WARRENSVILLE HEIGHTS, Ohio — The new school district report cards released by the Ohio Department of Education on Thursday morning show in greater detail the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic had on education and, more specifically, early literacy in students. Despite the unique challenges posed to districts the past two years, many districts, including CMSD and Warrensville Heights, received high marks in important categories like student progress and ‘gap closing.’
The new district report cardsare the first to use a new scoring model approved by the General Assembly last year, replacing the A through F grading system with a star-based model where the lowest performing districts earn one star and the highest performing districts earning five stars. The star-based scoring system makes measurements in five categories.
Achievement: This represents student performance on state tests and how well students performed on tests overall.
Progress: This category examines student growth based on past performances.
Gap Closing: This is a measure of the reduction in educational gaps for student subgroups, including ethnicity, income, disabilities and other cohort groups.
Graduation: This measures the four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate and the five-year adjusted cohort graduation rate.
Early Literacy: The early literacy category measures reading improvement and proficiency for students in kindergarten through third grade.
On the brink of a state takeover five years ago, the Warrensville Heights City School District again reported improvements on its district report card, earning two stars in achievement; four stars in progress; five stars in gap closing; four stars in graduation, and two stars in early literacy.
Superintendent Donald Jolly II said, overall, the district is pleased and proud of its 2021 report card while insisting that the district not grow complacent.
“The momentum here is based upon the unity of all the teachers, the staff, the unions, everybody working together for the best interests of our students,” Jolly said. “Since my arrival here, in the midst of the storm of HB 70 (the state takeover bill), our community, our schools, our teachers, our parents, all came together to do what’s best for students.”
Jolly said the district is focused on improving its scores in the categories of achievement and early literacy and has invested much of its pandemic relief money to bring on extra staff to help students catch up. The so-called ‘intervention’ model helps to identify students that are lagging behind in certain subjects and providing them with additional instruction.
This is of particular focus in the area of early literacy, where students were greatly impacted by remote and hybrid learning.
“Half the [elementary] children didn’t even come to school for almost two years. We understood that,” Jolly said. “What the district did do is invest and put our resources into early childhood education.”
Jolly’s counterpart in Cleveland, CMSD CEO Eric Gordon, said additional resources and instruction time have also been devoted to early literacy.
CMSD earned two stars in achievement; four stars in performance; four stars in gap closing; one star in graduation and one star in early literacy. Gordon said the shortcomings in graduation and early literacy essentially confirmed what the district and the public already knew: the pandemic hit CMSD hard but the district can recover.
“The pandemic hit us hard in early literacy, where kids were not forming language skills while they couldn’t 'watch' language because of masks. Literacy is, in part, informed by watching people speak and we have been wearing masks for two years,” Gordon said. “The graduation rate declined 6 percentage points, that’s a hit. That’s a factor of kids not being in school, kids taking jobs that are paying up to $20 per hour and not finding the value of high school during the pandemic. We’ll recover from that.”
The high marks in the areas of performance and gap closing cannot be understated, Gordon said.
“Those are big wins for the district,” Gordon said. “We got four stars in both of them. That’s the best of the Ohio Urban 8. We’re really proud of that. Our test scores, although only a two, rebounded to pre-pandemic levels already which shows the progress that the district can make.”
Wonder how your local school district scored? Visit the Ohio Department of Education's website here.
