Sisters schools earn high marks

Last updated Oct 12, 2010 12:0pm0

Sisters School District turned in an excellent performance on the Oregon State Department of Education (ODE) "Report Card." The annual summary of individual school and district performance across the state rates all three Sisters public schools as "Outstanding."

Superintendent Jim Golden said these rating are based on discipline (primarily attendance), state OAKS test scores, and dropout rate. This year the criteria also included the tracking of student growth. Sisters schools "grew" in all areas measured.

School board member Cheryl Stewart said, "I would like to acknowledge the amazing and hard work that went into that, especially with tighter budgets, shorter school year, larger classes, extremely difficult situations and we improved. That's a major accomplishment for our staff, and our community paying local options is huge."

"The local option lets us keep that level of excellence," Golden said.

Board member Glen Lasken said, "This is where the rubber meets the road, it tells us that we are doing a good job of educating our kids."

By all local and state measures, Sisters' schools continue to perform at or near the top in the state. However, a recent Education Week study ranks Oregon 43rd in the U.S. in education excellence, while NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress), an organization chartered with rating education on a state-by-state basis, puts Oregon at 25th out of 50. (See related analysis, page 18.)

In other school district news, Christina Riepe has joined the district as a new athletic trainer, filling a position funded by the nonprofit Center Foundation in Bend. Riepe has served as the athletic trainer for the U.S. Men's and Women's Alpine Ski Team.

The Center Foundation, an offshoot of Orthopedic and Neurosurgical Care and Research, is a practice that "exists to benefit school age youth in the areas of health, wellness and education within Central Oregon." They are also funding a physician at most of the varsity-level games.

It is anticipated that the nonprofit Chalkboard Project will increase its grant to the Sisters School District from $8,600 to possibly as high as $20,000. This grant will be used to study the tying of staff evaluations to pay.

Current enrollment is 75 students over last June's budgeted forecast. This has significant positive impact on the school budget, but it has created a "bulge" in the third grade. After trying several other options, the superintendent requested and the board approved funding to hire an additional third-grade teacher. Golden committed to find the funding within the current budget by the end of the first trimester.

The highly publicized PERS (Public Employees Retirement System) adjustment was announced and resulted in a 9.4 percent increase ($604,000) in funding required from the SSD budget. This increase was included as a contingency in the June budgeting process.

The October 20 board work session (5 to 9 p.m.) will include development of goals, values and mission statements for Sisters School District led by Kathy Emerson, assistant director of the High Desert Educational Services District (ESD). The second two hours will focus on Superintendent Jim Golden's proposed "dash-board gauges" to measure student performance in progress.

Are Sisters schools really excellent?

Are Sisters public schools excellent? By anecdotal accounts, yes. Are Sisters schools preparing their students to compete on the world stage? Maybe. Is academic excellence a major goal in Sisters? Let's look at what is happening on the larger stage.

Are excellent schools a national priority? A recent Time magazine poll found that Americans rank education as their third biggest national concern with only "the economy" and "the war" ranked higher.

Last week NBC News devoted major blocks of programming to "Education Nation," a series designed to enjoin the debate on the current quality of education in America. The President of the United States kicked off the series with a full half hour sit-down interview on the topic of education.

On September 24 the highly anticipated new film by Academy Award-winning director Davis Guggenheim, "Waiting For Superman," was released. Bill Gates, whose foundation has donated more than $500 million to U.S. schools over the last eight years, has become an evangelist for the film that is being reviewed as ". . . a searing indictment of our education system and a desperate call-to-action to save our struggling schools."

Also last week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to the New Jersey schools in a matching grant to help save the New Jersey public school system.

Closer to home, the September 8 Statesman Journal quoted one Oregon gubernatorial candidate: "Kitzhaber budget would put education No. 1" while Kitzhaber's gubernatorial opponent Dudley states that, "A quality K-12 public school system is critical to protecting and improving Oregon's quality of life and our economic growth."

Some of the causes of all this concern?

The national average high school dropout rate is 30 percent, with many troubled districts reporting 50 percent and higher. In contrast, Sisters High School is consistently reporting a less-than-one-percent dropout rate.

The national average shows 68 percent of eighth grade students can't read at grade level, and 33 percent are not college-ready when they graduate. However, the Sisters School District (via OAKS testing) report 81 percent of eighth graders at or above their grade level in reading.

From recently released results of the Oregon state OAKS tests, Sisters schools outperformed other Central Oregon schools in 15 out of 20 categories. The 2009-2010 State Schools report card released on October 7 designated all three Sisters schools as "Outstanding," a rating that typically only one in three schools in Oregon achieve.

The federal No Child Left Behind program rates schools on an ever-tightening national scale. All three of Sisters' public schools have "met" standards every year for the five years that the program has been in place.

In a third-party Nelson Report survey taken this year of Sisters High School class of 2005 graduates and their parents, 95 percent reported that they felt that their high school education adequately prepared them for furthering their education or employment. In that same survey 82 percent of the students reported that they continued on to college or other related training.

In a September 13 essay entitled, "Why School Reform Fails," the conclusion of Robert Samuelson, a noted Newsweek columnist, places the blame squarely on shrunken student motivation.

But at Sisters High School, better than 80 percent of the students are involved in athletics or other after-school activities.

During the recent superintendent selection process, candidate Brooke MacNamara noted that

". . . I was (struck) by how engaged the students were, in their classes and in the halls. They were energized, open and friendly. I've been to a lot of schools around the world; I've never seen so many kids so involved."

It would be surprising if this level of quantifiable academic performance didn't bring pride to students, parents and those associated with Sisters' public schools and to the community at large.

And all these facts and figures don't even attempt to directly address the extensive arts, environmental, and international exposure that Sisters students enjoy.

However, if the goal of Sisters' public schools is to prepare their students to be competitive in the world market place, there are some other facts and figures that need to be taken into account.

Almost all of the ratings for U.S. schools are based on test performance, yet a new Time poll found that only one out of five people surveyed felt that testing has had a positive effect in schools.

Although the Sisters schools are performing very well against Oregon state educational criteria, Sisters' students are reporting nationally normed ACT test results just barely above the national average.

Results from the NAEP, an organization chartered to evaluate and compare the performance of the nation's schools, ranks Oregon 25th out of 50 states. The United States in now ranked 15th in a comparison with the 30 most highly developed nations of the world.

The new Sisters school superintendent, Jim Golden, presented his "dashboard gauges'" for Sisters schools at the October 6 board meeting.

These gauges will address many of the performance issues that can be measured today.

But given Oregon's ranking in the nation, and the nation's ranking on the world stage, perhaps those interested in preparing the youth of Sisters for the world stage should be working to develop a more rigorous or perhaps a radically different approach to education.