5 schools in Toledo miss state standards

3/10/2005

Five schools in Toledo have been downgraded into a category that will now allow parents to send their children to other district buildings without the lower designation, officials said yesterday.

The schools are Cherry Elementary, Glendale-Feilbach Elementary, DeVeaux Junior High, Jones Junior High, and Robinson Junior High.

"Their academic performance is not meeting state standards based on No Child Left Behind - essentially not hitting [adequate yearly progress] requirements," said Craig Cotner, chief academic officer for Toledo Public Schools. "In the last year, we had a variety of elementary schools that were identified."

Adequate yearly progress applies standards to subgroups of students by race and socioeconomic situations, English-speaking, and special education.

The district received notification from the Ohio Department of Education last month that the additional five schools would be placed on the school improvement list.

Officials were dismayed to see the three junior high schools placed on the list since there has not been testing at those grade levels.

"What [the state] has done is look at the performance of the high schools these junior high schools feed into and based it on the performance of those schools," Mr. Cotner said.

"So it's based on the performance of students who are not there, and that's been kind of a difficult task to explain to the staff," he said.

Jill Dannemiller, associate director of the Ohio Department of Education's office of accountability, said the state is required to make an adequate-yearly-progress determination for all schools. "Part of the concept is that schools are a system, so students who are showing up in the high school have obviously had eight years of school before that. The high school results are directly related," she said.