“I’m just stopping in,” S-B Elementary School Principal Dean Lew said at last month’s school board meeting February 22. “This is one of my yearly duties, just to come and stop in and talk to you about the AGR, the Achievement Gap Reduction (test),” he said. Such testing, carried out to satisfy contract requirements with the DPI in return for specific state aid, measures where kindergarten through third graders are in terms of learning, with the beginning of each year serving as a “baseline,” or reference value. So how were things going at Stanley-Boyd as of the February 22 school board meeting?

“Our students are working hard, and I want to commend our teachers as well,” the S-B ele-mentary principal said of how things are going with the present learning reality at Stanley-Boyd Schools and recent test scores. Among the key strategies to enhance learning is reduced class size, with teachers able to give more attention to each student. Teachers must also un-dergo professional development.

But while, though taking a dip in the present virtual instruction age, were/are still above the norms. The latest round of testing, done periodically to gauge student performance, would help the district plan for the future, Lew said.

“We have three benchmarks that we take,” Lew said, “to see how students are doing, we use it to drive instruction going forward.” Those three benchmarks could change by subject, with kinder-garten math including the ability to count cardinal numbers, develop a numbers and operation base, and have age-appropriate “operations & Algebraic thinking,” per the online district re-port. Only ability to county cardinal numbers is assessed at the beginning of the kindergarten school year, math-wise, going from seven percent at the start of the year all the way to seven- ty-seven percent when fall progress was measured.

For kindergarten reading abilities, meanwhile, the assessment is based on sound recognition and spelling words as dictated by the teacher, along with something called the PALS test. Re-garding dictated spelling tests, kindergartner ability improved from 18 percent scoring 34 or above at the start of the year all the way to 74 percent scoring the same when fall progress was measured. The average student spelling score at Stanley-Boyd , meanwhile, was 54 out of 73. Board member Jeff Boie had a question for Principal Lew.

“What has been the surprising thing you’ve seen since the beginning of the school year?” he asked Lew during questions time after the presentation had concluded.

“I’ll be honest with you,” Lew said, saying that in the upper elementary with a different test called the Exact Path Benchmark in place of ACT Aspire, average test scores were higher than the norm. But why switch in the first place?

“That’s just because, If we ever had to go to virtual learning, there’s a study island program with Exact Path” that ACT Aspire didn’t have, Lew made known. As to the scores, it was good news.

“What we’ve seen with our scores from the beginning of the year to January,” Lew told Boie,” is that our average scores have been higher than the norm,” Lew said, adding that, “It’s going to be interesting to see how we do in the next spring assessment.” Perhaps more surprising, at the same time, was that this had happened without all students being able to attend class, though they had gotten their work done.

“It could have been the internet,” said Stanley-Boyd Elementary Principal Dean Lew in relation to upper grade elementary students who had been able to get their work done but yet weren’t able to attend.