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Summer, What Summer?

The weather has not been inspiring any dreams of sitting poolside, at least not without a sweatshirt. Could it be another summer without sun?

School has been out for nearly a week and my room still looks like a bomb went off inside. On the last day of school I realized that I just wasn’t going to be able to shove everything in the closet and head out at the end of the day. Instead I tracked down a custodian and asked when I really had to be “out” of the room.  “August.”

Suddenly the month of June was my oyster. I’m going through the file cabinets and weeding out all the 9th/10th grade crap, duplicates and just plain crap, while organizing it all into some organizational pattern. All those folders full of something mixed together – unmixed and filed correctly. And I finally expanded the drawers for AP into three! I can actually pull stuff without risking a nasty paper cut. I have many, many graphic organizers (not including the dusty binders sitting in the bottom of my closet) and a lot of poetry.

I was also able to put the final touches on the reading intervention data. Of our students placed in reading interventions over the last two years, more than half passed the HSPE. In order to be placed into an intervention, one of the criteria is not passing previously. This number is tempered by the significant number of students who did not even take the HSPE because they were too credit deficient. Would those students have passed anyway? We’ll never know and it’s not like anyone wants to volunteer to be in a control group, but they had never passed before.

Interestingly, our screener data was all over the place with these students. Obviously they all started out low (another criteria for class placement), but HSPE passing rate did not really correlate with the screener at grade level scores. Why? is a good question. But do I really want to tackling it over the summer?

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