Schools are honored in state ABC testing

Piney Creek School has the highest performance composite of the Alleghany County Schools, according to ABC testing results released Aug. 4 by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.

Piney and Glade Creek schools were named honor schools of excellence, while Sparta School and Alleghany High School were named schools of distinction.

The honor school of excellence designation is the highest possible honor a school can obtain in the state testing program. That means between 90 and 100 percent of students are at or above grade level and the school met goals set out by the federal No Child Left Behind program.

Below the school of excellence designations, the next highest honor in the program is school of distinction, which means between 80 and 89 percent of students are on or above grade level.

Glade, Piney and AHS each attained adequate yearly progress (AYP) in the federal testing program, as previously reported. However, Sparta School did not meet its progress goals for that testing program.

School officials cited large numbers of special needs students at that school as the reason it did not meet AYP. However, the state ABCs testing program follows a different set of guidelines.

According to the results, Piney Creek and Glade Creek students attained performance composite scores in the 90 percentile, scoring 91.7 percent and 90.3 percent, respectively. The percentile scores show the number of students at each individual school who are at or above grade level, according to the criteria of the test. Piney Creek’s score is up about two percentage points from 2004’s 89.5 mark, while Glade Creek’s score is down a miniscule amount from last year’s 90.7.

Sparta School’s scores slipped slightly from those of last year. The school’s performance composite is 88, compared to 90.4 the year prior. Alleghany High School’s performance composite is down slightly this year as well, decreasing from 83.4 percent in 2004 to 82.6 percent in 2005.

The annual accountability test underwent a change this year, according to Alleghany County Schools’ Testing Coordinator Frank Busic. “This is the second year that the State Board of Education found anomalies in the formulas that particularly pertain to the sixth grade,” Busic said. “Last year, the state board considered dropping the scores during two meetings, but held them in. This year, the results were taken out due to problems with the formula. Next year, we will have a whole new set of formulas.”

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