Riles

Riles

LAURINBURG — Scotland County Schools are working on new ways to make sure every student walks across the graduation stage.

Chief Accountability Officer Michael Riles spoke on Monday to the Scotland County Board of Education for the Committee of the Whole about the cohort graduation review process that will be starting.

“We began a process of looking at a diagnosis tool to determine we are monitoring students so that they graduate on time,” Riles said. “We’re looking at a plan were we can have an audit or review of each student’s transcript beginning in grades 12 and backing that down … at the regional accountability meeting happening this Friday we will be getting our verified cohort list from the state.”

The list includes all students from their ninth-grade year and who would be included in the cohort group that is expected to graduate.

“From that list, we will be working with each school and our curriculum and instruction department to review those transcripts in December to make sure those are standardized reviews which would give us time to make changes to those reviews by next semester if we need to catch any student and make sure they’re on track for graduation.”

Riles said that once the seniors are complete they’ll go to juniors and continue down to the freshman so each year the plan can be updated.

Riles also shared an update from the summer school scores, which showed some growth over the course of the program.

“With the accountability summer school performance we began in our last meeting looking at overall performance and talked about statistical significance,” Riles said. “We found that for grades K-3 those improvements were statistically significant but looking at the effect size for those scores … that effect size was actually .15, so that is what’s considered a small effect for that population.”

Riles explained that for grades four and five, while the test score increase wasn’t statistically significant the effect size was .41 which is a medium effect for the population.

The test scores for the middle school are processed and analyzed at the state level

“With summer school performance data the middle school data will be processed and analyzed at the state level,” Riles said. “Our

Masks mandate

Students will continue being mandated to wear masks while inside the school buildings until Nov. 30. The board unanimously voted during the Monday night meeting to continue the mandate for students and to revisit it during the Nov. 22 Committee of the Whole meeting.

Reach Katelin Gandee at [email protected].