Sisters schools shine on state tests

The first school board meeting of the 2010-2011 school year, held last Wednesday, was highlighted by the district's outstanding performance on the 2009-2010 OAKS battery of tests.

Sisters School District outperformed the other Central Oregon public schools on 15 of the 20 major categories. (See this article on The Nugget Web site, www.

nuggetnews.com for links to the individual results by school district.)

The Oregon Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (OAKS) tests measure whether students are at their grade level in the four disciplines of reading, writing, math and science. In 10th grade, students take tests in all four disciplines. At each of the grade levels 4-8 students are tested in one or several of these disciplines. The grade level expectations come from the Oregon Department of Education Content Standards.

In additional good news, the Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) rating compiled by the federal government per the No Child Left Behind program requirements were released last week. There was a slight increase in the overall state performance (roughly 80 percent meeting standards overall). All three of the Sisters schools met standards. Bend-La Pine had 27 schools reporting, with eight not meeting standards. Crook County had eight schools reporting, with four not meeting standards.

Intent on continuing and improving on Sisters' performance, the school board and new superintendent, Jim Golden, unveiled their goals and objectives for 2010-2011 at the board meeting. These targets will be finalized the next board meeting, at which time they will be posted on the district Web site for review (www.sisters.k12.or.us).

The highlights of these commitments include the development of a new district vision and mission statement. A draft will be reviewed at the next board meeting.

Another objective is the reduction of the real or perceived divisions in the schools between labor and management, between the board and operational staff, and between the community and school personnel.

This is to be accomplished by surveys, aligning continuous improvement plans, proactive communication, twice-monthly board meetings and having the superintendent in every school every week.

Golden is to have a draft of his "dashboard gages" identified by October 20. These measurements are designed to give the schools, the administration, the school board and the public a way of tracking how well the students are performing in "real time" as opposed to having to wait for OAKS or SAT or ACT measurements to find out how well the students have done.

The superintendent has also committed to have continuous improvement plans for each building by October 25, and a set of financial "what if" plans developed by January 19, 2011. He will also be measured quarterly on the district's progress on "making standards work." That is identifying a subset of the Oregon State Content Standards (www.ode.state.or.us/search/results/idS) that the teachers believe are "key" and creating real-time assessments to measure student progress in these critical areas.

Finally, Golden is to implement the concept of "SMART format" goals. These goals will be reviewed and updated quarterly beginning September 30. SMART goals are to be "specific, measurable, attainable, reasonable and time-sensitive."

There was good news on the budget front. The pre-Labor Day enrollment was 1,293, which is up 81 students from the budgeted number with more enrollments expected after the Labor Day holiday. This is good news for the budget since the state funding is based on the total number of students attending - but it has created a "bulge" in the third and fifth grade classes. In the light of the current budget crisis, hiring new teachers is not an option. Golden was very complimentary of the creativity the elementary school teachers and staff showed in coming up with several workable solutions to help cope with the "bulge" without adding staff.