In recent weeks, Fair Grove Schools received scores from the Missouri Schools Improvement Program (MSIP), which rates a school based on college and career readiness, attendance, graduation rate, and academic achievement. According to this annual performance report from Scripps Media, Fair Grove scored within the top ten percent of the state, with an overall 98.9 percent, while the state average as a whole was held at 91.3 percent for the 2014-2015 school year.
Mike Bell, the school’s superintendent, addressed how the scores are calculated, saying almost all of the academic achievement scores are based off of the state assessments the students took during elementary and middle school, as well as End of Course (EOC) exams done every year for specified classes in high school. Attendance percentage is evaluated by figuring if ninety percent of students are attending school ninety percent of the time. Graduation rate is scored by the number of students who graduate within a four to five year period and do not drop out of school.
Chris Stallings, the high school principal, says it is important to have state mandated testing, but it is constantly changing. The main focus is to learn content taught, opposed to a test. Stallings goes on saying, “We always want to get better every year. Each year we strive to ensure we don’t lose students as dropouts, increase our attendance rate, and raise our ACT scores. Regardless of how well we do the previous year we always set a goal to improve in those respective areas.”
Stallings comments further, indicating while these scores are a great way to provide feedback on the work of teachers, it cannot become just a focus on scores, to where the big picture is lost. As a school district, the want is there to do better than the previous years. The goal at the beginning of each new school year is for every teacher and administrator to be better at what they do and further aid their students.