FARMINGTON – It was no surprise that talk centered around the recently released list of schools failing to make adequate progress on the No Child Left Behind standards at Tuesday evening’s SAD 9 board meeting.

SAD 9 has three schools on the list. Two, Academy Hill School in Wilton and Cascade Brook School in Farmington, were cited for having under 95 percent of students taking the required standardized test.

Academy Hill had 94.4 percent of students participate and Cascade Brook had 94 percent.

Students are considered not having participated if they skip over one section of the test, Superintendent Michael Cormier noted to the board, who spent much of the portion of the meeting that focused on the list grumbling among themselves and shaking their heads.

Both schools’ performance results were within state standards, or higher.

Meanwhile Mount Blue Middle School was placed on the list for falling slightly short in academic performance in one sub population, (for example: African-American, females, males, students without disabilities). Overall on average, students met or exceeded the state’s expectations of where they should be academically.

Administrators declined to specify the subgroup, with Cormier saying he didn’t want to place the burden of a school being placed on the monitor list on one group of children.

The district is deciding on a course of action to get these schools off the list by next year and to prevent others from being cited.

Assistant Superintendent Susan Pratt has said the district plans to notify parents of children at monitor-status schools and explain what it all means.

There are also plans to pour over the data and look at ways to improve the testing environment for students to both raise scores and attendance and at the middle school where performance was below what the state wanted, possibly rework some programming.

Students will take the Maine Educational Assessments in March and those scores will determine what schools make the list next fall, so the district must act fast if it wants to make changes, Pratt said. “This is only the beginning, folks,” she said.

Facilities status

Assessments aside, Cormier noted that at several facilities, improvements needed to be made.

Academy Hill’s elevator will need around $20,000 in renovations to bring it up to code and asbestos needs to be removed from around one of the furnaces at the Mallett School.

Cascade Brook’s gym floor may need to be renovated or redone, Cormier said. Water that has seeped in below the floor has caused some of the boards to rot and to buckle.

On a more positive note, the district was recently awarded grant money thanks to a Clean Air Bus grant. The money will be used to improve exhausts on all buses built from 1995 on in order to reduce air pollution.

In other matters, the board approved:

• Field trip requests for a group of 16 female singers of “Syncopations” from Mount Blue High School to travel to New York City in March to participate in the National Women’s Honor Choir and perform at Carnagie Hall.

• A request for 12 students, also from the high school, to go to France on exchange for a little more than two weeks in February.

sdepoy@sunjournal.com

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