Overton County students saw some of their largest TCAP score increases since prior to the pandemic.
Director of Schools Donnie Holman said that out of 18 testing areas, 15 showed improvement. He said that while math scores improved slightly, they did not see the gains they saw in English Language Arts.
“Even though everything is reflecting positively for the most part recovering all that learning loss in math is going to take some time,” Holman said. “And I believe if you look at the studies, the studies show that a gap in math takes much more time to recover than it does in English Language Arts.”
Math scores grew from 29 percent to 31 percent at or exceeding expectations. ELA scores increased some seven percent. Holman said they had a 99 percent participation rate from students.
Holman said that another area they hope to improve is the high school end-of-course scores. He said that they use TCAP data to help improve curriculum and better the learning of Overton students.
“We want to focus on the areas of need, we want to do the best that we can to close that gap to help our students to learn the material they lost because of COVID,” Holman said. “We want to do the best we can to make sure the students are meeting achievement data standards with what they learned that year.”
Holman said that achievement data are standards to be taught for that year as opposed to growth.
“You could have a 7th-grade student whose scores show a lot of growth,” “But that 7th-grade student could actually be performing on a 4th-grade level and they really improved and go up to say a 5th-grade level. Well, they’ve done a lot of improving, but achievement-wise, they’re not achieving at their grade level.”
Holman said that all of the success of the district is due to the hard work of teachers and support from student families and the community as a whole.
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