First Day of School and a Place to Focus

Today was the start of a new school year for many in the Jefferson Area schools. The Class of 2023 started their seventh grade experience at Jefferson Junior/Senior High School and the rest of the students will follow tomorrow. Teachers and school staff are recharged and ready to go for a new school year.

The Jefferson Success Pathway is a collective impact project involving many community partners that is focused on making sure that every child in the 80214 area of Jefferson County can succeed from cradle to career. With 9 in 10 students in Edgewater Elementary, Lumberg Elementary, Molholm Elementary and Jefferson Junior/Senior High struggling to overcome the roadblocks of poverty, academic progress is harder than in more middle class Jefferson County schools.

But we firmly believe that together we can overcome the roadblocks of poverty and see students succeed into a great career. There are school models in Denver Public Schools, and elsewhere in the country, where students who face poverty roadblocks find academic success.

Today the Colorado Department of Education released the school results for the PSAT, SAT and CMAS (Colorado Measures of Academic Success) assessments. These academic assessments are one measure of how well a student is doing academically.

These results, along with the other data indicators that we track, will be compiled for our third annual Community Report which will be released later this fall.

One of the key values of our work is to use data as a flashlight to spotlight strategies that are working instead of using data as a hammer to discourage what isn’t working (thanks to Strive Together for this image). On the English CMAS assessment, Lumberg Elementary showed the most growth, while Molholm Elementary showed the most growth in math. What strategies are these schools implementing that have led to this growth? How can these strategies be replicated at the other area schools?

The results released today will provide a focus for our Collaborative Action Teams which will start meeting in the next month. It is important to remember that though professional practices in our schools are very important for student success, this work cannot be done by our schools alone. It truly takes a community to raise a graduate.

So here are the student achievement results for our focus schools that were released today.

3rd Grade Reading Milestone

3rd Grade CMAS English Language Arts Results

5th Grade Math Milestone

5th Grade CMAS Math Results

Growth Scores

According to the Colorado Department of Education, “A student’s growth percentile (ranging from 1 to 99) indicates how that student’s performance changed over time relative to students with similar score histories on state assessments. For example, a student in the 75 percentile means he or she grew as well or better than 75 percent of his or her peers.

School and district growth rates are determined by the growth percentiles from individual students, specifically the median (or score in the middle) student growth percentile. As a point of reference, the state median growth percentile for any grade overall is about 50.”

If the rate is above 50, students on average are learning at a faster rate than their peers around the state.

English Growth

Math Growth

College and Career Readiness Milestone

We included results from the State of Colorado, our district Jeffco Public Schools as well as three other high schools in east central Jeffco which have higher populations of free/reduced lunch students than the rest of the district. This allows us to compare results for our focus high school, Jefferson.

PSAT Results