By Ben Rodgers
Staff Writer

SUAMICO – The Howard-Suamico School district as a whole exceeds expectations, according to the most recent report cards.

The accountability report cards were released by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction on Nov. 21.

The report cards are legislatively mandated and evaluate the performance of the district as a whole as well as individual schools.

Areas scored are student achievement, district growth, closing gaps, and on-track post secondary readiness. The scores combine to form a rating of one to five stars, with five being the highest.

Overall the district scored a 75.1, good enough for four stars, or an exceeds expectations rating.

The highest score came in the readiness category with a 89.9, compared to the state average of 86.5.

Student achievement for the district was also above the state average with a score of 78, compared to 66.7 for the rest of the state.

HSSD was also slightly above the state average for closing gaps, and below for district growth.

The top school in the district was Suamico Elementary with an overall score of 91.3, good enough for five stars or significantly exceeds expectations.

Bay Harbor Elementary was the lowest scoring school with a score of 59.9, which scored two stars, or meets few expectations. This is a drop from last year’s rating of 83.4.

DPI attributed the drop to low scores in closing the gap for the economically disadvantaged subset of students.

“While we are in general agreement with the overall outcomes as defined by the state, it is perplexing to comprehend how the rating of an entire school of dedicated teachers and students could be affected so decidedly from one year to the next by a single indicator,” said Superintendent Damian LaCroix in a press release. “Despite the responsiveness of the DPI in explaining how the calculations are constructed, this fact exposes flaws in an imperfect formula used to apply a report card-style rating to schools. We assert that an accurate assessment of the quality of our schools is dependent on multiple and varied measures.”

Bay Port High School exceeds expectations with a score of 73.1, as does Bay View Middle School with a score of 71.2.
Lineville Intermediate School also scored well with a 74.4

Report cards are intended to help schools and districts use performance data to target improvement efforts to ensure students are ready for their next educational step, including the next grade level, graduation, college, and careers.

The 2016-17 report cards use data from a variety of sources, including information reported through WISEdash and two years of Forward and one year of Badger testing as well as three years ACT Plus Writing and Dynamic Learning Maps testing for growth calculations.

At least three and up to five years of data are used for the gaps priority area and four years of data is needed to calculate a graduation rate.