EVMS’ State of the School a ‘reality check’ on academics

Eagle Valley Middle School Principal Lee Conley says students are unable to recite their multiplication table.  

“I tell them, ‘Give me what 5 times 2 is,’ and they can’t hold up five fingers,” he said. “We literally have kids who are that low. That’s where we need to do something.”

Conley said he was worried when he and administrative staff provided a “State of the School” presentation for families on Sept. 26.

For Conley, the update served as a reality check on where the school stands in terms of student performance and the work ahead to help them — and getting the word out on both.

Primary concerns touched on Eagle Valley’s recent success in rising from a one-star to a two-star school according to the Nevada School Performance Framework.

Eagle Valley gained 8 points on its star rating, which is based on student performance according to different academic and non-academic measures. Total points, added together to produce an overall score, are converted into a star rating based on a 1 to 5 scale.

Eagle Valley’s jump indicates growth in proficiency and its ability to meet certain targets in math, English language arts or science by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) or Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test scores.

Conley said this year, there are students committed to interventions in math and reading based on their MAP testing from August and September.

“It’s those kids that are performing in the lowest quintile of 0 to 20% of MAP testing,” he said. “We put them in interventions, and we had to take them out of an elective and put them in interventions and they are with some of our best teachers and learning the basic math functions.”

But there’s still a long way to go to make that five-star, high-achieving ranking for the school.

Conley said, “we didn’t do a good job last year” communicating to families. Some of Eagle Valley’s biggest needs are engagement and interventions to get its students up to grade-level achievement.

“We have to take them out of an elective and put them in these interventions for a semester and we give them a strong enough foundation,” he said.

Some students are unable to process a basic article or story. If asked to summarize a book or passage’s main ideas or characters, he or she might get frustrated, Conley said.

“We’re asking them to dive deeper into books, but a lot of them can’t read fluently,” he said. “Writing is a whole other story. I was pretty good at deciphering bad handwriting. Now, the kids’ writing is so below what it should be.”

Conley said on a positive note, a recognition program has been implemented to recognize students who are SBAC proficient. The suggestion came from Seeliger Elementary School Principal Kari Pryor, whose school is one of three to feed into Eagle Valley. Students this year received certificates and chocolate chip cookies during an assembly. Plans are to go to Carson High School and recognize the freshmen who took the tests as eighth graders as well. Efforts are to help eliminate apathy about education, he said.

“They never know how they did; and it doesn’t matter to them, so it was cool because all three — Empire, Fremont and Seeliger (schools) teachers and an administrator had certificates made,” he said. “It was just that recognition.”

COnley also alluded to Mayor Lori Bagwell’s Attendance Hall of Fame campaign, which has helped motivate students get back into the classrooms and decrease the school’s challenge with chronic absenteeism.

“We want to be as informative and transparent as we can,” he said. “We gave the same presentation to staff a week before (State of the School) so they knew the information and told them we’ll share it with the parents so they knew.”