Alamance-Burlington school board members heard a presentation on the school system’s academic results for 2024-25 that the newly-hired assistant superintendent of academics for ABSS largely attributed to “budgets and buildings.”
See last week’s coverage of the state’s determination that ABSS school system was one of the 20 worst ‘low-performing’ systems in the state: https://alamancenews.com/state-designates-abss-school-system-as-low-performing-one-of-20-worst-in-state/
“We know that through the financial difficulties, many [assistant principal] positions were cut,” ABSS assistant superintendent of academics Dr. Sean McWherter said Tuesday afternoon during a presentation on the latest School Performance Grades for ABSS.
The assistant principal positions that McWherter referenced had been cut from the budget for 2024-25 as ABSS sought to close a $4 million budget deficit for the fiscal year that ended on June 30.
APs, along with many other school positions, are funded by the state and based on each school’s enrollment. The state-funded portion of the budget for ABSS for 2024-25 covered the salaries and benefits for 22 APs at 36 schools, based on a budget presentation the school board heard in May 2024.
The number of assistant principal (APs) positions funded by the state had been roughly the same for years, but ABSS subsequently used a portion of its county-funded budget to cover the salaries and benefits for positions above and beyond the number funded by the state, then-superintendent Dr. Dain Butler told the board in February 2024.
Meanwhile, omitted from McWherter’s presentation to the board on Tuesday afternoon was any mention of the fact that ABSS has been designated by DPI as one of 23 low-performing school districts across the state.
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Coming in as the 20th lowest among 115 school districts in the state, ABSS has been labeled a low-performing district after a majority of its schools – 20 out of 36, or 55.6 percent – received a School Performance Grade of D or F for 2024-25, based on the latest student achievement data that DPI released last Wednesday, September 3.
Twenty schools (55.6 percent) received a School Performance Grade of D or F; and 16 schools (44.4 percent) received a C or better, according to DPI. Twenty ABSS schools are now designated as low-performing after receiving a D or F; and 19 schools are designated as continually low-performing, most of which overlap with those on the low-performing list, after receiving a D or F for two of the last three school years.
The state’s annual A to F School Performance Grades are intended to give parents and the public a snapshot of the percentage of K-12 public school students who were performing at grade level (i.e., grade-level proficient) by the end of the school year or, at the high school level, by the end of a course.
Eighty percent of each school’s letter grade is based on the percentage of students whose End-of-Grade and End-of-Course test scores indicated that they were grade-level proficient in reading, math, and science, though the grades for high schools reflects a number of other academic indicators, such as the four-year graduation rate (see related story, this edition).
Twenty percent of each school’s A to F letter grade is based on whether students met expected academic “growth” targets during the school year, as measured by the state’s “Education Value-Added Assessment System” (EVAAS). The statewide system generates reports and “scatter plots” (by school, class, and student) to predict academic performance and help teachers make “data-driven decisions” about the effectiveness of their instruction and identify gaps in individual students’ and/or groups of students’ understanding of the subject matter, according to the company that developed EVAAS.
“My understanding is we haven’t done a lot with the board as far as individual school scores,” McWherter told the board Tuesday afternoon. “That’s something we want to change.”
For an example, McWherter said that students who are struggling with basic skills, such as “reading fluency,” would receive “intensive tutoring” at their schools. School officials will also communicate with parents and guardians about their children’s gaps in learning (or proficiency) and encourage them to work with their children at home, he said. Something as simple as asking a parent to read with a child for an extra 15 minutes a day could go a long way toward improving students’ academic progress, McWherter said.
Superintendent: ABSS is going to get serious about academics
“One of the things we are going to have to take a look at among our academics team,” ABSS superintendent Dr. Aaron Fleming said, “is are we going to continue tutoring at this [particular] school – whatever it may be. I think a lot of things will have to change.
“We can’t just do something after school and call it tutoring,” the superintendent said Tuesday. “We are going to have to have conversations with [school leaders] about what is approved tutoring in ABSS. I won’t say all [but] I will say a majority of our programs that had tutoring were in schools that went backward.
“A lot of the field trips you’ve seen approved over the last year will probably not going to get approved this year,” Fleming added. “We need students in school from the first bell until the last bell. I just wanted to make sure I threw that out there, because I’m sure there will be calls.”
“I remember when it was around Thanksgiving or Christmas that I kind of alerted board members, ‘hey, things aren’t going so well with academics.’ It ended up worse than even I thought it would be.”
