E DEN P RAIRIE ✹ A PRIL 21, 2011
SPORTS
SUN CURRENT 75¢
Vol. 46, No. 16
In the Community, With the Community, For the Community
Medalists abound on Eagle boys track squad PAGE 32
www.minnlocal.com Sadia Abdi (left) gets some coursework help from Asad Shane, an Eden Prairie High School math teacher who founded the New American Academy in Eden Prairie in January. More than 200 students Somali students from Eden Prairie and the region have come into the academy for tutoring and other assistance after school and on weekends. The academy is run by all volunteers, gets very little income from those who attend and is in need of resources. (Photo by Paul Groessel • Sun Newspapers)
How do you fill an achievement gap with
empty pockets? BY PAUL GROESSEL • SUN NEWSPAPERS
Volunteer tutor and Eden Prairie High School graduate Khad Mohamud (left) helps Hussein Abdi at the New American Academy. He is one of a few regular volunteers that help the dozens of students who come to the academy, located in an office space on Washington Avenue, in the Golden Triangle business and technology area. (Photo by Paul Groessel • Sun Newspapers)
There’s this gap – maybe more like a chasm – between the test scores of white, English-speaking students and non-white students whose first language is not English. Throw a dart at a map of the United States and chances are it will land in one of these gaps. There’s one in Eden Prairie. It’s talked about quite a bit, so just a couple test scores should serve as a good recap. For 2010 state standardized test results, 33 per-
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cent of the 186 Limited English Proficiency students tested were proficient in math at Eden Prairie schools. District-wide, considering all 5,034 students who took the math test, 79 percent of them tested proficient. That’s 46 percent. The gap in reading scores was 55 percent. A lot has been said about closing such a divide, and one reported reason for the school district’s broad elementary school changes is to address GAP: TO PAGE 14
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