Addressing Adequate Yearly Progress at New Prague Area Schools
The MCAII results started to arrive in early July. As we received each report we began the process of analyzing the data to discover our areas of strengths and our areas of concerns according to the MCAII assessments. These high stakes tests are taking very seriously in our district and provide us with the opportunity to continue to grow and work towards academic success for all students.

The MCAII provides us with the ability to compare ourselves with the state and other districts. They also give us the opportunity to compare subgroups within the district such as free and reduced lunch student results, English Language Learner student results and special education student results. These same results are used by the state to determine if the district is making adequate yearly progress ( AYP) in each subgroup. If a single subgroup does not make AYP the district or the school is identified as not making AYP.

This year it was very exciting to see the 16% improvement in our high school math scores and our 13% improvement in the high school science score. Our middle school science scores were number one in our comparable districts with a 9% improvement over last year. Our three elementary schools also had many areas of improvement, with Falcon Ridge showing the most growth on the Math and Science Assessments.

Many of you by now have received a parent letter or read in the newspaper that an area of concern for us which has placed our district in not making AYP status is in special education reading. The other areas we are looking to improve in are special education math at Raven Stream and special education reading and math at the middle school. As the target each year will be raised by the state we will continue to look for ways to improve in all areas.

We intend to look at our data down to each and every strand to discover our specific areas of strengths and concerns. We will evaluate our programs, time spent in each curricular area, and our curriculum. We will identify students who were not proficient and design interventions to help them improve. We truly want all of our students to be successful and will continue to strive for academic success for all.

We encourage each of you to go to the New Prague Area School website - www.np.k12.mn.us - then click on Curriculum - click on MCAII report cards to see how our schools are performing. Please also click on our testing calendar to view our testing dates for the upcoming school year. We ask that you continue to be our partners in education and help us work towards ensuring academic success for all students.