The latest TISA accountability report showed Overton County Schools regressed last year in trying to reach 70 percent third grade ELA proficiency by 2030.
In the 2024-2025 school year, Overton County dropped from 39.2 percent proficiency to 32.4 percent. Director of Schools Kim Dillon said it is a challenge to improve third grade ELA proficiency.
“Those third graders that we had last year, you know, they may not have scored where we wanted them to score in comparison to the third grade group the previous year, but it’s a different set of kids,” Dillon said.
Overton County’s goal for this school year is to reach 49 percent third grade ELA proficiency. Dillon said the school district is putting things in place to focus more on assisting students before they get to the third grade.
“We are working with TNTP (The New Teacher Project), they are working with us, and kind of do walk-throughs and help us with looking at student work analysis,” Dillon said. “We are implementing Mastery Connect in our lower grades so we can look at data prior to 3rd-grade to see where they are coming in 3rd-grade, so we know like a starting point. We are trying to take a deeper dive in our data to see if we can work with kids to meet them at their level and try to get them to that proficiency that we need them to be at the end of the year.”
Another goal for the school district is to reach 50 percent proficiency in third through eighth ELA and Math by 2028. The report showed that Overton Schools saw a regression in ELA proficiency, dropping from 37.6 percent to 35.6 percent, while Math proficiency dropped from 41.7 percent to 40.9 percent.
Dillon said some grade levels met the goal, while most grade levels did not.
“We know where those are,” Dillon said. “We have just finished taking the Mastery Connect, which we take three times a year to help give us some idea of where the kids may fall on TCAP, and the scores looked really good, especially in our math. So we are very pleased with that, and we feel like we are making progress, and we are using the right curriculum, and we feel like we are moving in the right direction.”
The third goal for the school district is to maintain an 80 percent college career readiness rate and to reach a 20 composite ACT score. The report showed that ACT scores slightly took a dip from an 18.4 to an 18.3. Dillon said early results this year are giving the district high hopes for a large leap in ACT score improvement.
“Our seniors right now, they just took the senior retake, and their average was a 19.1 when they were juniors, and they increased it to 19.67, so we were very pleased with that,” Dillon said.
Dillon said Livingston Academy has something called Primetime, where juniors go through an ACT prep course to better prepare students. Overton County produced an 80.3 percent college career readiness rate last year.
The fourth and final goal for Overton County Schools is moving from below to approaching mastery of standards by at least 25 percent for SPED 3rd-8th grade proficiency by 2028. Last year’s progress goal was to move by five percent. Dillon said Overton County schools did not quite meet that goal.
