Education feature: District has plan for improving Clovis schools

Clovis High School is under the gun to get Adequate Yearly Progress exam scores up and Superintendent Rhonda Seidenwurm said the district has a plan.

After Clovis High School failed federal mandatory AYP exams for four years, the board of education adopted an alternative governance plan to help the school improve.

Clovis High School’s students were rated 32.5 percent proficient in math and 51.4 percent in reading for the 2007-2008 school year. The No Child Left Behind act of 2001, of which AYP is a component, requires 100 percent proficiency for all subgroups by 2014.

The alternate governance plan involves bringing in High Schools That Work, the Southern Regional Education Board’s site improvement initiative. The goal is preparing students for careers and further education by improving curriculum and instruction in high schools.

Seidenwurm said  the goal for Clovis High School is not focusing on getting certain subgroups to pass, but on overall improvement.

“The schools that are making AYP in New Mexico are, for the most part, the schools that are not large enough to have special education or English language learners,” Seidenwurm said. “Larger schools are more apt to have those groups.”

Seidenwurm said the school isn’t expecting each subgroup to make AYP.

“The deck is stacked against them. We’re concentrating on progress across the board,” Seidenwurm said.

Clovis High School is not in a unique position. Some 68 percent of all schools in the state didn’t meet AYP goals last year.

Deputy Education Secretary Catherine Cross Maple said the bar for AYP exams goes up each year.

“There are 37 different ways that schools can not make AYP,” she said. “No Child Left Behind requires all of us to concentrate and be transparent on our accountability.”

Cross Maple said the state education department makes sure to get involved when a school fails to make AYP and is forced into restructuring.

“We become very prescriptive about how the school should be using it’s resources,” she said.

Cross Maple said the state requires certain kinds of curriculum and proven practices must be used.