The Española School District is in no better position to educate area students than it was a year ago, according to the report card regulators compiled, using data from the 2016-17 School Year.
New Mexico Public Education Department officials gave the District a D, for the third consecutive year, according to the annual report card released Nov. 9.
The grades are based on an A to F scale. The District’s last passing grade was the C it earned following the 2011-12 School Year.
Department officials didn’t list the District’s 2012-13 grade on its website.
Regulators determined the grade based on several measures, including the average of the letter grades for the District’s 13 schools.
They also examined how well the District did when it comes to accountability, achievement, School Board training, budget expenditures, teacher credentials and post-secondary achievement, as well as input from families, via the quality of education survey.
The District’s failing grade came about two months after the Department released grades for the individual school sites, based on data obtained from the 2016-17 School Year.
Only three, Española Valley High School, Sombrillo Elementary School and Chimayó Elementary School, realized improvements.
Shortly after the individual schools’ grades were released, Española Valley High School Principal Robert Archuleta said the school’s success can be attributed to a few things, such as hiring certified teachers and developing short-cycle assessments.
The short-cycle assessments would allow teachers to gauge individual growth in an effort to create learning benchmarks for individual students.
A total of four schools: Española Middle School, Los Niños Kindergarten Center and San Juan Elementary School had grades that stayed the same from the previous year. The rest of the District’s six schools saw their grades drop.
The report card doesn’t explain how much weight each component had in determining the overall grade, which means there is no way to tell how much influence the District’s 61.7-percent to 64-percent graduation rate increase had on the overall report card.
Lack of student achievement
Since the 2011-12 School Year, the District’s student count has dropped from 4,300 to 3,651, for a total loss of 649 students.
The District’s remaining students realized across-the-board gains in reading proficiency.
On average, about 27 percent of the District’s third- through 11th-graders were proficient in reading, compared to 24-percent that were proficient in the 2015-16 School Year.
While District students enjoyed a 3 percent increase from last year’s numbers, the overall 27-percent increase fell short, when compared to the 32-percent student proficiency score from the 2014-15 School Year.
The state’s reading proficiency average is 37 percent.
On average, about 10 percent of the District’s students proved proficient in math, which is a huge jump from the approximately 2 percent proficiency the students realized during the 2015-16 School Year. The state’s average for math proficiency is 20 percent.
Española students, overall, enjoyed the largest growth in science. Twenty-eight percent of the District’s fourth, seventh and 11th graders were science proficient. The increase represented a 13-percent gain from last year’s 15 percent proficiency score.
The District had 20 more teachers for regulators to audit, this year, compared to last, bringing the total number of teachers employed to 229.
While all teachers had at least a bachelor’s degree, the percentage of instructors with master’s degrees fell from 61 percent in 2015-16, to just above 47.5 percent this year, for a total of 109.
Although the District has, on average, about 17 vacancies, the marked increase in teachers comes about a year after state regulators criticized the District for not having enough qualified educators.
District Superintendent Bobbie Gutierrez said she isn’t surprised or blind-sided by the grade and believes it accurately reflects the individual grades the school received in the middle of August.
Until the District improves the grades for individual school sites, there is little chance of the overall grade improving.
“I think our school District report card won’t improve until our overall student achievement improves,” she said.
Gutierrez said she believes the commitment to meeting the District’s staffing needs will help improve student achievement outcomes. She is also hoping that two programs, which the District is in the process of rolling out, will help give students the confidence they need to excel in the classroom.
“I think there are quite a few things that we have going on that will, over time, help with overall achievement at our schools, but it takes time and consistency,” she said.