Gentry Middle School: Test scores are up and school is ranked high among area schools
Posted on Wednesday, August 27, 2008
GENTRY ó What a difference a few years can make ! Four years ago the Gentry Middle School had only 40 percent of its students scoring at proficient or advanced levels on the stateís Benchmark tests. Now 75 percent of its students have met that mark.
ì We were at the bottom of the list of schools in Benton and Washington Counties, î said Gentryís middle school principal, Larry Cozens. ì The teachers did not want that any longer. They felt that literacy was the way to make the biggest change the most quickly. We had the schoolís literacy specialist, Jeanie Cozens, work with us on the reading and writing parts of the test. We looked at the best practices and strategies which were working in other schools and worked them into our system. We started making improvements, î he said.
The school was then picked to be one of four schools in Arkansas to take part in the stateís school-support program. Through the Arkansas Leadership Academy, teachers were taught how to gather data and use it to make informed decisions about how to better the education of their students. The program showed teachers how to make those decisions based on objective facts and not on subjective opinions or philosophies.
At the school, students from each grade level met together each week with specific areas of work to review. All the teachers worked together to help all of the students. Minutes were kept so teachers could look back and see what was working for a particular child and what was not.
Middle school teachers worked hard and went outside of their comfort zones to improve student test scores, said middle school math teacher, Phyllis Berry. They took on remediation classes and worked through lunch periods to help students and raise scores. They added literacy and math-counts classes to give students extra help where test scores were low.
Students were willing to work hard, too, Berry said. They spent their free time after lunch to get better at math and reading. They faced the challenge of having two math classes and two language / reading classes, and they stepped up and made the best of it.
ì They should feel proud of themselves for the work theyíve done and how theyíve set the bar high for the incoming middle-school students, î she said.
At the end of the last school year, students were surveyed and it was learned they thought there was a lack of respect among them. So teachers, during the summer and in the first few days of in-service training, worked on ways to help students respect others, said Cozens.
Over the last four years, the school has helped its students move up to where they are now ó up at the top of the list of schools in Benton and Washington counties.
In math, Gentry seventh grade schools ranked fourth on the list. Sixth and eighth grade students ranked fifth. In literacy, the sixth grade was at the very top. Seventh grade students ranked second, and eighth grade students came in at seventh on the list.
ì We have more than 75 percent of all our students in the middle school scoring proficient or advanced, î said Cozens.
ì The work which the teachers and students have accomplished over these past few years is something in which everyone should feel a great deal of pride, î Cozens said.
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