City schools achieve AYP, county in school improvement

Hartselle City Schools has made AYP once again for at least the last six years while Morgan County Schools just missed making its AYP goals for the second straight year.

Hartselle schools superintendent Mike Reed said he was pleased with the AYP results this year.

“This is great news for our school district,” Reed said. “While it is good news, we’re concerned about making our ultimate goal of 100 percent by 2014. That’s a difficult goal to achieve, but I’m extremely happy with the job that our teachers, administrators, students and even the parents have done this year. We couldn’t do this if everyone wasn’t working together.”

In addition to the entire school district making AYP goals, all five Hartselle schools also made its AYP goals.

Morgan County failed to meet AYP because of its reading scores in the special education subgroup.

Mary J. Marquart, district accountability and assessment coordinator, said the school district will have to work harder to help the special education students improve.

“We’re now in school improvement year two,” Marquart said. “That means that we’ll have to submit plans to the state to correct the problems and use a portion of our federal funding to help these students improve in reading.”

Other than that, Marquart said school officials were thrilled with Morgan County’s results. All of the county schools made their AYP goals. In fact, three grade levels have already achieved 100 percent proficiency.

The fourth grade at Cotaco school earned a 100 percent in reading while the fifth grade at Eva school earned a perfect score in math.

At Union Hill, the third grade class earned 100s in both reading and math.

“We haven’t seen a 100 percent until this year,” Marquart said. “We were just thrilled to see that.”

However, the AYP goals will continue to increase year-by-year until 2014, which means the schools must continue to change their approach to education.

“We’re going to have to continue to change our methods to help more students improve their scores,” Marquart said. “The goals go up each year, and it gets tougher and tougher to make AYP. If you don’t change, you will get left behind.