"The Albemarle County school division failed to meet federal achievement goals for the first time in three years, according to a report released Thursday by the Virginia Department of Education.

Four of the division’s five middle schools failed to show Adequate Yearly Progress - a rating system integrated into schools and divisions nationwide by the 2001 No Child Left Behind law. Burley, Henley, Sutherland and Walton middle schools did not show sufficient progress.

In those schools, the pass rate in math - specifically among low-income students - did not meet federal benchmarks and was a major reason why the division did not pass.

“For us, we have work to do in sixth and seventh grades,” Superintendent Pam Moran told the School Board at its meeting Thursday. “The kids that are in standard-level mathematics are the group in which we have some significant work to do.”

Greer, Yancey and Agnor-Hurt elementary schools also did not make AYP this year.

The federal government measures progress by using results from the state’s Standards of Learning tests, taken by students in certain grades each spring.

Seventy-three percent of students in six student groups - including low-income - had to pass the reading SOL test this year and 71 percent were required to pass the math exam for a school division and an individual school to meet AYP benchmarks. The pass rates will rise each year until 2014, when No Child Left Behind has stipulated that all schools and divisions reach 100 percent in both subjects.

The student groups for which school divisions must report test scores are low-income, white, black, Hispanic, students with disabilities and limited English.

Bruce Benson, assistant superintendent for instruction, told the board that the margin by which the division failed to show progress this year was slim.

If 11 more students out of 1,350 in the division’s low-income subgroup had passed the SOL math test and 55 more low-income students out of 1,168 had passed the SOL reading test, the division would have made AYP, Benson explained.

“In a division of this size, that’s not a lot of kids,” he said in an interview earlier Thursday.

There are 12,747 students in county schools, according to last year’s Sept. 30 enrollment count.

“I want to stress that it’s important that every kid counts,” Benson said. “So that is not acceptable. That is work that we are going to do to ensure that every school makes AYP and the division makes AYP in this coming year. Every kid counts – I think it’s incredibly important that all of our administrators understand that because you can be as close as we are and still not make it.”

He cited new math specialists working in the county’s middle schools this year as a way in which improvement can be made.

The state Department of Education will release accreditation ratings in mid-September offering a more detailed statewide look at student achievement based on SOL scores in English, math, history and science." (Matt Deegan, The Daily Progress, August 23, 2007)