Giving Compass' Take:

• Leonard Armato, writing for The Hechinger Report, suggests the ways that high-poverty school districts can turn around by giving students new ways to excel and focusing on performance. 

• Which suggestions listed in the article are also opportunities for donors to support education?

• Read about why most poor school districts are often left stranded. 

St. Mary Parish knew change was needed.

By the mid-2000s, the state of Louisiana had placed several of its schools in “academic assistance,” a designation for schools that fail to improve sufficiently. Some had remained there for nearly 10 years. Meanwhile, the rural district’s test scores lagged behind the state average.

By 2016, the high-poverty school district had turned around.

Here are five ways we are giving students the opportunities they need to excel:

  1. “Credit recovery” for struggling learners. Not every student succeeds at something on his or her first attempt. To lower the dropout rate and keep students on track to earn diplomas, we started a “credit-recovery” program to assist high school students who have lost credit in core subjects due to failing grades or excessive absences.
  2. Opportunities for online learning. Some students may require a more flexible learning schedule than the typical school day allows.
  3. Expanded summer learning opportunities. In many districts, summer school is restricted to students with remediation needs. In St. Mary, our VLP also offers a Summer Learning Institute, which allows high school students to take advantage of the summer break to enroll in new courses or retake courses for credit.
  4. Direct and intensive targeting of skills that confine struggling readers. More than a decade ago, far too many of our students were struggling readers.
  5. Improving student performance district-wide. Each student’s achievement is critical to the overall success of our district. From 2006 to 2016, St. Mary Parish raised its district performance score from 60 points to 99.2 points. In 2017, we raised it again to 99.7 points (out of a possible 150 points) — a mere 0.3 point from attaining an A letter grade.

Read the full article on turning around a school district by Leonard Armato at The Hechinger Report.