It’s difficult, in looking at the school reports cards issued annually by the state, to judge a school district’s progress from year to year because the state changes something about the report card each year, whether it be the benchmarks in test scores or, as in the case of high schools this year, the addition of a category – college, career, workforce and military readiness.

Add to that the fact that the state tests – which factor so much into the report cards – are largely meaningless to the students who take them, Brookfield school officials said.

Brookfield Board of Education member Melissa Sydlowski, who teaches at Trumbull Career and Technical Center, said the state sets a specific time frame in which to administer the tests and penalized Brookfield in the 2023-24 report card because a student was hospitalized and could not take the test.

“What kind of sense does that make?” she asked at the Sept. 17 board meeting.

Despite those criticisms, Brookfield Supt. Toby Gibson said he and other school administrators take the report card seriously and look for ways to improve the district’s scores.

“Unfortunately, people like to put it in the newspaper and rank you and give you stars, a grade, whatever,” Gibson said. “That’s where we are at with education, so, we’re gonna continue to play the game and do our best to get as many stars as we can.”

The district’s overall report card score is 3½ stars out of 5, up from 3 in the last report card and on par with the year before that.

The report card shows positives in specific areas because of the hard work of teachers and other staff and students,” Gibson said.

“They show up,” Gibson said of students, “they take the test and they try and they don’t have to. We appreciate their efforts as much as we do the staff in this.”

The high school earned 4 stars overall – up from 3½ a year ago – thanks to 1-star jumps in achievement and progress (from 3 to 4 stars) and 4-star ratings in gap closing, graduation rate and the new career readiness category.

High school Principal Megan Marino said she is “really excited” to make 4 stars overall but hopes to keep improving. She said the 4-star rating in career readiness was a disappointment and she promised it will be 5 stars next year.

To thank students for their hard work last year, “We’re gonna really pat them on the back this year with some different, fun things we’re gonna do,” Marino said.

The middle school rating also went up one-half of a star, from 3 to 3½, largely thanks to 1-star jumps in achievement and gap closing, both of which now register 3 stars. The school also earned 3 stars in progress.

The middle school implemented a program called Beat the State to motivate students to take the state tests seriously, and students responded by beating the state projections on how well they would do in fifth-grade math and science, seventh-grade math and eighth-grade algebra and science, said middle school Principal Craig Boles. While students in fifth- and seventh-grade English did not beat the state, they raised their scores by more than 10 percentage points each, he said.

Boles credited the improvements to increased classroom time for math and English, detailed curriculum maps that specify what is to be taught each day, an improved disciplinary climate and giving teachers more autonomy to handle issues in their classrooms.

“We are going in the right direction, as a middle school,” Boles said. 

The elementary school maintained a 2½-star rating, the same as last year, with 3 stars each in achievement and gap closing, 1 star in progress and 2 stars in early literacy. The gap closing rating went up by 1 star.

“2½ stars. We’re not making excuses for our report,” said elementary Principal Stacey Filicky on Oct. 15.” We acknowledge the 2-star rating in K to 3 early literacy. We understand how it’s calculated. We are already implementing changes.”

One of the changes was to bring in a new diagnostic tool used to measure where kids are in reading. The previous program was “ineffective,” and the school changed to Dibels, Filicky said.

The school has an afterschool program to which all students on Reading Improvement and Monitoring Plans are invited. Administrators meet with teachers to discuss teaching challenges and classroom needs, have talked to officials in other districts to get teaching strategies and make reading a focus of intervention periods, Filicky said.

Filicky noted that the district has improved in reading when its scores are compared with those of similar schools.

“We’re not waiting for results to improve, we’re actually working on them,” she said.

Kristen Foster, district director of teaching, learning and accountability, said the elementary is a “special beast” because of the state mandates concerning how reading is taught.

“It’s a constant influx of compliance that we’re trying to deal with,” Foster said, adding that the elementary scores are not a reflection of the efforts of the teachers.

“We have absolutely fabulous teachers that are working their butts off,” she said.

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