Hamilton County school board members did not lay blame for the district’s low TCAP scores on anyone outside the room during Thursday night’s nearly four-hour meeting.
“When it comes to accountability [about TCAP scores] it is us and you,” board member Greg Martin said to Schools Superintendent Rick Smith during a work session ahead of Thursday’s business meeting.
Member Rhonda Thurman added, “I don’t blame the teachers and I don’t blame the principals. It’s the school board and the administrators to blame for these scores.”
And member Jonathan Welch asked, “Is there anything we are really looking at doing differently this year?”
Smith told the board that accountability “rests with all of the community we won’t change until our community changes.”
He several times stressed the need for community involvement, citing increased funding and support. He also said he is confident in the “solid” and “well-thought out” plan for student instruction this school year, with student literacy at the crux.
Becky Coleman, director of literacy for Hamilton County schools, presented the revised plan for increasing literacy in elementary schools, which includes shuffling Hamilton County’s 20 literacy coaches from higher-achieving schools to those that don’t score as well. These coaches, who used to split their time evenly between schools, will now spend more time in the district’s Title I schools, which are predominantly poor and have historically lower test scores.
The district is focusing on “building fundamental literacy skills,” Coleman said. The focus is on the youngest students, as data show that children who can’t read on grade level from the beginning will only fall farther behind as they move through school.
The board also heard from Kirk Kelly, director of testing and accountability, about the new state-mandated achievement test, TNReady.
In an earlier meeting, board members were told that seven weeks of school would be devoted to testing and that teachers would lose between 30 and 40 percent of their instructional time.
Kelly clarified Thursday how the “drafted times” discussed in the previous meeting represented the chunk of time an entire school would spend on testing. But, he said, any individual student would actually be in tests for three hours at most during that time.
He did not mention, and board members didn’t ask, what the students would be doing during the remaining hours of the school week when they were not taking their one test.
Kelly explained how TNReady tests are not that much longer than the previous TCAP tests, saying TNReady will consume more of a school’s time because it is not taken on paper and pencil but on computers, and many schools are not equipped with enough devices to test entire grades simultaneously. That means they will have to test in blocks, which will restrict access to computers for up to an entire week while the school is testing.
“If we get more devices we’ll spend less time doing this and buy more instructional time for a school,” Kelly said.
During the regularly scheduled meeting that followed, the board voted unanimously to change its public comment, a reform that UnifiEd, a local public education advocacy group, has been pushing for.
The original policy said members of the public had to sign up to speak before the board three days prior to the meeting. The new policy amends this, also allowing three additional members of the public to sign up to speak the day of the meeting.
Smith also praised a “very positive, good first week of school.”
Smith said that as of last week, all but four teaching positions in the district had been filled and they “we’ve seen many more people apply to work in Hamilton County schools.”
He also added that attendance has increased by almost 700 students over last year, according to the fifth day of school attendance records from both years.
“We are growing, we are growing rapidly,” he said with a smile and shake of the head.
Contact staff writer Kendi Anderson at kendi.anderson@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6592.