As 2020 dawns, Bulloch County Schools central office personnel have assigned two schools – Mattie Lively Elementary and Langston Chapel Elementary – to “comprehensive district support” and five other schools to “targeted district support” based on recent CCRPI results and other sources of concern.

“District” as used here refers only to the Bulloch County school system and not to any larger area. School system officials emphasize that the support being directed toward school improvement is a local initiative, not imposed by the state. None of the local schools have fared poorly enough on the College and Career Ready Performance Index, or CCRPI, to be placed on state-ordered support.

But the seven selected schools will receive help from the central office, and in some cases input from outside consultants, in making and carrying out their school improvement plans and monitoring the results.

“As a result of being a comprehensive support school, there is a loss of school autonomy with developing the SIP (school improvement plan) because we’re pushing in to say, ‘Let us help you, let us be at the table with you, you need some extra support,’” said Assistant Superintendent for School Improvement Teresa Phillips.

Having received that job title at the beginning of the school year, Phillips heads the local district’s Office of School Improvement. She and Dr. Noralee Edwards, the district’s director of data support, led a Dec. 12 presentation to the Bulloch County Board of Education.

All of the local schools have maintained improvement plans for years now, as do schools statewide. In recent years, Superintendent Charles Wilson and the board have emphasized the autonomy of school leadership teams, headed by principals, to make and carry out these plans. The schools have even been given control over how they use a certain amount of the money allotted by the board.

So, the selection of “district support” schools represents a new but limited level of intervention from the central office staff and its school improvement specialists.

“We monitor all of our school improvement plans, but with the comprehensive support schools it’s a more focused and frequent monitoring and more frequent and intensive support,” Phillips told the board.

Supported schools

This approach is not completely new this school year. After a review of 2018 CCRPI scores and other data, Wilson and staff quietly placed two schools – Langston Chapel Elementary School and Portal Middle High School – on “comprehensive support” last spring.

“We decided to have two comprehensive needs schools again this year,” Edwards said. “Two is about all that we can manage at that level of support.”

Administrators are keeping Langston Chapel Elementary in the comprehensive support category after it showed only a small increase, from 61.2 to 62.6, in overall CCRPI from 2018 to 2019.

CCRPI scores, reported on a 100-point scale, are based heavily on Georgia Milestones testing and more lightly on measures of reading ability, readiness for the next level and in the case of high schools, graduation rates.

Langston Chapel Elementary’s score in the School Climate Star ratings, issued at the same time as CCRPI, also remained the lowest among the local elementary schools, Edwards said.

But after Portal Middle High School’s middle grades CCRPI score rose significantly and its high school score slightly, PMHS has been moved up to the “targeted support” category.

Help for MLES

Meanwhile, Mattie Lively Elementary School is newly designated to receive comprehensive district support in 2020 after posting the lowest CCRPI score in the school system in 2019.

The school’s scores declined from 72.5 in 2017 to 62.2 in 2018 and 57.8 in 2019. In comparison, Bulloch County’s 2019 composite score for elementary schools was 74.8, while the statewide score for elementary schools was 77.1.

Additionally, MLES fell short of a goal, with all subgroups of students in all subjects, to close achievement gaps by 3%, Edwards noted. Subgroups include racial categories, students with disabilities, economically disadvantaged students and students learning English.

So the support team is planning a Georgia School Assessment on Performance Standards, or GSAPS, visit to Mattie Lively Elementary School in spring 2020 to develop a plan to be implemented beginning with the new school year in August.

“We’d love to be able to begin that work now, but that GSAPS visit is quite intensive, and then there’s a lot of data compilation that occurs afterwards,” Phillips said. “Someone else does that work, so we’re on their timeline.”

If the school improvement office and district leaders see specific things they can do to provide support to MLES during the current school year, they will do so, she added.

GSAPS evaluation visits were made to Langston Chapel Elementary and Portal Middle High last school year. These involved consultants from the Regional Educational Service Agency, or RESA, and the Georgia Learning Resources System, or GLRS, as well as members of the school system central office team, Phillips said.

Langston Chapel Elementary will not receive a new GSAPS audit, since it is now working through the plan made last year.

Mattie Lively Elementary and Langston Chapel Middle had been selected for targeted support last school year. Schools in this category do not undergo a comprehensive evaluation.

Targeted support

The five 2019-20 “targeted support” schools – Portal Elementary, Langston Chapel Middle, Portal Middle High, Southeast Bulloch High and Statesboro High – were selected for help for a variety of reasons.

“We might not feel like a school needs a big, comprehensive look and in-depth support, but they might be having a problem with a specific area,” Phillips said.

Portal Elementary experienced a 16.2-point dip in its CCRPI score, from 78.5 in 2018 to 62.3 in 2019. But this does not yet constitute a trend, since the school had a significant increase, from 71.9 to 78.5, the previous year, Edwards noted.

With Langston Chapel Middle School there are concerns for stabilizing the school climate and with “hiring issues,” she reported. Last school year LCMS had the lowest School Climate Star rating, 80.0, in the county, but this was still a three-star rating on the five-star scale.

School climate ratings are based heavily on student, parent and teacher surveys but also factor in attendance, student  suspensions and reports of substance  abuse, bullying or unsafe incidents.

For Portal Middle High, the support effort will “focus on ways to increase achievement in high school and sustain growth in middle school,” the administrators reported.

Southeast Bulloch High School is on the support list because, as Edwards observed previously, the state’s emphasis on improvement means that high-performing schools raise the bar for themselves. With a 79.0 this year, SEB High was still the Bulloch system’s top-performing high school but fell short of the new baseline of 80.2 established by its previous score of 84.2.

At Statesboro High, the problem was a drop in the four-year graduation rate, from 82.6% previously down to 73.7% of students graduating on time.

Administrators made a separate proposal for bolstering graduation rates in the high schools. That will be the subject of later stories.