Trustees tweak their goals for student performance

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Snyder ISD board now focusing more on economically disadvantaged student academic results

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The Snyder ISD board of trustees is tweaking how it evaluates student progress in the school district.
During their Thursday meeting, trustees approved changes to the district’s Lonestar Governance (LSG) Plan, their blueprint for establishing goals and monitoring student progress in a number of academic and career programs.
The changes aren’t major, school district officials said, but instead are intended to focus more on areas in need of improvement, such as academic performance by students classified as economically disadvantaged (ECD).
Dr. Rachael McClain, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, said that ECD student performance on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR), which have been a point of concern for the district, will now be of particular interest to the school board.
“We’re still focusing on all of our students, but the board has opted to focus specifically on the performance of our economically disadvantaged students,” McClain said. “They also added to board goals related to early child performance, focusing on students in second grade and below.”
The goals set for ECD students include raising the percentage of those students who perform at “meets grade level” or above on the English-Language Arts and math portions of the STAAR will increase to 40 percent by June 2023. 
Past goals in these areas focused on ECD students performing at “approaches grade level” or above on the STAAR.
Early child goals include having the percentage of second-graders performing at grade level in reading and math increase from 35 percent to 60 percent by June 2023.
At the high school, a new board goal is for the number of graduates identified as college, career or military ready to increase to 97 percent by June 2023.
McClain said the changes to the LSG plan should improve how well the district communicates its goals and efforts to reach those goals with the public.
“It’s a little more targeted than last year,” she said. “I think you’ll see a difference in the information we share. We hope to make it clear to both the board and the community in a clear, concise manner.”