Putnam County Students showed increased proficiency in all four core subject areas in this year’s TCAP testing.
Data and Testing Supervisor Jason Stickler said scores have been trending up in English, math, science, and social studies for the last three years. Stickler said he is encouraged by the results because they affirm that students are actually learning.
“We’re confident in Putnam County that what we’re doing is working,” Stickler said. “So, what we want to do moving on into the new year is to maintain this positive momentum, and just tweak a few areas as we go to get an even better gain next year.”
Stickler said English/Language Arts showed improvement this year, especially among elementary school students. Stickler said fourth grade proficiency jumped from 44.7 percent in 2023 to 53.2 percent this year.
Stickler said the third graders made steady gains too, as they improved from. from 42.9 percent in 2023 to 49.8 this year. He said English/Language Arts have been a focus area over the last year.
“We believe that early literacy is important to student success, and so for us, that starts all the way back in second grade,” Stickler said. “A lot of performance conversation came about with the third grade retention promotion law, and we’ve just seen great gains in our third grade ELA scores.”
The retention promotion law bars third grade students from advancing to fourth grade if they do not show proficiency on their English TCAP. Stickler said students who are not proficient must complete another pathway to move on.
Stickler said there were steady gains across middle school math. At the high school level, Algebra I and II as well as English I and II improved this year.
Stickler said district TCAP data, which was released Monday, is still being analyzed. He expects school reports to come out later this month. Stickler said it is too early to identify any points of concern.
“As those files start to roll down from the state, we’ll be analyzing those really closely to kind of see where we need to target for the new year,” Stickler said. “Right now, we’re just really encouraged by the performance that we saw on this latest file drop from the state, and we’re just celebrating the success of our teachers and our students right now.”
Stickler said the analysis process helps the district ensure next year’s curriculum and instruction plan will best serve the students’ needs. He said these results, along with benchmarks and other end of year tests, will help identify areas that need to be tweaked.
Stickler said individual student scores are expected to be released around July 17.
