NORTH OLMSTED, Ohio — After scoring two straight years of 4 stars, North Olmsted City Schools received an overall grade of 3.5 stars in the recently released Ohio Department of Education’s school report card.
“Overall, we kind of take the same approach with the report card every year, whether we are 3.5 stars, 4 stars or 5 stars,” North Olmsted City Schools Superintendent Chris Caleris said.
“You take a look at it and try to understand that it really is just a snapshot of the students and where they were at that particular time. You want to dig into the data, look for positives and also look for areas of potential growth.”
A few years removed from replacing a letter-grade system, the Ohio Department of Education’s star-based rating system includes overall ratings — 3 stars means a district meets state standards.
North Olmsted City Schools received 3 stars in achievement, 2 stars in progress, 4 stars in gap closing, 4 stars in graduation and 3 stars in early literacy.
One of the negative grades is progress, which decreased from 3 stars to 2 stars.
“We started to look at that as a district team,” he said. “It’s interesting, the progress in certain areas is high, but maybe the progress wasn’t just enough of where it needed to be.
“It’s one of those measures that I always look at and say you have a student who’s growing so much but maybe they didn’t get to where this measure wanted to be. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t grow, so those are the things we’re looking at right now.”
Another decreased metric was early literacy going from 4 stars to 3 stars, with Caleris saying some of the issue has to do with the way the state presents its data.
“When you really look at that measure, there are positives, but there’s also the way it’s calculated and things that can definitely be misleading,” he said.
The superintendent said the district always takes a measured approach when it comes to the report card grades.
“You don’t want to be very reactive in these situations based on one report card, whether it goes up or down because it’s really about your full-scale programming and what you’re seeing district-wide,” he said.
A new school report card metric is college career workforce & military with the district receiving 3 stars.
“We’re meeting expectations, but we’re still trying to learn about that measure because it’s new,” he said.
The superintendent used the discussion about the state report to announce next spring he’ll be publishing the Eagle Report.
“My goal this year is to send out a community report,” he said. “It’s somewhat like a quality profile to the entire community.
“We’re not only going to add information about our local report card, but we’re going to have information about all of our internal measures that are actually showing positives, as well other areas for growth.”