The Kentucky Department of Education released the 2022-23 school report cards Tuesday, reflecting scores for school districts and individual schools based on the Kentucky State Assessment results.
In 2020, Senate Bill 158 was passed, requiring KDE to use “status” and “change” as ways to evaluate state indicators. This is the first year “change” has been reported.
According to KDE, “status” represents a school’s performance on a state indicator for the current year, while “change” represents a school’s performance on the indicator for the current year compared with the previous year. Status and change combined provide a performance rating for each indicator.
Districts and schools are ranked on a color system with red (very low); orange (low); yellow (medium); green (high); and blue (very high) for status. The rankings for change indicate red (declined significantly); orange (declined); yellow (maintained); green (increased); and blue (increased significantly).
To view the report cards by district or school, visit education.ky.gov.
Owensboro Public Schools averaged a green (high) in its elementary schools, yellow (medium) in its middle schools and orange (low) in its high schools.
Monica Rice, district assessment coordinator, said OPS saw improvement in change.
“Our schools have increased in change overall,” she said. “Some of our exciting things are that we exited the ATSI status at the high school and exited TSI at Estes and Foust, so our schools that were designated as areas for improvement made positive changes to exit those areas.”
ATSI schools are ones that received the Additional Targeted Support and Improvement designation while TSI are schools that received the federal Targeted Support and Improvement designation.
“When it comes to accountability, we have state classifications, state definitions and federal classifications from the U.S. Department of Education,” Rice said. “ATSI and TSI are designations for federal classifications.”
Rice said 14 of the 17 indicators at the elementary were green or blue.
“We had science, social studies and writing in green or blue at Foust and Newton Parrish, English language proficiency was blue at Estes and quality of school climate and safety was blue at Sutton,” she said.
Postsecondary readiness at the high school level, which includes Owensboro Innovation Academy students who are part of OPS, averaged in the blue.
“At Owensboro High School, we averaged green in reading, math, science, social studies, writing and quality of school climate and safety,” Rice said. “We had a large overall change at Owensboro High School from the last several years.”
The lowest ratings the district received were orange averages in English language proficiency and graduation rate, both at the high school level.
“When you look at the school report card for the whole district, that does include Owensboro High School and (Emerson Academy) so we do have some orange there and we’ve put some plans into place for our alternative schools to make improvements,” Rice said. “At Owensboro High School, we’ve moved up in some areas that we were orange in.”