District report cards released

New Mexico Secretary of Education Hanna Skandera released the 2016 School District Report Cards for each of the state’s 89 public school districts Tuesday, with Clovis Municipal Schools garnering a C letter grade while the Grady and Texico school districts weighed in with A grades. Melrose Municipal Schools received a B.

The grade on Portales Municipal Schools’ 2015-2016 district report card was a B — up from a C for 2014-2015. Dora Schools received an A, while Elida, Floyd and Fort Sumner Schools all received a B.

Officials said the district grade is determined by the average of school grades in each district. According to NMPED statistics, 49.4 percent (44) of the state’s 89 public school districts received a C grade while 22.5 percent (20) garnered a D.

Just 6.7 percent (6) received an A — with half of those As awarded to Curry and Roosevelt county schools — and 20.2 percent (18) received a B. Dulce Independent Schools received the lone F letter grade (1.1 percent).

New Mexico Public Education Department (NMPED) officials said each Local Education Authority (LEA) under the jurisdiction of NMPED annually receives a comprehensive report of their achievement, accountability, teacher qualifications and postsecondary success.

Clovis schools received a B grade in 2014-15 and a C in 2013-14 while Grady recorded an A grade the previous two years. Texico received an A grade last year and a B two years ago. Melrose bounced back from a D grade last year after garnering an A in 2013-14.

“We’re continuing to make progress,” Skandera said during a Tuesday media briefing prior to the release of the report cards. “The number of A and B grades by district are up over last year and the number of C and D grades have declined. The number of A and B grades are up by 3.3 percent since last year while the number of D and F grades are down by 13.5 percent. While we all recognize we still have work to do, we’re continuing the trend of making progress. We have high standards and have done a lot of hard work.”

NMPED officials said the report cards examine the LEA demographic profile, accountability, achievement (including proficiencies in reading mathematics and science), school board member training, budgeted expenditures, teacher credentials, post-secondary achievement and parent surveys on quality of education.

Clovis Municipal Schools Superintendent Jody Balch offered the following with regard to his district’s grade.

“The 2015-16 school district report card is from the work done in 2014-15 and we are in the 2016-17 school year,” he said. “The point being, there’s quite a time lag in the information being provided by the PED. There were not any PARCC scores on the report card for the 2014-15 time frame. The 2015-16 report card utilizes PARCC scores for the first time and I believe that’s possibly the difference in the district’s grade from one year to the other.”

For Portales, all elementary schools received either an A or B, Portales High a C and Portales Junior High a D. PMS Superintendent Johnnie Cain attributed his district’s score with a focus on improving scores on the PARCC.

“All of our scores came up except the junior high. Just about all of our scores in each of the subject areas came up as well. Hopefully we’re going to see that even rise next year,” he said. “I think we’re on the right path. We’ve just got to keep moving forward.”

In the case of PJHS, the only school whose grade did not improve from the last school year, Cain said that his district has introduced curriculum that will better align the school to common core standards for math and language arts.

“We’ve changed curriculum in the junior high school to Eureka Math, which is what we started at Lindsey last year, and we’ve had good results with it at Lindsey. It’s more aligned with the common core than the curriculum that we’ve had in the past,” he said. “By that better alignment — and the work is more similar to what the kids are going to be tested on — we think that we’ll see some gains from that.”

A large challenge for the district, according to Cain, has been a lack of professional development because of cuts in funding at the state level.

“For years, we’ve had professional development and all kinds of studies for reading, but they’ve not put that much into the math side, so finding that professional development to help us understand and teach common core math standards has been a little bit challenging,” he said.

Melrose Superintendent of Schools Jamie Widner said be believes PARCC scores also played a role in the letter grade the school district received.

“You have to remember that 2015 was the first school grades handed out after the initial administration of the PARCC test,” he said. “With the second administration of the PARCC my teachers and students knew more of what was expected and we fared much better on the test. I believe that’s the difference in the two grades. I still believe that teachers should teach students and not worry about the test. At Melrose we still want teachers to teach and not focus on the test. I want the test to take care of itself and I don’t believe the PARCC will make any difference in our students’ lives, but we have to be prepared so that the teachers’ evaluations and our school and district grades can be as good as possible.”

Grady and Texico school district officials did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Staff Writer Eamon Scarbrough contributed to this report.