Cowan Road Middle has not met the Adequate Yearly Progress requirements for four consecutive years and is in a Needs Improvement Year 3 (NI-3) status.
Cowan Road Middle Principal Hoby Davenport briefly introduced the improvement plan to the board members, which, among many other things, features a math consultant from Clayton State University for sixth- and seventh-grade math teachers and a RESA consultant for eighth-grade math teachers.
Davenport also showed the board the progress his students have made within one year.
“AYP compares apples to oranges. I want to compare apples to apples,” he said.
To make his point that Cowan Road -- despite not meeting AYP requirements for four years in a row - still is improving, Davenport said his sixth-grade math students’ scores went up from 39 percent in 2006 to 65 percent this year.
In fact, Cowan Road Middle students improved in all subjects but social studies. And seventh-grade and eighth-grade students showed similar progress. Nevertheless, the school is required to follow through with an improvement plan as required by the No Child Left Behind Act. The board, which saw members James Graham and Fannie Delaney absent, voted unanimously in favor of the plan as presented by Davenport.
In other business, the board announced Pearla Hodo of Anne Street Elementary, Anne Marie Lombardo of Griffin High and Mindy Griffis of Spalding High as the three finalists for the systemwide Teacher of the Year award. All three were already named Teacher of the Year for their schools and received the highest rate from last year’s Teachers of the Year, based on the applications they had submitted. The three finalists will now be judged in their classrooms by an instructional team to determine the Griffin-Spalding County School System’s Teacher of the Year.
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