A look at Bartley Elementary MAP scores:
[]Bartley Elementary made the best showing for Fulton's third- fourth- and fifth-grade students in 2014.
The school saw big jumps in both English language arts - going from 47.2 percent of students scoring proficient or advanced in 2013 to 62.4 percent in 2014 - and in math - with 60.8 percent of students scoring proficient or advanced in 2014 versus 50.4 percent in 2013. Science, however, saw a drop from 51.4 percent of students scoring proficient or advanced in 2013 to 38.5 percent in 2014. See the accompanying sidebar to see a more-detailed breakdown of scores by grade level.
Principal Connie Epperson identified English and math as obvious strengths for the school.
"But more importantly, when you look at three years, we have seen growth (in those subjects) over the last three years, not just as a building, but at the grade levels," Epperson said.
She attributed that steady improvement in large part to implementation of the Professional Learning Communities system that buildings have been working on district-wide over the past several years.
"We're developing better strategies not only in our instruction, but in our data team processes," Epperson said. "We look at a lot of data. We're looking at data every other week and developing smart goals."
She said that data-driven focus has helped Bartley staff to identify weaker areas even within those stronger subject areas, for example, post-reading skills and developing strategies.
Epperson said the information gleaned from data showed students were struggling with those concepts, and as a result building staff is working on a new approach in which common language and strategies are used consistently at all grade levels to help improve performance.
"We've made a very focused effort to have all teachers do mini assessments and continue to assess until (students) get to where they need to be," she said.
The whole building is being held accountable to help meet the goal of improving those areas, with a data wall in they entry hallway that measures student skills and posts results from those assessments for each grade.
"It holds us accountable, and it's visible to our parents, it's visible to our students," Epperson said.
In the area of math specifically, Epperson said the biggest factor in the improved scores was the implementation of Accelerated Math last year, a program Bush Elementary has been using for several years and which Epperson said they had seen success.
"It gives students the opportunity for repeated practice," she said of the new instructional format.
Epperson said a building-wide effort to go increase access to technology also had an impact, particularly on students' ability to get that repeated practice.
"With our building going one-to-one (ratio of students tot technology) as much as possible for grades three to five has improved the ability to practice," she said. "I'm going to brag on one of my third-grade teachers who only had three students not perform at proficient or advanced, and the reason for that is she had Chromebook one-to-one most of the year. Any time you went into her classroom and there was a student who had completed a task, they were practicing on the Chromebook."
While a new teaching strategy was a boon for the math program, Epperson said it had the opposite effect for science.
"Obviously we need work," she said. "We had in place a new program, and teachers are going to have to make sure we're aligned as best we can with GLEs (grade level expectations) and that other things that should be on grade level are getting picked up. We need to fill some of the gaps there."
Epperson also identified writing as an area Bartley will be focusing on this school year.
"We feel like our students have all the pieces they need to be successful with that, but it was one of the poorer areas for performance," she said. "We're certainly going to work hard to try to address that."
Katherine Cummins can be reached at (573) 826-2418 or [email protected].