Sunset staff offer improvement plan

Clinton City Schools recently wrapped up final approvals for the 2024-25 school improvement plans throughout the school system with staff from Sunset Avenue appearing before the Board of Education recently to present their plan, one focused on reaching a three percent proficiency increase.

Grouping the fields of reading, math and student with disabilities (SWD) into targeted goal areas was used universally within the city schools. For Sunset, the common factors of its plans were to — by 2025 — increase the overall proficiency in set subject by three percentage points.

Among other shared aspects with each school plan, that Sunset also implemented, was using collected student-driven data through proven support systems such as mClass and iReady, with mClass used for measuring reading and math skills, and iReady being used to help create personalized lessons per individual student.

The goal, as it’s been each of the schools, was reducing the amount of non-proficient students throughout the system by the end of the year.

While there’s much similarity between Sunset’s plan and that of the other city schools, an area of focus that wasn’t detailed in the recent LC Kerr and Butler Avenue plans was multilingual learner subgroup proficiency.

With the three percent growth margin set for the entire plan, the desire was to increase the 16.1 percent of the 2024 reading proficiency from the end of grade score .

“At Sunset Avenue, we teach English as a second language,” Sunset teacher Anna Parker said. “And to meet this goal, what we’ve already done is, at the beginning of the year, group the students according to their levels. That way, we could use our materials, like iReady, to help our newcomers. Dr. (Linda) Brunson and Mr. (Jeremy) Edgerton actually saw that in use. It’s been very, very helpful with our students who just got here from another country.”

She continued, “We also provide research-based language support materials to the content area teachers, and we attend their PLCs (professional learning community) just so that we know kind of what materials they need and that it aligns with their students needs.

Of the data sources Parker said used to reach those goals was monitoring of ML students proficiency throughout the year, along with tracking accommodations and instructional modifications used for those trackers.

“Honestly, the most important data piece that we really look at is that WIDA data for their access scores,” Parker said. “That’s what we actually use to determine which category of services those students need. Some students need services every day of the week. Some students maybe only need it three or four times a week. There are other times when we can just kind of push into their classrooms and help them as needed.”

WIDA (World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment) is a consortium which provides standards and assessments for English learners.

“There, of course, is the iReady data that is very important, as we know that’s very aligned with our EOG scores,” Parker said. “We look at past assessments, too, those are things the content teachers do, as well as the reading interventionists, with data from the common assessments and the EOG in their content areas.”

In breaking down Sunset’s other goal areas, the planned three percent proficient increase by 2025 from 2024’s reading EOG was 42.8 percent and math was 63.1 percent.

For SWD, the goal was to increase achievement over the next two years to remove the school’s current TSI (Target Support and Improvement) designation by 2026. As of 2023-24, SWD proficiency, measured also by EOG assessment, was 21.4 percent.

Concerns over the TSI designation were brought up by the Board of Education, but were put to rest by Dr. Theresa Melenas, executive director of instructional services.

“It’s actually a federal designation, and what they do is take a baseline, and gave us cut-off scores for 10 years at a time,” she said. “And so, over the 10 years, they’re supposed to, in theory, put us at 100 percent proficiency for students with disabilities.”

It’s when not meeting that set marker that the TSI designation is given, which Melenas said she didn’t like.

“When you don’t meet the threshold, or you’re not growing a specific percentage of students, you get a designation called targeted support and improvement (TSI),” she said. “Most of our schools have one for students with disabilities. As a former principal of a TSI school, if my kids were growing 85 percent or plus, which most of my kids were, and I was still not performing at a high level, I was happy with the growth, knowing that I will probably not get all of my students with disabilities at 100 percent proficiency. So I don’t think it’s a very fair federal designation. I think some of the target areas are a little lofty, but as long as we see increased growth in students, I think we’re on the right track.”

In the final segment of Sunset’s presentation, principal Nicole Carroll detailed data not included in their PowerPoint, which covered current growth. The data was classified between red, least non-proficient, and green, proficient.

“You saw a lot of iReady data from LC Kerr and Butler Avenue, and we shifted gears a little bit and talked about EOG data,” she said. “The one thing that we focus on at Sunset is how closely related iReady is to our EOG. So when we look at iReady predictions, we were within 20 to 30 kids of being exactly right with our proficiency.”

“She continued, “We have decreased our students that are two grade levels or more below red. We have decreased from 34 percent at beginning of year to 20 percent at middle of year. So to give you an idea of that, we’ve decreased the number of red students from 207 to 121 for math.”

Carroll said green numbers went from 15 percent proficient at beginning of year to 34 percent at middle year which increased student proficiency from 94 to 202.

“We exceeded our expectation goal by 10 percent for reds, and by 9 percent for green in math,” she said. “In reading, we’re just going to need this big celebration because we’re excited about this. Red in reading, we decreased from 44 percent BOY to 28 percent at MOY. So that is 256 students to 165 students, our greens, we increased from 19 percent to 35 percent, so our students on grade level in reading went from 108 students to 205 students. And we exceeded our red and green gold expectations by 10 percent as well.”