CLARIFICATION - A headline for an article in Thursday's Anne Arundel County section on Brooklyn Park Middle School's varying results in attempting to meet federal "adequate yearly progress" requirements may have left the impression that the school failed to meet the standard in the past school year. The school met adequate yearly progress requirements the last school year.
Losing a game or failing a test by just one or two points has always had a particular sting.
Brooklyn Park Middle School has felt a similar pain. Though the school triumphantly met federal testing benchmarks under No Child Left Behind this past school year, the school has narrowly failed to show what is called "adequate yearly progress" in four of the past six years.
Failure to meet the standard of the federal law for several years had, in the past, placed schools in danger of being required to restructure in one of three ways: replacing staff deemed responsible for low student achievement, converting to a charter school, or contracting with an outside operator to run a school.
But a new statewide accountability system implemented this year differentiates a school such as Brooklyn Park, where a handful of students weren't meeting the standard, from other schools, where proficiency might be a more distant goal. The system allows the school more flexibility and independence in righting the situation.
"It's always been just one child. It was always just right there," said Raymond Bibeault, senior manager for school improvement at Anne Arundel County Schools and a former principal at Brooklyn Park, who called the new system "kindler and gentler."
"It was frustrating when you list in the paper or on the Web site that a school doesn't make AYP [adequate yearly progress]," said Bibeault, adding that the school failed to meet the standard by just one or two students. "It doesn't paint the whole picture of what went on in that building and it doesn't take into account all the successes going on in that building."
The state's new system of categorizing schools - called School Improvement - will address the fact that some schools with small numbers of failing students have been subjected to the same measures as those with systemic problems, said Marti Pogonowski, the director of the office of continuous school improvement for the county schools. This will allow schools like Brooklyn Park to be more strategic in their goals.
