Most county schools score Bs

HARLINGEN – They’ve made the grade, for the most part.

The Texas Education Agency has given the Harlingen school district a B on the accountability ratings released Wednesday. Most of the area school districts, including La Feria, Santa Maria, Santa Rosa – received Bs. Only South Texas ISD and Los Fresnos received As. San Benito and Rio Hondo received Cs.

Districts that received Bs are looking at ways to reach the top, while school districts that received Cs are using the grade as an opportunity to pursue higher marks.

“We’re working hard as a school district to ensure our students receive high quality instruction,” said Rio Hondo Superintendent Ismael Garcia.

“We are improving year to year and we’re going to take this letter grade and really concentrate our efforts on improving instruction for all our students,” he said. “We are going to use it as a good learning tool and improve from there.”

The state has reworked some parts of the accountability ratings. Instead of using four performance indexes, the rating system uses three: Student achievement, school progress and closing the gaps. Student achievement is broken down into three subcategories. School progress has two subcategories.

Educators are trying to understand the new system.

“It’s hard to simplify for the community and for people that are not involved in this arena to turn a complicated system into something simplistic,” said Alicia Noyola, chief academic officer for the Harlingen school district.

“Within each category, there are all sorts of formulas that are calculated just to get to that piece,” she said.

At the moment it’s hard to say how everyone will feel about the new system.

“The education commissioner is saying at this point they will be making no changes for the next five years to how things are calculated,” Noyola said. “So I think there is still a wait and see. Until this system is in place for a few years it’ll be very difficult to evaluate.”

Harlingen schools had some gains and some challenges this year. All schools “Met Standard” but two elementary schools, Bonham and Lamar, had improvement required in two areas.

“Obviously there are things we are going to need to refocus on,” Noyola said. “Now that we at least know how things are going to be recalculated for the next five years we can really dig deeper and identify where those areas that are of concern.”

While Bonham received improvement requirement for on academic growth, the school still received two distinctions.

Harlingen High School South also received five distinctions, quite an improvement from last year when it received none.

“We’re very proud of the work that they did,” Noyola said. “One of the pieces that impacts the distinctions is attendance. South has made a concerted effort to pay particular attention to attendance so the students are in school so they are able to address their needs.”

As always, there remains the concern about using test scores to evaluate schools. A solution may be on its way.

“One of the house bills that came into play in 2017 was that they were going to give districts the opportunity to develop their own local accountability system,” Noyola said. “It would take the place of the state accountability system as long as it met certain criteria. It’s a wait and see.”

Several districts, she said, are piloting their own accountability systems in which they will include other pieces that will provide a more complete picture of campuses and school districts.