2015-16
Annual School Performance Report Sunny Hills Elementary School
Sunny Hills Elementary School 3200 Issaquah-Pine Lake Road SE, Sammamish, WA 98075 (425) 837-7400 http://connect.issaquah. wednet.edu/elementary/ sunny/default.aspx
Welcome
Active learners, involved families and dedicated staff make up the Principal Leslie Lederman community of Sunny Hills. This year, in addition to our normal standards of rigor, we employed flexible thinking as we worked through a year of construction. With the support of all and a never ending positive attitude, we successfully navigated this challenge and are grateful to move into a state of the art building on September 1, 2016.
Mission Sunny Hills is a community of life-long learners who are committed to academic and social growth and who celebrate each student’s unique strengths.
Demographics Grades: K-5
Teacher Experience Enrollment: 610 96.0%
64.1%
Teachers with Master’s/Ph.D
Teacher’s with National Board Certification
10.2
6 Average Years Teaching Experience
OSPI Data In March 2014, the U.S. Department of Education declined to renew the state of Washington’s conditional Elementary and Secondary Education Act Flexibility Waiver for schools receiving Title I, Part A funds. This decision affects all schools in Washington State, which are now subject to the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Washington is the only state that has lost its waiver and must revert to NCLB standards and timelines of assessment. For schools and districts to be considered succeeding under NCLB, schools must meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) standards. For schools to meet AYP, 100 percent of all students, regardless of special needs or English language mastery, must meet proficiency standards. Sunny Hills met AYP this year. For complete information about the Issaquah School District’s assessment data, highly qualified teachers, annual yearly progress, and state NAEP (of Educational Progress) results, please visit the state’s online district report card.
52.3%
29.7%
District Report
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For budget details and more go to www.issaquah.wednet.edu/district/annualcommunity-report/ The Issaquah School District believes in seeking continual feedback from a broad and diverse range of constituents regarding their experiences with the District and their neighborhood school. See the Community Polling Study site at www. issaquah.wednet.edu/district/polling for more information and survey results.
Highlights Student Council, Green Team and Safety Patrol offered our students opportunities for leadership. Students in grades 1, 4 and 5 led our school in safety, sustainability and the development of our character. This year, we were able to achieve Level 4 status with the King County Green Schools program. Our student council chose a “focus of the month” such as “perseverance” to help all students learn how to achieve their goals. As a school, we set the goal of thinking beyond our school community and raised over $14,000 to supply two water filtration systems to our sister school, Birhawi, in Ethiopia. Once again, our PTA has provided us with an array of experiences from art in the classroom to science, a variety of fun family evenings and a special culminating community event called “Walk Down Memory Lane”. This year-end event brought together families, students and staff from our current population as well as many from the time Sunny Hills opened in 1963.
Environmental Conciousness We were proud to offer for the first time two new programs at Sunny Hills. This year we partnered with high school students from the Washington Student Math Association to provide bi-weekly math challenges via an after school Math Club. This group of analytical thinkers took their knowledge on the road and competed in regional competitions. Through a generous donation from the Issaquah Schools Foundation, we were also able to offer Scratch Club to many of our students. Three six week sessions were offered to our 3rd, 4th and 5th graders. Next year, we hope to expand this program to include K-5.
Culture of Kindness Our work around a Culture of Kindness continued. This year we added professional development for our staff in the area of positive relationships. Through our work, we established clear expectations for our students and identified three school wide rules that we refer to as The Mustang Way. They are: Be Respectful, Be Responsible, Be Engaged.
Community and School Partnership We are proud of our partnership with our PTA and with ISF. As a team, we have worked together to bring many valuable programs and supports to Sunny Hills. Both our families and staff have reached the coveted 100% mark for PTA memberships. Our partnership with ISF is also something to brag about! We have over 25% of our families contributing to ISF; a statistic that puts us as the leader in the district. Our school is well represented on both the ISF board with several board members and with even more parents serving as ISF committee members.
PTA has brought us: • Community building events that unify our families even though our students leaving Sunny Hills after 5th grade attend two different middle/ high schools. • Support our green efforts and our Culture of Kindness • Partnered with us to create a safe campus • Raised funds to allow for a successful implementation of our new curriculum
ISF has brought us: • Build teacher capacity--funding provided by ISF supports teachers pursuing their National Boards and has provided staff with professional development for our new writing curriculum by bringing in national presenter, Matt Glover. • Our school is represented on ISF board with several board members, with even more parents serving as ISF committee members. • Support student learning through the VOICE mentor program.
Assessment
Grade Level Total ELA
Two tests given to elementary school students—The Smarter Balanced Assessment and the Measurement of Student Progress (MSP)—help indicate how well Issaquah students are learning.
84.5 78.4
80.1
77.7
74.7
81.2
Smarter Balanced Assessment The Smarter Balanced Assessment is a system of valid, reliable, and fair next-generation assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English language arts/literacy (ELA/literacy) and mathematics for grades 3-8 and 11. The system—which includes both summative assessments for accountability purposes and optional interim assessments for instructional use—will use computer adaptive testing technologies to provide meaningful feedback and actionable data that teachers and other educators can use to help students succeed. Smarter Balanced assessments will go beyond multiple-choice questions to include extended response and technology enhanced items, as well as performance tasks that allow students to demonstrate critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. Performance tasks challenge students to apply their knowledge and skills to respond to complex real-world problems. They can best be described as collections of questions and activities that are coherently connected to a single theme or scenario. These activities are meant to measure capacities such as depth
of understanding, writing and research skills, and complex analysis, which cannot be adequately assessed with traditional assessment questions. The performance tasks will be taken on a computer (but will not be computer adaptive) and will take one to two class periods to complete. Smarter Balanced capitalizes on the precision and efficiency of computer adaptive testing (CAT). This approach represents a significant improvement over traditional paper-andpencil assessments used in many states today, providing more accurate scores for all students across the full range of the achievement continuum.
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Grade Level Total Math 78.6
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76.8
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78.8
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77.4
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77.2
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74.4
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MSP The MSP is an exam developed by and mandated by the state; it replaced the state’s original annual exam, the WASL, in spring 2010. Washington’s education reform efforts began in 1993 and involve annual state-specific tests for students in grades 3-8 in reading, writing, math, and science (MSP) and then again in grade 10 (High School Proficiency Exams in reading and writing and End of Course assessments in math and biology). MSP goes beyond multiple choice tests. The tests are much shorter than the WASL and include multiple-choice and short-answer questions. Four-point essay questions have been eliminated on science tests. This change allows students to show they are able to solve the problems, while not being scored on their writing ability on the science tests. Besides being a state test rather than a national assessment, MSP results are reported differently. Each student either “Meets Standard,” “Exceeds Standard,” or “Does Not Meet Standard” in each subject—reading, math, writing, science— and subjects tested vary among grade levels. MSP scores do not compare students to other students; instead they show the learning level of each student as compared to the state’s expectations for a well-taught student at that grade level. MSP results help parents know how well
each student is meeting learning targets, and the results help schools plan instruction and curriculum focused on these learning targets. Numbers represent percentage meeting or exceeding standard.
Grade 5 MSP-Science 86.0
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