Students score better than state on ACT, worse on SAT
Four schools in Effingham County will share $1.5 million in federal money meant to improve the literacy of all students.
Striving reader grants were awarded recently to Effingham County Middle School, Guyton Elementary School, Marlow Elementary School and South Effingham Elementary School.
Those are the only four schools in the district that applied for the grants.
Judith Shuman, the district’s curriculum and professional learning coordinator, said the opportunity to apply for the grant came at a very busy time, and only four schools had personnel who went out on a limb to commit a lot of time and effort to apply for money that they knew they might not get.
Shuman said part of the money will pay for assessments that will provide baseline data on how well all students at the schools can read.
The schools are being encouraged to spend all of their grant money in the next three years.
Each school came up with its own plan for how to use the money, but all of them were challenged to come up with improvements that can be sustained long after the grant money is gone.
Professional development – improving teachers’ teaching skills – is one major way the money can be made to last.
Anna Barton, principal of South Effingham Elementary School, said some of the $383,000 her school will receive will go to hire substitutes so that teachers can leave the classroom for training.
Teachers also will have a resource room including non-fiction titles in science and social studies.
Students “will have more books in their hands, not just traditional reading series,” she said.
The grant targets striving readers, not struggling readers, so all students will benefit, even the ones who already read well.
Barton and a teacher are going to a conference in Athens this month and 20 teachers will attend a training session in Valdosta in January.
Barton said all of her teachers agreed that they should try for the grant.
“It was a group effort,” she said. “It was a lot of work.”
Lyn Long, gifted facilitator for Effingham County Middle School, said the teachers are tickled that they can get more training and be sure students have books in their hands that they want to read.
“Students who are interested in art, music or agriculture will have materials that they would be interested in reading,” she said.
Speakers will be brought in who write books on how to teach reading to middle school students. “It’s almost unheard of,” she said.
Long said the teachers are excited about the grant.
“We do this because we love our kids,” she said. “It’s a labor of love. It’s a very nice payoff.”
College tests
In other news in the school district, students this year averaged 21.3 on the ACT college entrance exam, higher than the average of 21 for the state and the nation.
On the SAT, the average score in the district was 1,422, which is below 1,450 for the state and 1,490 for the nation.
Shuman said most colleges accept either test and more students in Effingham are taking the ACT.
The state pays for all 10th graders to take the PSAT, which gives students an idea how they will fare on the SAT. The Effingham school district pays for all 10th graders to take the Aspire test, which forecasts how students will do on the ACT.