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March 29, 2024 12:24 am
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Local Schools Return To Higher Star-Rankings

By VERNON ROBISON

Moapa Valley Progress

It was moderately good news for local schools last week as the Nevada School Performance Framework (NSFP) rankings were released for the 2018-19 school year. Most of Moapa Valley’s four schools ticked up a notch this year after a surprising dip in the rankings took place last year.

The statewide NSFP system ranks schools between 1 and 5 stars based on student proficiency rates on standardized tests in English and Math, graduation rates academic growth and a myriad of other complex factors.

Both Moapa Valley High School and Grant Bowler Elementary achieved 5-star ratings this year. MVHS returned to the highest ranking after falling briefly to 4-stars in 2018.

Bowler saw even more drastic improvement. It had bottomed out at 2-stars in 2017, then was upgraded to 3-stars in 2018 before powering forward to 5-star status this year.
Lyon Middle School also ticked up to a 4-star ranking. Lyon dropped to 3-stars last year after enjoying several years as a 5-star school before that.

Finally, Ute V. Perkins Elementary in Moapa was the only local school that did not build on last year’s star rating. The school was rated as a 2-star school. That was the same ranking as last year when it dropped from the 4-star status it had achieved in 2017.

Room to improve
Perkins principal Hal Mortensen said that the school’s low ranking has stemmed from a small student population upon which to stretch the statistical complexities. With only one small class per grade level, all it takes is a handful of poor-performing kids to throw the school’s scores, he said.

“If you are bigger school with four or five classes of each grade and have a couple of kids that don’t do well, you are okay because you have a much larger number to take up the slack,” Mortensen said. “But if it is only one class there is very little room for error.

Almost everyone needs to be high performing on the test. Of course, we always have that goal. But statistically, it can be a hard standard to meet.”
Still Mortensen is intent on looking forward for improvement. And he has reason to be optimistic.

The NSFP focuses only on grades 3-5 for elementary schools. And Perkins has a whole new staff of teachers in those three grades this year. These include Michelle McConnell in 3rd grade and Dan Haiola in 4th/5th grades.

“Both of them have a lot of experience working in inner city school in Las Vegas,” Mortensen said. “So they are very data driven and they have some great ideas on improving performance.”

In addition to that, teaming up with Haiola in 4th/5th grade this year is Moapa resident Rhonda Blackwell who has an in-depth understanding of the small-town atmosphere of the Moapa community, Mortensen said.

“I think that having those two perspectives working together will make a great team for our 4-5 graders,” he added.

Mortensen feels that these new staff members, along with added resources now flowing to the school, will bring great improvements this year. “It’s wonderful to have all this new energy in the building,” he said. “They have all hit the ground running, analyzing the data and pulling kids that need help aside to work one-on-one with them. I am confident about how things are going.”

Bowler: a come-back story
Grant Bowler Elementary students aced the NSFP system in nearly every category this year. The school’s academic performance in English, Math and Science were far above levels of both County and State. The school also received all of its possible points in its student growth, an indication of academic improvement and progress at the school.
Principal Shawna Jessen primarily credited the school success to unified teamwork in the classrooms.

“I just have to stress that it took a whole valley to do this,” Jessen said of the 5-star ranking. “We had students, teachers, specialists and parents all working hard together to get this done and I’m just so proud of all of them!”

Over the past couple of years, Bowler has been a veritable beehive of innovative educational ideas. Jessen went through a long list of initiatives that the school had implemented to improve test scores. These included a boot camp for testing meant to teach test-taking tactics and skills. Also the school’s GET SMART groups which focus on interactive activities related to subjects of Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math (STEAM).

Jessen said that another major factor in the success was additional resources brought to the school because of its dipping to a 2-star ranking. This added funding allowed for more staff positions including learning strategists and literacy specialists at the school.

The larger staff also allowed for reduced class sizes in the upper grades of the school. In addition, the school was able to purchase new Math and Reading curricula which hadn’t been updated in more than a decade, Jessen said.

The only area where the school fell short in the NSFP was in attendance. According to the framework, if students miss more than 18 school days in the year, they are counted as “chronically absent.” If the school has a high percentage of chronically absent students, it hurts the school’s star-rating score.

Bowler had 16.6 percent of students deemed as chronically absent last year. That is more than 2 percent higher than the overall CCSD which was 14.3 percent.

“So we have to work on absenteeism,” Jessen said. “But that seems to be a problem that goes across all of Moapa Valley schools. So we will see what can be done.”

It was all about attendance
It was actually chronic absenteeism that kept Mack Lyon Middle School from returning to a 5-star ranking this year.

Lyon principal Ken Paul explained that the school’s academic achievement and growth numbers were rock solid. But a poor absenteeism rating tipped the scales the other way for the school.

“To make 5-star the threshold is 80 index points,” Paul explained. “Our final index score ended up being 77 which is 4-stars. But we lost nine points on the attendance category. So that really hurt us. If we had those points, we would have been a solid 5-stars.”

Paul said that being in a remote rural area can be a strike against the local schools in this category. That is because students often have to leave the community to receive important services when need, taking them out of school for the whole day. That can include doctor appointments, trips to the dentist, orthodontist visits and many other things.

“The rating system gives no allowance for any of that,” Paul said. “It is just absenteeism.”

It also doesn’t allow for kids who are heavily involved in extra-curricular pursuits like club baseball, rodeo and, of course, hunting season.
“We have kids that are out regularly to participate in these kinds of things,” Paul said.

“They work hard to make up all of their work and keep up with the class. So their academic levels are still high. But we get dinged for it on the attendance side all the same.”

Paul said that the school has been taking measures to better educate parents and students about the importance of being in school. The school has called upon attendance enforcement officers from Las Vegas to come to Moapa Valley and make visits to the homes of about 20-30 kids who were chronically absent last year.

“Of course, there are no citations being issued or anything,” Paul said. “It is just an effort to communicate and raise awareness out there to try to improve our performance in this category.”

The school also has some work to do in its English Language Learner (ELL) and Special Education (SPED) programs. These small programs have been troublesome for the school for a long time. Once again, this is because of the small numbers in the sub-groups.

“We have worked hard on these sub-groups and we have shown some improvement this year,” Paul said. “But it still wasn’t enough to gain us a lot of points. We will just keep working on that.”

Live & die by the numbers
MVHS principal Hal Mortensen said that he is pleased that the school has returned to its 5-star ranking. Nevertheless, he stated that this improvement was a rather marginal victory.
“Last year we just barely missed the threshold and ended up at 4-stars,” Mortensen said. “This year, we barely made it, by only a few points, and we are back to 5-stars. But we will take it!”

MVHS has consistently been a top scorer in the district for academic achievement and in growth measures. In addition it has maintained a near perfect graduation rate. None of that has really changed year to year, he said.

But where the school struggles is in those few statistical areas that are most difficult to improve.

This year, chronic absenteeism was one of those areas for MVHS. That category deprived the school of five index points in the rubric.

In addition, the school’s ELL test scores were also a soft spot. This exam tests the English language fluency of a sub-group of students for whom English is a second language. For MVHS, that amounts to a pool of only about 11 students, Mortensen said.
“These kids have been taking this same test since grade school,” Mortensen said. “Some of them just have trouble with it.”

“Plus, when you add into it that some of these kids also have special needs, it is just extremely hard to get full points on that category,” Mortensen added. “But we will keep working on it.”

Mortensen praised his staff members for their good work in keeping performance high at MVHS. “We have a phenomenal staff who continues to strive for excellence as we have in year’s past,” he said. “It is a long tradition at the school and we will keep reaching for it.”

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