Three Pinellas schools that face challenges gear up for the upcoming Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.
By DONNA WINCHESTER
Published February 8, 2004
ST. PETERSBURG - While some educators are just now gearing up for all-important statewide tests, three south Pinellas schools vowed months ago to put everything on the line.
Blanton Elementary, Tyrone Middle School and Boca Ciega High School face special challenges as the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test gets under way Tuesday.
Like most St. Petersburg schools, the three struggle with high poverty, low parental involvement and above-average numbers of children with special needs. Any one of those conditions can have adverse effects on standardized test results.
The state's mandate that their students perform at the same level as students at schools with fewer challenges is a source of frustration for teachers and administrators. But, they say, it also galvanizes their efforts.
Blanton marshals its forces
At Blanton Elementary, principal Debi Turner is not letting her guard down simply because the school's FCAT grade rose from a D in 2002 to an A in 2003. She knows the improvement occurred because three-quarters of her lowest-performing students raised their scores.
But despite the A grade, many of her students test below their grade level - 65 percent of the school's third-graders still scored below grade level in reading and 59 percent scored below grade level in math. Thirty-three students were held back based on a new legislative wrinkle that requires children who cannot pass the reading portion of the FCAT to repeat third grade.
Turner began the school year especially concerned about those students.
"We started from Day 1," she said. "We took it student by student and said, "Where is so and so at, and what can I give him to remediate him?"'
There's more. The number of students who speak English as a second language has tripled.
Turner is doing lots of little things to get her students ready. The School Advisory Council decided in September to sink nearly half of the $65,832 the state awarded the school for improving its FCAT grade into a remedial math software program called River Deep. Turner expanded the school's Read 180 program, which allowed another 45 children to take advantage of a curriculum that combines small group work with a teacher and independent work on a computer and in a reading center.
Additionally, Blanton became one of eight schools that took advantage of a new district-sponsored program called Project Focus. Since August, specially trained teachers have delivered short, 15-minute bursts of instruction targeted at a particular skill the students need to pass the reading and math portions of the FCAT.
Frequent assessments, a crucial part of Project Focus, indicate the children are benefiting from the intensive instruction, Turner says.
Still, she is hesitant to predict how her school will fare this year. "Controlled choice," the district's new method of student assignment, delivered to Blanton more children reading below grade level than it had last year.
The conditions do not bode well for a school that is struggling not only with the state's requirements, but with the federal government's No Child Left Behind mandate as well. After failing to meet "adequate yearly progress" last year, Turner knows there is a good chance that Blanton, along with other Title 1 schools that fail to meet the requirements for the second year in a row, will have to give its students the option to transfer to a school that is making progress.
"I'm a little anxious because I have even more challenges than I did the year we got the D," Turner said. "I'm just hoping we'll have a decent year."
While Turner has been concentrating on academics, Blanton assistant principal David Carey has been coordinating the testing process. He attended a districtwide meeting for elementary school testing facilitators on Friday to wade through the state's rules for administering the test.
"To say the least, it's a very stressful time," Carey said. "Teachers have lost their jobs because for one reason or another they didn't follow the guidelines."
Optimism reigns at Tyrone Middle
Like Blanton, Tyrone Middle School scored well overall on last year's FCAT. It maintained its state grade of B, largely because its lowest-performing students improved. Overall, 69 percent showed learning gains in reading, but 61 percent of the school's sixth-graders still scored below grade level. Only 15 percent posted reading scores that were above average.
In an effort to turn things around, principal Stephanie Adkinson began concentrating intensely on Sunshine State Standards in August.
"Any time you're working with the state's or the district's expectations of what kids are supposed to be learning, you're working toward FCAT at the same time," she said. "You're not necessarily teaching for the test, you're teaching those vital standards."
Adkinson and her department heads made a decision early in the year to share with students their FCAT scores from last year. That way, she said, they knew exactly where they were and where they had to go to improve.
Low-performing readers also were given the opportunity to spend an extra period each day in an intensive reading class. Their teachers, armed with specifics about each child's weakness, gave them a goal and a strategy for reaching it.
Adkinson is optimistic about Tyrone's chances of maintaining its B grade this year, or perhaps improving it.
"You have to be optimistic in this arena," she said.
Eighth-grade guidance counselor Susan Mabrey is Tyrone's testing coordinator this year. To ensure that everything runs smoothly on test days, she will lead the children in two practice sessions in which they will report to their first-period classes and then go immediately to their testing sites.
She also spearheaded an FCAT "pep rally" at the school last week with a "Staying Alive" theme borrowed from the disco days of the '70s. The idea was to let kids know they had their teachers' support and to get them excited about the chance to show off their skills.
"You have so much lead time that it gets tedious," Mabrey said. "(The pep rally) was a way of making something hard and stressful more fun."
Ambitious goal at Boca Ciega
Unlike Blanton and Tyrone, Boca Ciega High School's lowest performing students failed to show learning gains last year, causing the school's grade to drop from a C to a D. Nearly three-quarters of the ninth-graders scored below grade level in reading and 56 percent were below grade level in math. Only 9 percent were above average in reading and 14 percent were above average in math.
Principal John Leanes knew he had signed on for a challenge when he arrived at Boca Ciega in August. Fresh from a 10-year stint as principal at Joseph L. Carwise Middle School in Palm Harbor, a school that has posted state grades of A since 2001, he knew improvement at the struggling high school would have to start from the ground up.
"Literacy became our primary focus," Leanes said.
He asked English department head Doug Campbell to head up the committee. Campbell, who also is the school's FCAT coordinator, said the logistical nightmare a high school faces at FCAT time is almost as daunting as the academic challenges.
"We have to disrupt the school system completely," he said, explaining that students who are taking the test must be accommodated as well as students who are not.
At Boca Ciega, about 500 10th-graders will take Florida Writes on Tuesday. Just shy of 1,300 10th- through 12th-graders will take the reading portion of the FCAT, which along with math and science, begins March 1. But because a student can pass one portion of the test and fail another, a different number - fewer in this case - will take the math and science portions.
To ensure the success of students who struggle with reading, Campbell worked with Leanes on a program Leanes found useful at Carwise called "Reading on the Spot." The Internet-based plan makes it possible to locate course material matched to a student's reading level.
The main idea, Leanes said, is to teach students skills they need beyond FCAT, such as analyzing and synthesizing information. School-based assessments similar to the FCAT indicate that the students are making progress.
"Our philosophy became that we are all teachers of reading, whether we teach physical education or language arts," Leanes said. "You can't perform well in any subject if you can't read."
Leanes is especially hopeful that the extra attention to reading will benefit 11th- and 12th-graders who have not yet passed the reading portion of the FCAT. Unless they are able to do so, they will not receive a standard diploma when they graduate.
"With a lot of these kids, once they get into the system and they don't experience success, they just drop out mentally," he said. "By giving them some strategies, we hope to have more of them plug in."
Like Turner, the Blanton principal, Leanes worries about his students' chances of making adequate yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind legislation.
"We have three sections of severely educationally handicapped students with IQs in the 40s and 50s," he said. "Can we get them to improve? Yes, but they're not going to college."
Leanes' goal, which he admits is ambitious, is for the school to earn a state grade of B this year.
"The kids are embarrassed by the fact that they go to "a D school,"' Leanes said. "We have a population that is struggling, but there is so much more to us than that."
Test dates
Children in grades 4, 8 and 10 will take the writing portion of the FCAT on Tuesday. Makeup days are Wednesday and Thursday. Beginning March 1, the reading and math portions of the FCAT will be administered to children in grades 3-10, and children in grades 5, 8 and 10 will take the science portion of the FCAT.
