one copy free
Buller wins one year term for board Stephanie Ivankovich
Elected members
Jackie Heiser
636 votes One-year term
929 votes Three-year term
Jill Morrill
Tyler Buller, 20, 2006 graduate won a one-year term to the school board by votes on Sept. 9th, “I was watching the results come in online with Jill Morrill,” Buller said, “and I was truly surprised that I had won. The precincts came in and I was down for about four precincts before the final precinct was called in, which put me ahead 16 votes. I remember having to call Jill’s daughter down to make sure that we were reading the results right. It was that close.” Buller wants to make the communication between the school board and the students easier. “I can bring a lot of perspective of what I went through and what my friends went through in high school,” Buller said. “I am easier to approach for students and it’s easier for me to approach students.” Fellow 2006 graduates Brian Underwood, Peter Ostiguy and Eric Dreibelbeis helped Buller campaign. “I have known Tyler for a long time and he has been active in the school board issues,” Dreibelbeis said. “He is really experienced in how the school board works and I am glad to help a good friend.” Dreibelbeis helped Buller in a few different ways. “I helped him organize an ice cream social event and helped get his name out to college students,” Dreibelbeis said. “I also knocked on doors to let everyone know about him.” Buller contacted Dreibelbeis, Underwood and Ostiguy in the middle of July.
Tyler Buller
News Editor
982 votes Three-year term Dawn Kaosotia/Provided
Jeremy Mullen/BW
Glancing down at the voting machine, senior Ben Hjelmaas gets prepared to vote for the school board canadate he wants to be on the school board at the Johnston Evanendelical Free Church. “We discussed the campaign strategy and Tyler’s message to the public,” Dreibelbeis said. The candidates elected for the threeyear terms were Jackie Heiser and Jill Morrill.
This is will be Morrill’s third, threeyear term for the school board. “I will be following up on a lot of issues,” Morrill said. “A big issue is the ninth grade electives.” Although this is Heiser’s first year
being elected on the school board, she was appointed to it after the death of Karen Coaldrake and served for five months to fill in until the election. “I want to see my role as being a positive communicator for everybody and work hard to say I do that,” Heiser said. The first school board meeting will be on Sept.. 22, at 7 P.M. at the ARC.
District misses AYP, proficiency increases AMY LOVEJOY Staff Writer
The school district has failed to meet its yearly No Child Left Behind (NCLB) goal for the 2007-08 school year. The high school failed to meet its Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) goal in math testing. 75.9 percent of juniors were proficient in math in the special education department, which is lower than the goal for the school year. “The state trajectory for proficiency is 79.3 percent for the 2007-08 school year,” Principal Bruce Hukee said. This means that 79.3 percent is the ideal proficiency in math testing for all Iowa school districts for the 2007-08 school year. Although the department did not meet its goal, the non-proficiency rate of this group decreased by 2.23 percent in the last school year. The district’s set of goals is based on the desired proficiency level of students. Students are deemed proficient when their tests scores lie in the 40th percentile or above. Proficiency means that a student is adequately skilled in a certain subject area, and it is usually measured by a
score on a standardized test, like the ITEDS or MIALTS. It is NCLB’s goal that every student will be at a high proficiency in reading and math by the 2013-2014 school year. The state established a formula to reach 100 percent proficiency by this same time. Right now Iowa’s proficiency level is at 79.3 percent in reading and math for all high school juniors statewide, according to annual ITED results. Although every student in the district is subject to multiple standardized tests throughout the year, the NCLB program only pulls data from ranges of students. These ranges include students in grades 3-5, 6-8, and 11. The ranges remain the same, so as students move throughout the district, a different group of students is tested every year. NCLB requires that 95 percent of each subgroup within a school be tested. In order for a group of like students to qualify as a subgroup, there must be at least 40 students in that group. Special education students, English Language Learning (ELL), and free and reduced lunch students are the main subgroups tested in the district. The district’s goal over the past few years has been to reduce the number
of non-proficient students in all subgroups by 10 percent annually. In order to attain this goal, each teacher is given a list of their non-proficient students, except students receiving free and reduced lunch. The teacher is able to provide the student extra assistance or counseling, including tutoring or additional homework assignments, in hopes of improving the student’s proficiency level in the next year. If the school falls on the watch list a second year, it will become a “district in need of improvement”. If the district continues to produce lower proficiency rates, it will fall on the NCLB watch list. This means the government will monitor our budget, and possibly even cut some of the district’s funding if it doesn’t continue to meet its AYP. The district will then need to look at ways to improve scores by changing classes or even the environment at the high school. While the district may see changes if scores don’t improve, the average student may not be affected. “The big picture is that some students are not proficient,” Hukee said. “Our job is to make sure students have skills necessary to be successful.”
district goals Students will demonstrate increasingly higher levels of proficiency in math, science and reading.
math 95.7 percent
currently
87.43 percent
reading 94.3 percent currently
86.57 percent
science 95.5 percent currently
86.1 percent
These goals are set for the 2010-2011school year for juniors.