September 13, 2010
Mt. Diablo USD News Update
Where Kids Come First
API Update
We wanted to celebrate the good news with you that 37 of our schools met their API growth targets, and as a district our API grew by 11. Though many of our elementary schools showed significant gains, Ayers, Ygnacio Valley, and Holbrook all had gains of 50 points or more. At the middle school level, El Dorado, Pleasant Hill, Riverview all gained 26 or more points. At the high school level, Mt. Diablo gained 29 points, while College Park gained 17 and broke the 800 pt barrier. The gains at all our schools were due to our teachers', support staff members', and administrators' hard work, continual focus on reviewing student achievement data, analyzing and sharing best instructional practices, and supporting students who do not master a skill after the initial instruction. Attached to the bottom of this news update are the API scores for all of our non-special program schools.
We know that we need to continue to work collaboratively to analyze student achievement data and review best instructional practices to ensure that we are meeting all of our students' learning needs. Currently, we need 56% of our students demonstrating that they are proficient or advanced on the English-Language Arts (ELA) portion of the STAR test and 56.4% on the mathematics STAR Test. District-wide 58.8% of our students were proficient or advanced in ELA and 58.5% were proficient or advanced in math. However, several of our subgroups including socioeconomically disadvantaged, English Learners, Hispanic/Latino, and African American did not meet the performance targets. Our District Goals and Objectives are critical to help continue to move forward allowing our district to meet the upcoming academic targets Not only do the District Goals and Objectives provide clear growth expectations on multiple critical measures, the document also provides strategies that we will be implementing district-wide to support every school to meet the learning needs of all our children.
If you have questions about your child(ren)s' school's API, I recommend that you contact the principal and discuss the school's Single Plan for Student Achievement. If you would like to participate in the dialogue around your child's schools plan to move forward I suggest that you join your school's School Site Council.
In these difficult financial times, we are extremely proud of our teachers', support staff members', and administrators' commitment to continually challenge ourselves to improve the learning opportunities for all our children.