The Maine Department of Education is expected to release a revised list of failing schools in February, factoring for the first time the tests of low-income and severely disabled students.

Officials have worked since October to amend the list of 124 schools whose students failed to make progress on a state test during the 2002-03 school year.

Because Maine had problems identifying low-income students and because it hadn’t planned on including the test scores of severely disabled students, the revision is taking a month longer than expected.

“We’re still working it through,” said Jackie Soychak, learning systems policy director for the Maine Department of Education.

Under the No Child Left Behind Act, a 2002 federal education reform law, there are more than 30 ways that schools can make the failing list.

Among the ways to fail: if students didn’t take or didn’t score high enough on the state’s standardized test, if they missed too many days of school or if they didn’t graduate at a high enough rate.

Schools also made the list if any sub group of students, including immigrants and minorities, didn’t meet the requirements. In February, two new sub groups will be added to the mix: the severely disabled and the poor.

Maine planned to include the performance and participation of low-income students when it released the list last October. But the state had determined poverty by asking students whether they had Internet access at home, a method that educators fought by saying some poor families have Internet access while some affluent families don’t. The state decided not to put schools on the list for their low-income students until it had a better way to identify them.

For February’s revised list, the state will deem students “low-income” if they qualify for free or reduced lunches.

Maine had not planned to include the assessment of severely disabled students for 2002-03 at all.

Instead, the Department of Education was going to pilot a program that allowed schools to evaluate such students using alternate assessments and portfolios in place of standardized testing. The information was not supposed to determine a school’s success or failure.

“The feds told us, ‘Sorry. You need to enter that data,'” Soychak said.

According to Soychak, the U.S. Department of Education told the state it had to use the information gathered during the pilot program if its schools wanted to count those special education students as testing participants. Without those kids, Soychak said, a number of schools would have failed because they weren’t testing enough students.

She said officials are not sure how well the newly included special education students did on the assessments. If they scored poorly, that could force additional schools onto the failing list.

“We can’t be sure until we see the data,” she said.

The revised list is expected to be released sometime in February.

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