CCHS receives ‘commendable’ report card rating

By Kate Hayden

khayden@charlescitypress.com

As Charles City students prepare for their upcoming Iowa Assessments this March, staff members at Charles City High School have taken note of a district-wide assessment from December –– a “commendable” rating of 67.5 points from the Iowa School Report Card, a statewide initiative released yearly as a guiding tool for schools.

The final report judges CCHS on eight categories, including College and Career Ready Growth, the lowest CCHS score at 30.2 percent, and the school’s graduation rate, a 95.1 percent success rate of high school ninth graders who graduate in under five years. The school is a rated in the category below neighbors like Waverly-Shell Rock High School, rated at 71 points as “high-performing”, and Decorah High School, another “high-performing” school at 71.4 points. For the full report, visit www.charlescitypress.com.

Advanced offerings

It’s typical to compare ratings on similar schools, CCHS principal Josh Johnson said, but in the district’s mind, there’s a lot more than meets the eye.

“One thing that’s easy to compare is AP class offerings. Decorah is one of the leaders in the state in our school size, 3A, on that area in offering AP classes. A lot of their scheduling and design, and talking to their principal is around their AP offerings. Waverly-Shell Rock has a decent amount of AP offerings as well,” Johnson said. “A lot of the reaction that we get comes from some of the community…their question is, ‘how are we going to offer more rigorous classes to our kids?’ Meaning AP classes in a lot of people’s minds.”

Advanced Placement courses are just a piece of the puzzle to Johnson, who says the school has been studying what they can do to push students into higher achievement levels of College and Career-Ready Growth for a while now.

“We’ve talked in our counseling department since the very first month I was here two years ago. What do we need to focus on?” Johnson said. “Usually those things don’t come as a surprise, you’re already probably in tune with what you need to do….we definitely knew that we need to increase our efforts with college and career readiness.”

Part of that ongoing effort is a three-year plan introducing AP courses in the CCHS course catalogue. AP Government was introduced this year with 35 students immediately signing up, a positive sign to Johnson. The school is expecting to offer AP chemistry and calculus for 2016-17, and is considering biology and human geography as potential class offerings the following year, depending on how many AP-certified teachers CCHS has.

“I don’t want to say is a reaction to what Waverly Shell Rock or Decorah is doing, it’s more of a reaction to our community and what our students are asking us to do,” Johnson said.

Beyond classroom walls

Measuring data like college readiness is not always clear-cut, and the Iowa School Report Card actually breaks the subject down into two parts. College and Career-Ready Growth (CCHS: 30.2 percent), in which the state judges the percentage of students “who are on a trajectory to be college and career ready by the end of high school”; and the second category, College and Career Readiness (CCHS: 49.8 percent), “the proportion of students that met milestones in reading and mathematics that predict higher probably of post-secondary success.”

“You look at it as, kids that graduated a couple years ago, are they pursuing two year degrees, four year degrees? Are they successful, are they sticking out a two year program or four year program?” Johnson said. “It takes a while to comprise that data, and then we have to look at last year’s graduates, what do we really know about them right now? We don’t know a whole lot.”

One way for the school to judge success rates on is by high school students who take on NIACC concurrent credit-courses through the year, gaining between 12 to 20 college credits before they even accept a high school diploma onstage.

“Obviously they’re college ready that way, because they can handle that kind of class,” Johnson said.

The high school is also working to open more career-credit opportunities for students in their junior/senior years, Johnson said, as a learning opportunity outside of the classroom walls. Elective credits and possible core credits like English, math, social studies or science will be built-in as students begin working with local businesses in the afternoons –– and hopefully, Johnson said, give students a broader understanding of problem-solving.

“You can’t measure that in test data, you measure that in what you’re able to provide a student to do,” Johnson said. “I couldn’t tell you that a student going down and working, solving a problem with the city council is going to raise their Iowa Assessment scores, but I know that it’s a higher order thinking, a higher order learning opportunity that we’re able to provide those kids.”