LANCE GAITHER

lance.gaither@bluegrassnewsmedia.com

Although results are mixed for many schools around the state, and overall performance for schools in Kentucky was down, Boyle County Schools outperformed many other districts around the state – even during the pandemic – based on results from the Kentucky Department of Education’s Kentucky Summative Assessments for the 2021-22 school year.

Boyle Schools outperformed the state average in every metric.

“We didn’t wait until the end of the pandemic to react, we were reacting in the midst of the pandemic,” said Susan Taylor, Boyle County Schools communications officer. “We knew there were going to be some large gaps to overcome. Learning at home was not ideal, we did one of the best jobs in the state but we knew it was not ideal. The celebration point is the fruits of our labor, were seeing the results and the district staff are very pleased and proud of everything our teachers did.”

For the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic began, the KDE last spring implemented its summative assessments for public school students in grades 3 through 8, 10 and 11. KSA provides content area assessments, including reading and mathematics at all grade levels, and science, social studies, writing and editing and mechanics. The assessments are the state’s measure of student proficiency and progress on the state content standards. These standards establish goals for what all students should know and be able to do in each grade.

The results from the spring 2022 exams show that the Boyle County School system has maintained its academic performance during and after the pandemic.

In a news release from the school, used the Academic Recovery Grant prior to the school year that was used to target gaps in student performance by creating additional support staff, extended in-school opportunities and extra summer programs.

Although students are back in school full time in the post-pandemic era, Boyle Schools will continue to innovate and find ways to help students succeed, said Superintendent Mike LaFavers.

“We are not letting off the gas,” LaFavers said in the release, “even as we are seeing improvements, we will continue to push forward for every child as is our tradition.”

This was also the first time a new color rating system was used for the assessments, rather than the star rating system. The new system is on the color scale of red, orange, yellow, green and blue with red being the lowest and blue being the highest. Although a red score could be considered the equivalent of a one-star rating under the previous system, its not a direct comparison. The new system awards ratings by different metrics than the previous system.

Starting with next year’s exams, each school’s scores will additionally be judged based on comparisons of the previous year’s results.