Cloquet one of two area school districts to make 'Adequate Yearly Progress'

There was nothing but smiles and beaming faces at the Cloquet School Board meeting last week as board members and school administrators received some happy news.

Director of School Improvement Jen Larva was at the meeting to announce the Cloquet School District had met Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) this year.

There are 1,048 schools in Minnesota that did not meet AYP in 2010.

AYP is a measure of how school districts are improving according to No Child Left Behind Act standards. The Minnesota Comprehensive II tests on mathematics and reading determine AYP.

Cloquet did not make AYP in the 2006-2007 and 2007-2008 school years, sending them into a disciplinary stage of sorts. When a district does not meet AYP for two years, a plan of improvement must be implemented.

For Cloquet, this meant putting more money toward staff development to be able to raise crucial test scores.

Math was the district's strong point, with Cloquet about 3 percent more proficient than an overall state proficiency in math of 65.89 percent. In reading, students had a rate of 44.46 percent proficiency. That's more than 5 percent above the state reading proficiency level.

Even though district students are doing well in math and reading scores, the fifth-grade science scores appeared to be quite low this year. Although science testing isn't used to determine AYP, a next step will be for the district to work on these scores.

Also improving this year were the Native American and special education sub-groups of students, although their scores were given "safe harbor," meaning the number of children in each subgroup not meeting proficiency was reduced by 10 percent. The low-income sub-group of children also made safe harbor in math testing areas.

"We have a lot of diversity and we deal with that and get all those kids to succeed so our teachers are doing a fantastic job," said Cloquet Middle School Principal Tom Brenner.

While the district met AYP this year, Larva said the school district can't relax too much. There are still sub-groups of students that could use improvement.

Still, Larva said it's time to celebrate the district's success and be aware of the AYP calculation rules for future years.

Cloquet was one of the only districts in the area to make AYP this year. Wrenshall was the only other district to make AYP.

In Carlton, both the elementary school and the high school made AYP, but the district did not.