Schools’ performance scores up, but improvement still needed

Public school districts in mid-Missouri’s two largest cities saw gains on the state’s Annual Performance Reports, so officials said improvements can still be made.

The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education released the scores to the public Friday. The APR scores combines scores for measures such as attendance and graduation rates and standardized testing scores, including the MAP test. MAP tests students’ knowledge in subjects such as English language arts, mathematics and social studies.

Districts are rated with a percentage of possible points.

Both Jefferson City and Columbia Public Schools increased their Annual Performance Reports scores based on their performance from last year.

Larry Linthacum, Jefferson City Public Schools superintendent, said the staff is happy to see improvement.

“We’re excited about the progress, but we’re also inspired for the future as we still know there’s a lot of work to do,” said Linthacum.

Even though both schools improved their accreditation scores, they still have room to improve, as minority and low-income students as a whole continued to log lower test scores.

In Columbia, 47.9 percent of students on free and reduced-price lunch scored below basic in mathematics. In Jefferson City, 40.2 percent of students of those students also scored below basic in mathematics.

Michelle Baumstark, spokeswoman for Columbia Public Schools, said helping these students improve is a priority.

“We’re still not where we want to be,” Baumstark said. “For us using our internal measures is making a huge difference when we look at assessments to be able to determine where a student is at the beginning of the year, what supports and interventions we can put into place so that they can make progress over the course of a year.”

She said individual attention from staff seems to help the students perform well.

Black students in both schools performed poorly on the mathematics portion of the test. In Columbia 61.7 percent scored below basic, while in Jefferson City 50.7 percent scored below basic.

Both schools said getting students involved and coming to school is important to help students perform well. Both districts scored 7.5 points out of 10 on attendance rates.

“There’s research that states the more involvement you have outside of math, science, history, and English that their achievement scores goes up,” said Linthacum. “We want all of our students to find something they’re passionate about whether that is through science club, or the flag corps, or band, or the football team, or in auto mechanics, or auto body, or carpentry.”