BANGOR (AP) – Seven years after the Maine Learning Results were adopted, schools are working to create local assessment systems to measure whether students are achieving state academic standards.

Seeking to get an idea of the progress being made on developing the series of tests, the Maine Department of Education is studying 18 schools around the state.

The assessments will be used to determine whether students progress to the next grade and whether they receive a diploma at the end of high school.

Officials plan to issue a report this summer documenting what surveyed schools have accomplished and whether they have found the state guidelines and assessment samples helpful.

“The report is a way for teachers in other schools to get ideas and see what’s working,” department assessment coordinator Pam Rolfe told the Bangor Daily News for a story published Wednesday.

The report also will contain information about what helped or hindered schools’ progress, assessment types, and how much time teachers have been given to work on assessment systems.

Schools will see that the local assessments are “being approached in a variety of ways, that there’s not just a single way to do it,” Rolfe said.

According to state statute, schools must have a comprehensive assessment system in place by June that includes both the state’s standardized test and a variety of other measures to demonstrate achievement.

If the Legislature approves a waiver requested by Susan Gendron, commissioner of the Maine Department of Education, students in the 2008 graduating class – this year’s eighth-graders – would be the first to show achieved standards.

School systems have a host of decisions to make around the assessments. Besides deciding the types of assessments to offer, school systems also must decide at what point during the grade span they plan to give them.

In SAD 22, Hampden Academy principal Ruey Yehle said the aim is to get most of the high school assessments done between ninth and 11th grades so students have time to take replacement tests.

School systems also must develop a policy that includes details about the types of interventions and replacement tests given to students who don’t perform satisfactorily on an assessment.

“The idea is that it’s not a gotcha’ type of assessment. Students who demonstrate low performance will have another opportunity,” Rolfe said.

Many schools have decided to incorporate a dual system in which students must continue to take certain prescribed courses for credit and also must pass a certain number of local assessments, officials said.

“This doesn’t change too much about what a student experiences at high school, except for an important shift in awareness about needing to pass all of the assessments,” said Craig Kesselheim, curriculum coordinator at Union 98 in the Bar Harbor area. “You could scrape by with a low grade and still get credit for a course, but you can’t fail the common assessment and still graduate.”

Starting in either 2007 or 2008, depending upon when the Learning Results kick in, each school system is expected to record and calculate student performance information and to report annually the number that did not meet, partially met, met, or exceeded the standard on each assessment.

No guidelines have been established yet on how this is to be done.

For the state’s survey, 18 school systems were chosen last fall based on a number of characteristics, including location, size and progress of the development of their local assessment systems.

The data are still being compiled, but preliminary results indicate that work on the assessments has gone smoothly in those schools “where there is strong leadership, dedicated staff and provision for time to do this work,” Rolfe said.

AP-ES-04-28-04 0216EDT