The reports provide the public with data related to academics, attendance, student growth, student discipline and more.
The state Department of Education has released its annual school performance reports, including those regarding the Evesham Township School District.
The annual reports provide members of the public with an overview of data related to academics, attendance, student growth, student discipline, per pupil expenditures and other information collected from local schools across the state.
According to ETSD Superintendent John Scavelli Jr., the recently released reports includes information from the most recently completed 2016–2017 school year.
“It’s based on data that we’ve already shared with the board,” Scavelli said. “So it’s the state taking all that data and putting it into their format.”
In addition to providing members of the public with a summary of collected data for a school, the report also measures whether schools have met their performance targets for the year in four key areas: academic achievement, academic progress and chronic absenteeism and a school’s participation rate as it relates to the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers exam.
According to Scavelli, the state Department of Education continues to utilize an annual state participation target rate of 95 percent for students at a school taking PARCC.
In the ETSD, the following schools met the participation target for their school-wide populations: Beeler Elementary School, Evans Elementary School, Jaggard Elementary School, Rice Elementary School, Van Zant Elementary School and DeMasi Middle School.
DeMasi Elementary School, Marlton Elementary School and Marlton Middle School did not reach the participation target.
According to Scavelli, also new this year, the state Department of Education established a statewide proficiency goal of 80 percent for students taking the PARCC exam.
Additionally, Scavelli said annual progress targets were developed for each subgroup of students within a school based on baseline data from assessments in previous years.
Even if a school doesn’t initially achieve the state’s proficiency goal of 80 percent, Scavelli said the progress targets are designed to increase the percentage of students scoring “proficient” on their exams in all subgroups by the 2029–2030 school year.
According to the report, while no school in the district had a school-wide student performance score of 80 percent last year, all schools except Van Zant Elementary met their annual progress target for the school-wide population.
Scavelli said the reports also measure students’ academic progress, formerly known as “student growth,” which measures how students grow from one year to the next when taking the PARCC exam.
According to Scavelli, all nine district schools met the state’s established growth targets for their school-wide populations.
For chronic absenteeism, Scavelli said the term is defined as students who are absent for more than 10 percent of the school year or the total possible days of attendance for an individual student.
For that area, Scavelli said all of the district’s schools measured except Marlton Middle School met the state’s average targets for their school-wide population.
Scavelli said the full school performance report for each of the district’s schools is available on the district’s website under the “shortcuts” tab on the website’s homepage at www.evesham.k12.nj.us.
