Eight Duplin schools hit AYP standard
By Catharin Shepard
Published in News on July 23, 2010 1:46 PM
Eight of Duplin County's 16 public schools made Adequate Yearly Progress in the 2009-10 school year, according to preliminary AYP figures released Wednesday by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.
The 50 percent achievement is down from the 2008-09 school year, when 11 out of 16 schools, or 68.8 percent of Duplin County Schools made AYP.
The preliminary results show Chinquapin Elementary, Kenansville Elementary, North Duplin Elementary, Wallace Elementary, Warsaw Middle, Duplin Early College High School, E.E. Smith Middle School and North Duplin Junior/Senior High School made AYP.
B.F. Grady Elementary and Rose Hill-Magnolia Elementary missed achieving AYP by one target goal each. B.F. Grady Elementary met 26 of 27 goals while Rose-Hill Magnolia Elementary met 24 of 25 goals.
Charity Middle met 23 of 25 goals. Beulaville Elementary met 26 of 29 target goals, while Wallace-Rose Hill High met 13 of 16 target goals and Warsaw Elementary met 18 of 21 goals. East Duplin High School met 11 of 15 goals. James Kenan High School met 10 of 15 target goals.
"We certainly would have liked to see all of our schools make AYP, but we did have one of our schools come out of school improvement this year, so we're excited about that," Assistant Superintendent Cary Powers said. "We feel like when the ABCs come out, we're going to see growth in our schools."
Schools must meet all of the target goals set for the student subgroups in each school in order to make AYP, a measure put in place under the No Child Left Behind Act. Even one student in one of 10 subgroups failing to meet a goal can be enough to keep a school from making AYP.
The subgroups include white, black, Hispanic, Native American, Asian and multiracial students, economically disadvantaged students, limited English proficient and students with disabilities and the school as a whole.
The AYP results will not be made official until the state Board of Education approves them, scheduled for August 5.
The system instituted a retest policy for high school students' end-of-course tests beginning with the 2009-10 accountability cycle. The higher of the two scores from the 2009-10 school year will be used to calculate the AYP results related to Algebra I, English I and Biology. Due to the change, the 2010-09 AYP determinations for high school students will not be directly comparable with previous years' results, according to the state Department of Public Instruction.