001[music] Hello, Lockport Township High School District 205 parents and guardians. My name is Bob McBride, superintendent of Lockport Township High School District 205. This is a special board meeting brief for the board of education meeting we had right here in the porter room on Monday, October 27th. Every month we have [snorts] our regular board meetings, but this year this fall, our board met in a special session on October 27th to focus on perhaps the most important thing we do, and that's student achievement. Annually, our board of education asks for me to give a report on the student achievement the year before. What outcomes can we look at to understand how our students are academically succeeding? And how are our students academically struggling and we need to support them and move them in a new direction?
002I'm very proud to present this. This is our student academic achievement report. It's available in a hard copy, but also it'll be a flip book on our website that you can look through. This week, the Illinois school report card will be released later in the week. This report has many of the same measures as the Illinois school report card. Graduation rate, freshman on track to graduate, and our performance on Illinois's accountability test for high schools, which is the ACT, a college entrance exam. But we also include in this report many measures that the state of Illinois is not including in their report. You might ask why. Well, the reason behind that is that we believe that our students are more than a single score. It's really all of the different measures [music] that make up
003how our students are achieving [music] and also make us accountable to detect where they have had success and of course more importantly where they're struggling. This document is divided into five sections and if you'll bear with me for a moment I just want to give you a preview of each section encouraging you to look at the report itself. In section one, we took a look at a measure that is directly related to classroom performance. Grades. Grades determine a great deal. Tells us how our students are performing in their individual classes. Adds up to our graduation rate. Also tells us if our freshmen are on track to graduate. Our graduation rate for the class of 2025 is 97%. For freshmen leaving Central in 2025, 98.5% of them are on track to graduate. If we look at
004eight years of grades from our students, one of the things that we notice is that porters are increasingly taking more and more difficult classes and yet earning A's, B's, and C's as they encounter that difficulty. We've increased our A's, B's, and C's, and we've decreased [music] our Fs, which tells me as an educator that our students are doing a great job in their classes and responding to their teachers. And it tells me that our teachers are doing a phenomenal job in the classroom. If we go even further back, even before I was superintendent, I'm very lucky that our district was invested in looking at things that could impact student grades [music] that really didn't have anything to do with students cognitive abilities and their academic skills, attendance, [music] tardiness, lateness, participation. Our district really worked
005hard in 2015, 2016, 2017 [music] to look at how those issues can be certainly handled because they are important, but through different means, the dean's office through classroom management and to really focus in on students academic scores [music] and skills. 2018 we had a great increase in the number of A's, B's and C's and a real decrease [music] in Fs that started us on the path that you would see in this booklet. What it's led to is it led to, as I mentioned, Porters in more and more difficult classes doing [music] well, a very high graduation rate, and a very high rate of freshmen on track every year to graduate. A real thing to celebrate. Two other things to celebrate. This uh booklet also includes this report also includes our advanced placement performance. Over the
006past four years, we have had almost 800 students [music] who are new to the College Board's advanced placement courses. Not only have we had that infusion of students who typically would not have taken those classes through the good work of teachers structuring classes for them, school counselors recruiting them, and students willing to take a risk. But we've had that influx of students and yet our performance in terms of [music] students per passing advanced placement tests has only gone up by 10%. Similarly, if we look at dual credit, these are courses we offer right here in Lockport Township High School District 205 that are Joliet Junior College courses. If students complete that course and the exit exams from JJC, they receive [music] an actual college transcript from JJC. We right now sit, as this report indicates,
007out of 26 high schools that go to JJC, we are number one in terms of student participation, students earning college credit even before they graduate. Oftenimes parents will come to me and say, "Well, isn't all of that aimed at the students at the top of your school?" It really isn't. [music] Students earning top grades A, B, C, those are all of our students. [music] students new to advanced placement, those are average students, I guess we could call them, who suddenly [music] have started taking the nation's most rigorous courses. Students who go into dual credit, similarly [music] are students who are just our average students who now are earning college [music] credit. We also reported to the board something very, very important and that is how do porters participate in their environment? How do they get
008work internship skills, real work experiences before they even real career experience before they even leave high school? And how do they participate in the activity and athletics life of our school? Because we know that that increases grade point average. Our students are earning 40 uh community service credits to graduate. Our students are involved in internships with the city of Lockport and the village of Homer Glenn. Our students are working on campus in a variety of different roles. Our students are at Wilco and thousands of our students are involved in activities and athletics and it really shows in their GPA. The more they're [music] involved, the more they're performing. We ended really looking at the state's accountability system and that is the ACT test. Just to be clear, the state of Illinois requires for English language
009arts proficiency, math proficiency, and science proficiency, a single test in April of juniors only. So if you look at this report and you look at our proficiency, that is only that single test, a single group of students, juniors, and a a single day. Does it tell everything about our students? We don't think it does, but it does tell us very important things [music] about how our students have general skills in English, reading, math, science, and writing. The good news is when the Illinois school report card is released, you will see towards the end of the week that our proficiency rates have gone up and [music] that we've had above average and average growth. But we've also detected something we just all need to work on. [music] And that is something called complex reading proficiency. Every
010year that a student is in high school, she or he gets more and more and more complex reading that they have to consume before they go out to the military, to a junior college, a technical college, or a 4-year college. [music] We need to make sure that we are doing what we can do in the classroom to give students the most rigorous experience with difficult text. [music] We've detected that that's an area that we really need to work on and we're committed to it. And how are we doing that? Well, our board's doing a number of things. One, we're opening up an 8 period day at East Campus next [music] year to have the rigor of taking more classes. Two, [music] our board approved a test taking skills class so that students who might not
011have previously taken a class to help them on a test like the ACT can now do so. [music] And then three, we're acknowledging we need to do this work and we all need to commit to classroom strategies that put text in front of students and teach them at a high level how to deal with difficult text. Those are all things that we're [music] committed to. This report is definitely a celebration. There are incredible things that [music] our students and our teachers are doing and our school counselors are doing to support them. There are also areas that we need to work on and I really hope you get a chance to take a look at this online or you might get a hard copy in your hands to explore in depth more than just one measure.
012Many measures that make up an academically successful porter. [music] Thank you so much for listening to this board meeting brief for the special board meeting we had [music] on Monday, October 27th.