Putnam Leader Happy With Grades, Improvements

Putnam County Director Schools Corby King said the five A grades received by the system in the Thursday State Education report show exceptional performance by the school system.

Eight schools improved grades from last year’s grades. King said the success is thanks to the district’s unified commitment to student excellence regardless of which school or position ane employee serves.

“I think teachers working together, the schools where collaboration is strong, where that’s happening and we’re setting high expectations for all of our students, we’re seeing increasing performance of those students,” King said. “And the teachers, the staff, parents, everyone’s committed to that.”

King said there concern at Avery Trace and Upperman Middle Schools, both of which went from Cs to Ds this year. King said the district is analyzing the metrics where those schools struggled, to figure out what measures could help them improve.

“We’ve got district staff, I know their teachers at both schools are committed to excellence, they’re committed to improving,” King said. “The administrators, the same. So we’re going to work to bring those back up.”

King said the letter grade system was more difficult to deal with last year because it was completely new. King said the state standards are a high bar but Putnam’s students are performing very well compared to their peers.

“The letter grades are an indication that our schools our healthy, that our families are supportive, and that our teachers are teaching what’s expected,” King said.

King said he hopes the scores can serve as a boost in morale for faculty and students alike. King said the grades also act as a kind of healthy competition for all of the schools in the district.

“Our teachers look at where each individual student is,” King said. “We have teams at every school. We really look to see what a particular student needs or where their gaps in learning might be, grouping students, instructing them at their grade level, but also what they need to move them up to the next step.”

King said the district will use the letter grades to conduct similar research into each school as a whole to make sure they all have the resources that students and teachers need.