ELKHART -- Whether or not it's for the best, local schools that don't regularly make Adequate Yearly Progress have some changes to make.
Last week the Indiana Department of Education announced four of Elkhart County's seven local school districts didn't make AYP status. And while some educators are unsure of the effectiveness of using AYP as an accountability tool, some schools may face harsh consequences for failing to hit AYP's benchmarks.
According to the IDOE, No Child Left Behind includes intervention for public school corporations and schools that are a part of the federal Title 1 program and don't regularly make AYP. Title 1 schools have high percentages of students from low-income families and receive additional federal funding to help foster education.
When a Title 1 school fails to make AYP for two or more years it enters improvement status -- a series of interventions that progress each year the school doesn't make AYP. Schools must make AYP for two consecutive years to be removed from improvement status.
In July 2008 Indiana was one of several states approved for a U.S. Department of Education program called Differentiated Accountability. The program puts Tier 1 schools on improvement status into one of two groups: Focused improvement for schools close to meeting their AYP goals, or comprehensive improvement for schools far from their goals and missing AYP in several areas.
Elkhart, Goshen and Concord Community Schools each have several schools in both improvement status groups.
In GCS, Chamberlain and West Goshen Elementary Schools are on focused year three and four status respectively. Chandler Elementary School is on comprehensive year four.
Bruce Stahly, superintendent for GCS, said Chamberlain and West Goshen are taking a number of steps in reaction to this year's AYP scores. These include giving parents the option to transfer their children to a different school and sending faculty to state-sponsored workshops. Chandler, however, is facing more severe fallout.
Next school year officials will begin putting together a plan of action for Chandler based on one of four options: Replace the principal and other relevant staff who have remained the same during sustained failure to make AYP; close the school; reopen as a charter school; or contract with private management to operate the school.
If Chandler fails to make AYP next year, officials will be required to implement the plan.
Six ECS schools are on improvement status: Hawthorne and Roosevelt Elementary Schools are on focused year one; Monger Elementary is on focused year three; and Woodland Elementary is on focused year five. Beardsley Elementary is on comprehensive year three and Mary Beck Elementary is on comprehensive year five.
ECS Superintendent Mark Mow said the follow-up at the focused schools will include measures similar to those GCS is implementing such as offering parents alternate school choices for their children, training for faculty and providing supplemental educational services.
Beardsley, which showed notable Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress Plus improvement last fall, will send staff for additional training during the summer and benefit from hiring an English language learner specialist.
At comprehensive year five, Mary Beck is technically due to implement one of the four consequences Chandler is facing. However Mow said the school has been reorganizing staff for the last several years, and he plans to apply for a waiver from the state.
Mow said the district wants to be proactive when repositioning the faculty for everyone's benefit.
"Part of what we need to do at Beck is meet the law, and we've done that," Mow said. "We also need to provide as much stability as we can."
Neither Stahly nor Mow are anxious to tout AYP's ability to determines a school's potential for success.
Stahly said that while he doesn't want to minimize the impact of AYP it has a tendency to lose sight of the good things going on within a district. Essentially, he said, the AYP makes a judgment on education based on one test given once a year.
"That's regrettable," he said.
Currently for a school to make AYP 72.6 percent of its students must pass the ISTEP+. The AYP standards get progressively higher and call for 100 percent of students to pass the ISTEP+ by the 2013-14 school year. Student improvement is not taken into consideration.
"Point is that, by 2013-2014, unless the law's changed, 99.9 percent of the schools in the country will fail to make AYP," said Mow. "That's a prediction that will come true."
Stahly also can't make sense of having to restructure faculty if AYP isn't met by a certain point. Teachers who have roots in the school -- those who would likely be targeted for reorganization -- are the ones who have established relationships with students and their families. No good can come from uprooting those relationships, he said.
Good or bad, it's a reality that students and faculty at West Side Elementary School in Concord will face next year.
While Concord East Side and South Side Elementary schools are on focused years two and three respectively, Concord West Side is on comprehensive year five. This year it was decided the school would reorganize its faculty in compliance with NCLB guidelines if West Side didn't make AYP. It didn't, and next year the plan will take effect.
The plan calls for shaking up about 50 percent of the faculty at West Side, shifting educators to different buildings. Wayne Stubbs, assistant superintendent for instruction for CCS, said none of the teachers have done a bad job -- the move is simply a matter of being compliant with NCLB.
Like Mow and Stahly, Stubbs is frustrated at the AYP system of accountability. West Side has made progress, he said, but that isn't reflected in AYP's results.
"Here's an example of a school that has made an improvement," he said, "and yet credit is not given for making improvement."