By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
The St. Joseph School District showed improvement in the latest statewide measuring stick with improvement still needed in areas such as graduation rate and reading.
The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education issued the district’s Annual Performance Report with a composite score of 67.9%, just shy of the district’s goal of 70%.
Director of School Improvement, Kendra Lau, says the graduation rate climbed more than 12% to 89%.
“We saw a great uptick in graduation rate,” Lau tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post. “So, we’re really please with that. It’s the highest graduation rate we’ve had post-pandemic.”
Lau says the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted progress in the St. Joseph School District, hurting the graduation rate and classroom attendance. While the graduation rate saw improvement, classroom attendance has yet to bounce back. It has hovered around 77% the past few years.
“And we have hired attendance interventionists. We have worked with the prosecuting attorney’s office. Each one of our buildings has an attendance budget. They have attendance plans. We do home visits, more home visits than we’ve ever done. We make more phone calls than we’ve ever made. And yet our attendance was very stubborn,” Lau says.
Though attendance in the latest report was stuck at 78%, the latest count taken in the middle of this month disclosed attendance at 85% district-wide.
Student performance makes up 70% of the Annual Performance Report with the remaining 30% coming from the Continuous Improvement Program. Student performance has improved in science and math, but lags in reading.
Lau says lower scores in reading has the district’s attention.
“Our students in English Language Arts are not growing at the same rate that they are across the state of Missouri and we have to fix that,” Lau says.
Lau says a new approach to reading instruction now underway in Kindergarten through Second Grade should help.
“And we’ve seen some really good improvements with a consistent approach to teaching reading in those early grade levels,” according to Lau. “So, we expect to start seeing that on our APR in the Third and the Fourth Grade, but we need to do more to help and support English Language Arts in the St. Joe School District.”
Many schools made improvements in their state scores. Hyde, Hosea, Coleman, and Lindbergh all made gains of 15% with Pershing gaining more than 30%.
The St. Joseph School District composite score on the state APR is 67.9%. Lau says the district is within reach of achieving its goal of 70%.
“Here’s a small example. Our attendance rate was right at 89%, but if we would have gotten to 92%, we would have gotten five extra points and that would have closed the gap.”
The APR disclosed gains in mathematics in grades 3, 5, and 6 as well as in Algebra 1. Student scores improved in Social Studies with the district earning 83.3% of the points possible.
You can follow Brent on X @GBrentKFEQ and St. Joseph Post @StJosephPost.