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By Suzanne Bates MERRIMACK -- The school district is looking into whether some miscalculations were made in the New England Common Assessment Program test scores for 11th-grade students. The scores in math, reading and writing for Merrimack High School 11th-graders were lower than state averages, which is unusual for the high school, and were significantly lower than last year's scores. Assistant Superintendent Debbie Woelflein said the district has discovered some "data anomalies" related to the scores and that some of the district's students who are going to school outside the district may have inadvertently been counted along with other students. Their scores for the test would have been zero, said Woelflein. In the meantime, the district is celebrating some of its successes related to the test scores, which were released last month. Special education students showed solid increases in some grades. "In some cases, we're seeing an increase of 20 to 44 percent over last year's grade level scores," said Woelflein. The district is also making an effort to "follow the child" -- a state-led initiative to determine whether individual students are improving year to year. Under requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, this year's juniors are compared with last year's juniors. The state is trying to get districts to measure how a group of students is doing from one year to the next. For example, last year's seventh-graders at Merrimack Middle School who are now in eighth grade showed an 8 percent improvement in their math scores over last year's figure, said Woelflein. Principal Tom Levesque credited the improvement to increased coordination and collaboration among teachers, especially between teachers at the middle school with teachers at the upper elementary school and the high school. The district's designation as a District In Need of Improvement under No Child Left Behind is based on an "adequate yearly progress" measurement. That measurement will not be determined until spring. Woelflein said it was too early to know whether the district met adequate yearly progress this year. "It is very difficult to predict AYP because of all of the computations and the fact that students get credit for partial proficiency," she said. |
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