The Boerne Independent School District is making progress to get more of its students college and career ready as the 2021-22 academic year progresses.
Chief Instructional Officer Larissa Flores gave a progress monitoring report to the board of trustees during its February meeting last week and said BISD students are going in the right direction in core subject areas.
“Overall, we are seeing growth of our students in the areas of reading and math,” Flores told The Star after the meeting. “Our teachers and administrators have worked tirelessly to work with all students, and it shows.”
Reviewing the district’s reading scorecard, Flores said the goal is to decrease the number of kindergarten through eighth-grade students at the Tier 3 level by 2 percent by May.
BISD places students into one of three tier levels at the beginning of each school year. Flores said Tier
1 means universal or core instruction, Tier 2 is targeted or strategic instruction and/or intervention and Tier 3 is intensive instruction and/or intervention is needed.
“Students are given a beginning-of-year diagnostic which places them in each tier,” she said. “We assess again at the middle of the year and again at the end of the year. Because students in Tier 3 are the most at-risk students, we keep a close eye on them. Teachers check their progress a lot with the goal that the students will improve enough to leave Tier 3.”
At the beginning of the current academic year, Flores said 16 percent of BISD students through eighth grade were in the Tier 3 category. After the recent midyear assessment, the number has improved to 15 percent, or halfway to the district goal.
Flores also said the percentage was 18 percent in 2020.
The percentage of students in Tier 1 increased from 67 to 71 while the percentage in Tier 2 decreased from 18 to 15.
At the individual grade level, second-graders had the biggest Tier 3 decrease at 5 percent, followed by third-graders at 4 percent. On the other end of the numbers, kindergartners showed a 4 percent increase and seventh- and eighth-graders had no change.
In Tier 1, there was a 9 percent increase in first grade and a 7 percent increase in third grade. Sixth-graders decreased by 1 percent and kindergartners had no change.
Growth also was measured in reading at the middle and high school levels, using Lexile scores, which Flores said measure a range between beginning and advanced readers.
“An important factor for readiness is students’ ability to read and understand texts of steadily increasing complexity as they progress through school,” she said.
Flores’ presentation showed that 72 percent of middle school students identified as beginning readers have shown substantial Lexile growth. She also said of students enrolled in the program from the beginning to the middle of the year, 42 percent have met or exceeded Lexile growth goals.
Math
In math, students through eighth grade were tested through Imagine Math, and the numbers show improvement from the beginning to the middle of the academic year.
In September, 53.5 percent of BISD students were in the “did not meet” category, and that improved to 37.5 percent at midyear, the statistics showed.
Students in the “approaches” category went from 29.2 percent to 35.2 percent, students in the “meets” category improved from 13.8 to 22.6 percent, and students in the “masters” category improved from 3.5 to 4.8 percent.
“Our target is at least 50 points of growth per testing cycle,” Flores said. “We averaged a 77-point gain.”
According to a bar chart included in the presentation, Curington and Fabra elementaries had the highest number of students in the “did not meet” category while Voss Middle School and Boerne Middle School South Middle School had the highest number of “masters.”
Flores said all the data will be used to create target groups for interventions and individualized plans by students. Teachers will continue to use data to address learning gaps for all levels of students.
Comment
Comments