Student achievement and financial profit highlights Chinook School Division AGM
The largest turnout for a Chinook School Division Annual General Meeting filed into the Chinook Education Centre on March 13 to hear reports detailing activities from the past year.
Chinook Director of Education Liam Choo Foo felt the recent engagement with the public regarding education governance in Saskatchewan has seemed to spark an interest in the roll education plays.
“My sense is when the provincial government asked for the consultational period around transformational change and the Perrin Report, people started to get engaged with the education sector again. And it is very powerful and very meaningful to them,” Choo Foo said. “Because they’ve re-engaged with the sector, I think it’s quite natural that when the board holds an annual meeting to report on their progress over the previous year, that engaged people would want to know and have more information.”
Choo Foo noted that the annual meeting was a perfect forum for providing information to an engaged group of parents about the happening of the school division.
Chinook’s learning agenda, and specifically measured successes in math and reading, were again highlights from the past year.
Chinook had increased the number of students doing math at grade level by 29 per cent over the past four years, surpassing their goal of improving scores by 25 per cent as part of their Math Momentum initiative.
They have now moved into the maintenance portion of that initiative, and a math intervention project directs resources into students who remain below grade level standards. Of 158 students in the target area of Kindergarten to Grade 2, 89 per cent improved to an appropriate grade level standard. Among the 231 students in the Grade 6 to 9 focus area, 97 per cent realized improved marks.
“We see that little boost is making quite a difference to our divisional totals in math,” Choo Foo said of the two per cent increase of grade level math achievement to 77 per cent.
He pointed out that some school divisions are only experiencing a 50 per cent success rate in math marks.
Chinook has also continued to make progress with literacy levels, but there is a restructured effort for middle years students to address a slight downturn.
Saskatchewan Reads, which follows Chinook’s Balanced Literacy efforts, has a goal of 90 per cent of students at grade level in reading. Chinook has an overall score of 82 per cent, an increase this past year of three per cent. Since launching a focus on reading, Chinook started with 63 per cent of students reading at grade level, and that overall 19 per cent increase shows the success of their efforts.
“All indicators show that if you are reading at grade level in Grade 3, it’s the highest predictor of graduation in Grade 12,” Choo Foo said of the reason for this strong focus. “We do need to work on our 6 to 9, those middle year kids, but Grade 3 we’re 88 per cent. We’re getting there.”
He pointed out that some of the gains in elementary levels drop off in middle years, as there has been a tendency to back off on pursuing and pushing that reading component with those students.
“Now that we’ve recognized that, we do see some things that we can do to keep it up front and centre. So that the great gains being made in the lower grade levels are not lost through those middle years.”
Students reading below grade level are also able to benefit from an intervention strategy, as Chinook’s Levelled Literacy began in 2012. In 2015-2016, there were 152 kids who were struggling with their reading, and after this intervention an additional 90 per cent of students were reading at grade level.