By Megan Kelley

Review Writer

The Lake Orion Community Schools Board of Education met for a regularly scheduled meeting on Oct. 13 where, as has become a semi-regular occurrence, they were joined by district Data Specialist Missy Butki who presented the fall 2021-2022 student achievement data.

Butki has presented student achievement data roughly three times a year for the past few years; covering the student achievement data from the fall, winter and spring semesters.

As with her previous presentations, the data presented at the Oct. 13 meeting was collected among Kindergarten through eighth-grade students district-wide using nationally-normed benchmark assessments for reading and math. These assessments are done through state-approved vendor, FastBridge Learning.

Past presentations have shown slight dips in student achievement since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the previous data analyses have allowed the district to add intervention and support staff to the grades that were struggling to meet benchmarks.

To begin her presentation, Butki reminded the board of how long it had last been since students had seen a “normal” school year, pointing out that students in grades K-2 have never seen a “normal” school year, and the last “normal” year for the district’s seventh graders was when they were in just fourth grade.

State benchmark assessments are traditionally done three times a year; due to the COVID-19 pandemic, state assessments over the past few years have changed drastically. In the spring of 2020, students did not take a state assessment and in the spring of 2021, participation in state assessments were waived. While participation requirements changed those years, benchmarks did not.

“Keep in mind, the benchmarks, or the targets, did not change. So, the same targets that were for all of our assessments in 2019 are exactly the same targets that our students have to hit in 2021,” Butki said.

According to the Michigan Department of Education, disrupted learning during the pandemic did cause a dip in state assessment scores.

“The COVID-19 pandemic created significant challenges to instruction during the 2020-21 school year, and fewer than 75 percent of students took the assessment, with some subjects having as few as 50 percent taking the assessment. As a result, the data from the Spring of 2021 assessments should be used with caution and comparing it to previous years’ data is not advisable,” read the statement from the MDE.

LOCS, however, surged ahead and compared the data anyway, keeping the MDE’s advice in mind while analyzing it.

Overall, in English Language Arts (ELA) and in Math, from 2018-19 to 2020-21, nearly every grade took a dip in proficiency except in 11th grade where students took the SAT.

“That could have resulted in the fact that because participation was not required, the students who took the SAT wanted to take the SAT,” Butki said.

Though proficiency in math and ELA dropped across most grades at Lake Orion Schools, the district still outperformed the state, with most grades in LOCS scoring at least 10 percent higher in proficiency than their counterparts in the state.

Currently, after fall benchmark testing, the district’s K-1 students are at 63 percent proficiency in reading and 94 percent proficiency in math while the district’s 2-8 students are 72 percent proficiency in reading and in math.

At the beginning of the year, the district’s K-1 students are normally at about a 75 percent proficiency level in reading and math, Butki said.

Heading into the fall 2021-22, district data shows the percentage of second graders marked as high-risk of not meeting reading benchmarks spiking from 8-17 percent over the past year. The second grade class also jumped from 10 percent being high risk of meeting math benchmarks last year to 17 percent being high risk this year.

Last year, district data showed the first graders being most at risk.

“Those were our Kindergarteners who left (at the onset of COVID) and then we had some remote learning that we were all working on in the fall,” said Butki.

In 2019-20, that Kindergarten class, the class of 2032, had 92 percent of those students meeting reading benchmarks. That winter, the proficiency went up to 94 percent just before the COVID-19 pandemic and schools were forced to switch to remote learning.

When the students returned in the fall of the 2020-21 school year, 81 percent were still meeting reading benchmarks. The percentage dipped again in the winter of the 2020-21 school year to 74 percent.

In the spring, however, the district started putting more intervention resources into that class which brought the percentage of students meeting reading benchmarks to 88 percent. After returning to school after the summer, the class did undergo what Butki calls a “summer slide” or slight regression in performance after being out of school for the whole summer, students in the class of 2032 are currently sitting at 83 percent proficiency in reading.

“These are now our current second graders who are the highest at-risk. But as you can see with the way that we put our interventions in place and use our data, we are going to grow that group again,” Butki said.

With all of this data, the district is aiming to choose the right interventions.

“It’s one thing to collect the data, it’s one thing to show pretty graphs about the data but really, it has to work for us. So, putting this data to work, we’ve done a more detailed focus on making the data-driven decisions to choose the right interventions and using them with fidelity,” Butki said. “So, what we’ve done is we’ve added interventions for students based on what the data is telling us they need. We’ve added some phonics awareness for that K-1 group, some more phonemic awareness for grades 2-3, building vocabulary in grades 6-8, a new writing intervention in grades 3-5, and a Read 180 (program) in grades 6-12. In math, we’re adding a couple new interventions in grades 4-8 and then in the high school we are adding a benchmark assessment for all algebra 1 students this year.”

The district is also making use of the data with social emotional learning.

“Using our same system with Fastbridge Learning, students take a short survey and teachers make a brief observation and that data is going to help us decide what our buildings need, our grade levels, or our students,” Butki said. “It’s a little screener, doesn’t take long. We’re using that right now with K-5 and the student survey with 4-8.”

Additionally, LOCS is also creating social emotional committees to provide targeted intervention and are both adopting and maintaining other programs throughout all grade levels.

Butki is expected to return to the board with more data in the winter.