Robbinsville – Despite what Principal Jaime Hooper described as “the hardest year we ever had as educators,” Robbinsville Elementary School students produced solid End of Grade test results from the 2020-21 school year.
Robbinsville Elementary School students met or exceeded growth in nearly every category measured during that challenging school year, and where they underperformed, it was in areas local students have regularly struggled.
“This is what we have been able to do through all of this adversity,” Hooper said. “My teachers were still able to produce these results.”
Areas where expected growth was exceeded were second-grade early-literacy assessment, third-grade math, and fifth-grade science.
Areas that met expected growth were first-grade early literacy assessment, sixth-grade math, fourth-grade reading, and sixth-grade reading. In most of these cases, results were borderline exceeds growth.
Areas where test results did not meet expected growth were fifth-grade math and fifth-grade reading.
Those results showed promise. A recently-hired math teacher produced results equivalent to normal years without the challenges of COVID-19. And though Robbinsville Elementary School fifth-graders struggled in math and reading, they exceeded growth in science.
The 2020-21 school year presented unprecedented challenges because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Try teaching phonics – a method of teaching people to read by correlating sounds with letters or groups of letters in an alphabetic writing system – when everyone in the classroom is wearing masks.
Classes went remote for a time. Graham County Schools issues iPads to pupils from kindergarteners through second grade, and Chromebooks for pupils from third grade through 12th grade, which meshed with online learning — for those pupils with at-home internet connections.
Teachers in the classrooms and administrators – all the way to the state Superintendent of Schools – were making decisions on the fly to teach under conditions unforeseen in their training.
“For awhile, there was panic teaching,” Hooper said. “No one had ever been taught to do that. There was a gigantic learning curve for every educator.”
Yet expectations remained the same and pupils were still required to take end-of-grade exams to measure what they learned during the school year. The state judges each teacher whether students grow a year’s worth of education for a year of school, Hooper said.
Based on end-of-grade test results, at Robbinsville Elementary School, it was mission accomplished.
“I’m just so proud of the teachers and what they were able to accomplish when nothing was normal,” Hooper said, adding that Robbinsville High School and Robbinsville Middle School also met growth expectations.
Robbinsville Elementary School is in the process of implementing a new reading curriculum that blends reading with other subjects. In short, pupils will be learning to read as they learn other subjects, Hooper said.
“The needle is moving in the right direction,” said Crystal Buchanan, the school’s literacy coach (“reading guru,” as she is known at the school).