Stewart and Lincoln elementaries and Washington Middle School all saw academic improvements in the last year as shown from the Iowa School Performance Profiles.
The Iowa Department of Education launched this particular assessment program in 2018 which reflects the results of the Iowa Statewide Assessment of Student Progress (ISASP) test that was administered for its second time in 2021 following its first round in 2019. The overall report card scores for Washington Community School District’s two elementary schools and middle school all succeeded from “needs improvement” to “acceptable” in 2021, while the high school’s overall score remains at “commendable.” Superintendent Willie Stone comments on the lower grade level improvements achieved during a pandemic, “It’s really exciting to see, our staff has just been working extremely hard to try to improve things and it’s neat to see that improvement take place and neat to see us inching the mark up higher and higher, so our students are getting better and better.”
The most recent report card shows Washington surpassed the state average for four-year graduation rate and post-secondary readiness for college level course work and career and technical education, while the larger gaps were in ACT or SAT participation and mathematics proficiency. Stone says his administrators are more focused on individual student assessments, “We do look at this score and it’s important but we are just as worried about our everyday scores. When you take ISASP, that’s a picture in time, that’s one test at one time. If students have a bad day, let’s say something happened at home, ISASP or taking a test that week isn’t going to be the top thing on their list of things to do.”
Statewide, between the last time the ISASP was conducted in 2019 and 2021, the number of schools in the exceptional category decreased by six and the number of schools in the high performing category decreased by 26. In turn, the lowest two categories of needs improvement and priority increased by seven and 21 schools, respectively.