Highland performance profile improves
February 14, 2022
RIVERSIDE — The Highland School district’s numbers are up in the newest School Performance Profile report published by the state.
“Our elementary school, middle school and high school have all received some really good scores in our performance profile,” Superintendent Ken Crawford said. “There are six categories, exceptional, high-performing and commendable are the top three. It’s nice to see that our middle school is high-performing and our elementary and high school are commendable, which are steps up for all of the schools.”
The annual school performance profile report is based on a number of factors, including standardized assessment tests, four- and five-year graduation rate, and school climate surveys from grades 6-12. While the data skips 2020, Crawford said the newly published numbers gave cause for optimism in the wake of a disruptive pandemic.
“We’re proud of our kids, we’re proud of our teachers because they have bounced back from being gone and COVID,” Crawford said. “To see these scores through that gap and see the work that these teachers have done with the students and the students actually step up and do a great job, I think that’s something we should be proud of as a community.”
Crawford said the upswing was the result of concentrated efforts across the board.
“With the new Iowa Assessments there’s a lot of computer work involved, so we’ve tried to generate some of our curriculum around that so that they have the best chance of succeeding on the test based on the content, not based on (not) knowing how to work the program,” he said. “In our elementary school … we’ve done a lot more concentration on the reading, we’ve done a lot of what’s called a Barton program, which is taking kids that have a deficiency in reading and really bringing them up to grade level, and that has been very successful for us.”
Despite overall high performance, some areas of the data show Highland still coming in below the state average, including language arts metrics and ACT/SAT success. Even those, however, are improvements from years past, according to Crawford.
“The things that are behind the state average are closer to the state average,” he said. “I believe we’ve raised a lot of those scores. Every school, I feel you can tout all those things that you feel are going great, but then also there are areas we can focus on and say, ‘OK, we need to concentrate in this area,’ … we take the data seriously and then we work hard to ensure that those are the areas we’re trying to attack.”
As for the positive data, Crawford said the district aimed to maintain its momentum.
“We want to keep this as a trend, not as a high water mark,” he said. “That means we work on our conditions of learning … we also take our tests seriously in the spring and we work hard to mix those together so the performance profile makes us look like the school we think we are. We think we’re a pretty good school and it’s nice to have a profile say, ‘Hey, we agree too.’”
