Fort schools focus on student progress (10/12/05)

FORT RECOVERY — The more you know about student performance, the better you can improve student performance.

That’s an essential part of Ohio’s latest efforts to measure not only student achievement but student progress, middle school principal Ted Shuttleworth told the Fort Recovery School Board Tuesday night.

Participating in SOAR (Schools’ Online Achievement Reports) with Battelle for Kids of Columbus, Ohio, Fort Recovery’s school system hopes to be ahead of the game when the state adopts the “value added” dimension to student data tracking in 2007.

Working with student achievement test results, predictors of school test results, and actual school results, educators will be able to measure the impact of the school experience on kids in the classroom, Shuttleworth explained.

“We’re right now at the very tip of the iceberg in terms of student information,” Shuttleworth said, noting that “Battelle does not want their data used in the evaluation of individual teachers.”

“We think it’s really going to help in our classroom instruction,” he said.

Board members approved a trip by the high school concert band to Chicago during three days in March of 2006 after hearing a presentation by band director Jamie Smith.

In other business, the board thanked the Cooper Family Foundation for its donation of $4,000 to the elementary, middle school, and high school.[[In-content Ad]]