Augusta County schools meet SOLs

FISHERSVILLE — All 21 of Augusta County’s schools are expected to meet full Standards of Learning accreditation based on last year’s testing, the school district’s testing coordinator said Thursday.

Testing coordinator Gordon Mowen said the preliminary results show that six county schools – Cassell and Stump elementary schools, and Buffalo Gap, Fort Defiance, Riverheads and Wilson Memorial high schools – each registered more than 90 percent on the SOL testing benchmarks.

The district’s math scores at its elementary schools were the highest ever with more than 50 percent of students notching advanced passing scores and a pass rate of more than 90 percent in elementary math.

Mowen said Augusta County and other Virginia school districts have made great strides on the SOL testing since it was introduced in the 1997-98 school year. The exam is the state’s standardized test, and it’s also used to measure students’ annual progress under federal No Child Left Behind standards.

“In the beginning, the standards were vague enough that we didn’t know what kids had to know,’’ he said. Since that time, school curriculum has been aligned to cover material before spring testing and other strategies have been employed to help students prepare.

It’s a far cry from the first year of SOL testing when, Mowen said, many Virginia schools’ pass rates registered in the single digits.

While Mowen could talk positively about how students fared on Virginia’s SOLs, he had to tell school board members Thursday night the county had fallen short on meeting No Child standards.

Just 13 of the county’s schools made adequate yearly progress, the designation applied under No Child to measure whether students are advancing toward achieving 100-percent proficiency in core subjects.

Schools that missed the standard were in some cases less than a percentage point from achieving No Child benchmarks, Mowen said.

At Stuarts Draft Elementary School, 80.35 percent of the school’s economically disadvantaged students passed the reading test. But the standard for adequate yearly progress is 81 percent, meaning that group fell short, as did Stuarts Draft Elementary.

Across Virginia, all school districts will learn whether they met SOL accreditation on Sept. 16, said Charles Pyle, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Education.

Pyle said a year ago, 95 percent of Virginia schools met full SOL accreditation.