Schools
Mt. Sinai School Board Reviews State Test Results
School Administrators report on the District's performance on the State tests at the Board of Ed meeting.
The state testing results for the 2010-2011 school year were discussed at Wednesday's Mount Sinai Board of Education Meeting as Dr. Deena Williams-Timo, Executive Director of Educational Services, led the administrator’s presentation on last year’s results.
According to Regents data from Eastern-Suffolk BOCES, Mount Sinai ranks 18 out of the 65 districts. The district’s fourth grade has first place scores between neighboring districts. The fifth grade class came in third place on the ELA exam between neighboring districts, which Williams-Timo pointed out as being "low for the district."
The administrators report went through where each grade stands on ELA tests, Regents exams and AP exams and also went over ways to achieve higher rankings on these tests.
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“Practice tests familiarize students with the test format,” Williams-Timo said. “You don’t want to teach to a test but we do want the kids to be able to know what’s on the test.”
According to Williams-Timo, the districts that came ahead of Mount Sinai in the testing ranks are much smaller districts.
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The district is concerned and plans on making changes so that it’s Regent’s scores are more in the “Mastery level”, which is a score of 85 percent to 100 percent on the regents. According to the stats, passing rates (65-100) continue to increase for the district in Regents scores.
A new scanning process came into effect for five of the regents.
“This year there was a new scanning process—it went directly to BOCES but it was a 24 hour turn around window,” Williams-Timo said. “I was a little skeptical about that but they stuck to their word and in some case we got the [scores] back within a few hours.”
Along with the new scanning process, the district also gave a trigonometry regents exam for the first time. The new scanning process will be used in grading all the Regents exams this year.
“The community should be happy to know two things--one, these scores this past year based on the data we have were as good, if not the best that we ever had in the history of the district," said Superintendent Anthony Bonasera. "Second is that the board is not satisfied with that and they have let me know in certain terms that those Mastery scores had better increase.”
