St. Helens works through the numbers
High school addresses math performance deficit
Darryl Swan / The South County Spotlight
PERFORMANCE READY — Evan Mock, a freshman at St. Helens High School, takes instruction from math coach Alexia Hamilton. Mock is one of four freshman to have tested out of math workshop, a two-year-old program designed to improve student math skills to meet state and federal standards.
State school district report cards released last week present a mixed bag for south Columbia County school performances.
St. Helens High School in particular stood out due to its rating as a school “in need of improvement,” the first such rating for any of the St. Helens schools since online records have been kept.
It’s also the first year the state has adopted an achievement index in its report card format, a measure of how well districts and schools have performed compared to prior years.
In the case of St. Helens High School, the achievement index score fell short of the state-determined threshold for satisfactory student performace. Several steps are taken to reach that figure, which is the average of test scores from last year and this year added together and re-averaged for the areas of math and reading.
For St. Helens, the drag on test scores is math.
“That’s the area where we’re struggling,” said Nanette Hagen, the St. Helens High School principal. Fifty-five percent of tenth graders statewide met or exceeded math proficiency levels, compared to only 35 percent in St. Helens High School.
Statewide, only 61 out of 1,171 schools —– 5 percent – were tagged as being in need of improvement.
Hagen, who is in her third year as the school’s administrator, said two primary efforts have already been implemented districtwide to escape the math slump: start-up of a math workshop and using federal dollars to subsidize the hiring of a math coach.
Both are the strategic product of a collaboaration between the district’s math teachers at all grade levels, with buy in from the district’s top administration, to zero in on math at the early grades and to identify and build specialty programs around math-challenged students.
“For the first time, math teachers were saying what we needed,” said Linda D’Amario, the district’s math coach.
Starting last year, incoming high school freshmen who struggled with math in their final year in middle school were required to take a math workshop in ninth grade. The workshop class is in addition to the regular math class, Hagen said.
After only one year, Hagen said testing of the ninth graders using the state’s Oregon Assessment Knowledge and Skills test indicates at least a 20 percent improvement over prior student performance at that grade level.
The workshop is designed to help students like freshman Evan Mock, 14, who emerged from middle school struggling with math.
Mock is one of four students who have tested out of the workshop midway through the school year.
“We get to work on stuff I didn’t know so much before,” Mock said, adding that in particular he had problems with slopes and measurements.
D’Amario, who started at the district four years ago as a math teacher, said identifying students like Mock as early as possible, and taking a proactive roll for their advancement of math skills, is vital to the district’s – and the student’s – success.
She also said the workshops and use of other resources, including investment in new instructional technology to make math more interactive and the employ of calculus-level students as paid tutors, appears to be working, and the release of the state scores has not triggered consdideration for a new student math initiative. “Right now, we don’t think so. This seems to help them bridge the gap,” D’Amario said.
Hagen agreed.
“What I take away from this is improvement initiatives take time to show results,” she said. “It takes a year to see that on test scores. We’ll see that this spring.”