performing worse than in the past, but that the scores have remained relatively stagnant, officials said. Students in other districts in DRG-B are doing better, which in turn has pushed Newtown towards the bottom.

"Newtown finds itself at the bottom of a ladder," Superintendent of Schools Janet Robinson said during the meeting.

Robinson said Newtown spends less per pupil than most others in DRG-B, and while that may not be a direct correlation, she said that was a factor.

"All of these things are starting to accumulate, and they are starting to show," she said. "I'm not happy with these results and the inability to push this forward is something this community has to unite behind."

Dumais also said the district lags behind when it comes to the high ratio of students to teachers. Board member Debbie Leidlein asked if more teachers would help.

"More teachers at the high school would help you address the level of performance of the CAPT tests?" she asked.

"Yes," Dumais replied.

Education officials recently put together a list of goals and issues aimed at helping to improve student achievement.

For instance, board members placed the institution of full-day kindergarten on the list, saying that they should discuss it as part of a strategy to improve performance in the early grades. Writing also was an area educators said they wanted to focus and improve the scores on.

"We have this chronic problem of low CMT scores," education board chairman Bill Hart said in a recent interview. "We struggle in the later grades to bring that up."

Hart said so much emphasis has been placed on the budget recently, that he wanted to return the spotlight to education topics, develop goals and then figure out how to pay for it.

"I want us to get focused on education and the budget will flow out of that," he said.