St. Helens works through the numbers

High school addresses math performance deficit

By Darryl Swan

The South County Spotlight, Nov 18, 2009

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.

ADVERTISEMENTS

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.

1 | 2 Next Page >>