– ABSS superintendent Dr. Aaron Fleming
Fleming acknowledged later in the discussion that he became concerned about the academic performance in late 2024. “I remember when it was around Thanksgiving or Christmas that I kind of alerted board members, ‘hey, things aren’t going so well with academics.’ It ended up worse than even I thought it would be.”
“I think the facility issues [have] impacted learning,” the superintendent added. “I think when friends were cut from jobs [that] had an impact – new principals. Some may say those are excuses; to some extent, they may be. I can just tell you, where we’re at is temporary.”
Other strategies for improvement
McWherter outlined several other strategies for the school board that he said will be used to target gaps in learning.
Those strategies include the statewide Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS), which uses data to identify and support students “with varying academic, behavioral, and social-emotional needs,” including through individualized instruction, according to DPI.
ABSS had implemented MTSS years ago, in keeping with a statewide mandate that all N.C. public school systems implement the system by July 1, 2020.
Another strategy that McWherter briefed the board on is Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), which the school system had also implemented several years ago.
ABSS officials have traditionally incorporated MTSS and PBIS strategies into previous School Improvement Plans (SIP) they were statutorily required to develop for each school designated as low-performing by the state. State law also requires the school board to approve the SIPs for each low-performing (or continually low-performing) school before the plans before they can be submitted to the State Board of Education for review and approval.
The Alamance News asked school officials Tuesday afternoon how these strategies – as well as others mentioned by McWherter, such as “structured professional development” and professional learning communities (PLCs) in which teachers collaborate on effective instructional practices – differ from the same types of strategies that ABSS has used in the past. The newspaper had not received a response by press time Wednesday night.
Three-year contract for $503K to create data warehouse proposed
Meanwhile, McWherter asked the school board Tuesday afternoon to consider approving a three-year contract, for a total cost of $503,812, with a company in Cincinnati, Ohio, to create a data warehouse (or online dashboard) that McWherter said would enable ABSS officials and teachers to assess academic performance and related data in real time.
School board members weren’t asked Tuesday afternoon to approve the contract for the data warehouse; voting items are typically presented for a vote at the evening “business” meeting each month.
The proposal elicited reservations about the potential return on investment from school board members Drs. Eric Hall and Charles Parker.
“You create something [and] eventually it kind of dies on the vine,” Parker said.
School officials told the newspaper later Tuesday afternoon that a data warehouse that ABSS had launched in August 2014 to monitor student progress ultimately “was not sustained internally” afterwards.
‘It is alarming’
School board members expressed mixed reactions following the presentation on the academic performance results for 2024-25.
“The board saw this data over the last couple of weeks, and it’s not good,” school board member Avery Wagoner acknowledged. “But I do believe this will improve moving forward…You can’t manage what you don’t measure. I think now we’re at least trying to measure where we’re at academically.”
School board vice chairman Dan Ingle pressed McWherter to elaborate on “why we are where we’re at now.” Ingle also opined that the Covid-19 pandemic, which the World Health Organization declared an end to in May 2023, is continuing to affect academic performance.
The assistant superintendent said, “I think [not] having supports from [the Central Office]; departments that were not fully staffed; the lack of focusing and teaching what students were being assessed on. Again, none of those are a singularity.”
School board member Seneca Rogers said, “For our educators, our principals, our staffs, our students – those letter grades do not define you. Those letter grades are not what your school, your teacher, your community is. They’re just what it is. I want our teachers, students, principals to understand, I feel like the board, as a collective, are in support of them.”
“When we got this data last week, it was hard to swallow. Whether we agree with the state metric, it is what it is; it is a tool.
“[The board and administration] need to do whatever they can to get these schools off the low-performing list.
“It’s not a discussion we should have six months, or a year, from now. We need to be talking about this every meeting. . . This is a gut-check for all of us.”
– ABSS school board chairman Sandy Ellington-Graves
School board chairman Sandy Ellington-Graves acknowledged, “When we got this data last week, it was hard to swallow. Whether we agree with the state metric, it is what it is; it is a tool.”
Though she said she’s optimistic about the strategies that McWherter outlined, Ellington-Graves urged the board and administration need to do whatever they can “to get these schools off the low-performing list.
“It’s not a discussion we should have six months, or a year, from now,” the chairman continued. “We need to be talking about this every meeting.
“For parents and the community – I see the comments,” Ellington-Graves said, apparently referring to messages posted on social media about the 2024-25 academic performance results for ABSS. “Some are spot on; I see some that are totally heartbreaking. This data…does not mean that our students, teachers, our administrators are not doing good things in our schools. It is alarming. We should never lose focus on academics. We’ve got to learn to cut the noise out. This is a gut-check for all of us.”
