District Acknowledges Decline in State Assessments Due To Pandemic, Making Plans To Recover Lost Ground

(KNSI) – As another school year begins, the St. Cloud Public School District acknowledges its student assessment test scores were lower than desired and vowed to work to improve. The Minnesota Department of Education says students in districts like 742 had declining scores all over the state due to distance learning and other disruptions. The tests are given due to federal mandates.

District 742 Executive Director Research Evaluation, Assessment, and Enrollment Donna Roper told the school board the Department of Education not to compare this year’s results.

“It’s apples and oranges, and maybe even apples and bananas that we’re trying to compare across districts because of all of the factors that we had to deal with. It just really is inappropriate. They recognize that family situations and the human condition varied widely during this pandemic.”

The St. Cloud Area School District had internet access issues with students, problems with student attendance, and students with declining mental health and the loss of social-emotional learning. The issues were consistent with distance learning in other districts.

She says the MDE wants schools to look at their learning models during the pandemic and evaluate them.

“We’re going to take a look at where those opportunities to learn maybe didn’t happen like they should. And we’re taking the opportunity to acknowledge the difficulty and doing the comparisons. But then really trying to understand how are we going to take this forward.”

The department of education will release a new initiative later this month designed to help school districts make up ground lost during the last year.

See how all school districts scored by clicking here.

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