Alamance-Burlington school officials and their supporters were practically giddy this week over what they consider to be, as the superintendent put it, “a banner year for academics.”
Superintendent Dr. Aaron Fleming this week told a joint meeting of the school board and commissioners (convened to resolve the funding dispute between the two boards, see separate story elsewhere), “Every tested area has shown increases in proficiency; many of our schools achieved double-digit proficiency increases and growth across multiple grade levels and content areas.”
Fleming went on to make a very bold prediction, “When the Department of Public Instruction releases student growth data and School Performance Grades this fall, we anticipate that ABSS will be one of the most improved school districts across the state.”
Later in the day, at the school board’s monthly meeting, the school system with great fanfare unveiled preliminary results of its end-of-grade, end-of-course results, which were generally described in glowing terms.
We genuinely hope that the school system’s optimism and the superintendent’s hyperbolic prediction of significant progress prove to be true.
But we wouldn’t put money in the bank on it, just yet. Local school officials – in many cases predating Fleming’s tenure – have perpetually tended to make promises of improvement that have proven to be exaggerated if not totally vapid or outright false.
Let’s start with where the school system is, at least based on its most recent final results.
Largely absent from all of the glowing self-praise for this year’s test scores is any acknowledgement of the fact that ABSS has the very dubious distinction of having been labeled last fall as one of the 20 worst performing (of 115) school systems in the state.
ABSS has had poorly performing schools before. So, unfortunately, that was nothing new.
What was new in 2025 was the entire school system, itself, was now designated by the state Department of Public Instruction as ‘low- performing.’
More than 55 percent (20 of 36 schools, or 55.6 percent, to be exact) of ABSS schools were listed by the state as “low-performing” – and 15 of those as “continually low-performing,” meaning they had multiple years of low performance.
Now, interestingly, when the county’s commissioners asked ABSS officials last fall to come before them to discuss these results and the state’s findings, ABSS school board chairman Sandy Ellington-Graves refused.
The school board chairman and school officials always seem to have plenty of time to come ask the commissioners for money, but no time whatsoever to discuss academics or poor performance.
At any rate, what we’ll be interested to see is how well the county’s schools ended up performing on these end-of-grade, end-of-course test scores, which are largely the standard by which schools all across the state are measured.
One thing that is an early warning even amidst the rah-rah cheerleading about this week’s preliminary results is those schools (or grades) which are missing from the examples of improvement provided by the school system.
Oh, and by the way, we’ve asked the school system since Monday night’s school board meeting to get the individual school data that ABSS used in its summary dog-and-pony show at the school board meeting.
They haven’t provided it yet, so the newspaper’s ability to provide a more comprehensive examination of the school system’s own data at the individual school level is limited.
A small, but perhaps illustrative, example of our hesitation begins with the typo in the heading at the top of the front page of this week’s ABSS information: EOG/EOC Proficiency Tend (sic) Data; presumably it was supposed to have been Trend Data. We all make mistakes, to be sure, but one would have hoped more care would have been undertaken for such an ostensibly momentous announcement.
While the school system bragged at great length about the “improvement” in some of the areas of test scores, in several cases – even in their own propaganda – they acknowledge that, even with improvement, fewer than half of all students were at grade-level proficiency. That was the case for high school Math 1 and Biology.
In middle schools, despite some individual school “progress,” fewer than half of all students were proficient in English Language Arts (ELA) (6th, 7th, and 8th graders) and math (6th, 7th, and 8th graders). ELA supposedly captures students’ ability in reading, writing, and language comprehensive.
And in elementary schools – again while showing some improvement at individual grade levels at some schools – fewer than half of all third, fourth, and fifth graders were proficient in ELA, according to the school system’s own preliminary data.
Perhaps the best layman’s interpretation of the preliminary results can be that while many of the test scores are still pretty bad, at least they’re not as awful as they have been.
There’s a long way to go to climb out of being one of the 20 lowest-performing school systems in the state.
But we hope the final academic results will show that the school system has indeed turned a corner.
