AMENIA — At Webutuck’s Board of Education meeting on Monday, Dec. 2, the discussion centered on the results of computer-based testing in the content areas of English language arts and mathematics as potential changes to the curriculum may be imminent, based on the scoring.
Webutuck Superintendent Ray Castellani said the tests administered to the students are “grade-level standards,” containing different material, based on each student’s grade from third to eighth grade to identify challenge areas.
“What you’re going to see is our proficiency rates from three to eight, English language arts and mathematics. We have them broken down at the administrative level to share with teachers, building principals, obviously to break down and go over the data at a much more micro level,” Castellani said. “Notice, as you want to go through this, percentages for us are very difficult because two or three students persuade percentages tremendously.”
The New York State Education Department utilizes a scoring system of one through four, with one representing a student scoring below standards. The highest possible grade students can score on both the English and mathematics assessments is a four. The exams are given annually to third through eighth graders during the spring.
The presenters provided statistics on proficiency across grade levels. A student is considered proficient if they score a three or four on the test. In English, 22% of third graders, 32% of fourth graders, 5% of fifth graders, 29% of sixth graders, 48% of seventh graders and 26% of eighth graders were ranked as proficient.
For mathematics, from 2023 to 2024, 30% of third graders, 59% of fourth graders, 16% of fifth graders, 29% of sixth graders, 80% of seventh graders, and 20% of eighth graders all received an exam score of three or four.
“Because we are such a small population per class size, we looked at our mobility reports and we broke down our mobility reports by demographic and also by grade level to see how many students left and entered that way,” Marquis said. “So in the internal process of uncovering these scores, we really did look at several different factors here.”
For the English exam in the school year 2021 to 2022, zero percent of sixth graders scored a three or four, compared to 29% in 2024. However, 62% of seventh graders were proficient in 2022, meaning seventh grade proficiency dropped roughly 22.5% in 2024.
“There are definitely some areas where we will continue to make progress and to really examine and kind of put a microscope over what’s going on in those grades,” Marquis said.
“We also drill down this data to some groups,” she said. “So we really are looking at the cohort for students with disabilities, English language learners. We’re looking at general education. We are looking at students with lower socioeconomic status and then students who do not have any socioeconomic disadvantage. So we’re really trying to look at all of the subgroups to ensure that we are meeting the needs of all of our students.”
The board compared different Hudson Valley school districts with backgrounds and demographics similar to those of Webutuck’s. This allowed the school to visualize where their students’ placements were and how to adjust the curriculum if needed.
“We found District A and District B, and we compared them to ourselves to see how we were comparatively to districts with similar demographics and similar size and then we looked at the New York State percent position as well,” Marquis said. “So that’s where we fell for overall three through eight RELA (Reading and Language Arts) comparison.”
Marquis explained why the number is lower than it should be for the school’s academic influence.
“One of the major contributors for the numbers … is the number of students that did not take the assessment, opted out, and many times those students are coming from a higher functioning places in their curriculum and parents choose not to have them there,” Castellani said. “So those scores not being added, that sways those percentages. Five students is a major number.”
During the instructional council, department and data meetings, these concerns have been brought to the attention of faculty experts at different levels to hopefully get more students to trend upward this following year, Marquis said.
“So there’s lots that we have to dig down,” Castellani said. “We know that scores need to be improved. It’s not the easiest way to go on. It’s really peeling back the layers and trying to do that.”
Castellani has said Webutuck is offering after-school programs to aid students who were not able to score above a three while also helping students gain higher scores who did surpass that threshold. Webutuck also has a number of academic intervention services, including interventions during the school day. This is where groups of students are taken out of their classrooms to further their education with additional assistance.
“Last year, we had an after-school program … to work on scores of those students,” Castellani said. “We want to see if that program did, in fact, make a difference, and if it did, then we should probably duplicate it.”
