Student achievement in Eagle County is struggling to overcome pandemic impacts
District remains optimistic for further gains as it sees ‘better than expected’ growth this year
Ben Roof/For the Vail Daily
While the physical marks of COVID have mostly disappeared from public schools, the impacts are still being seen in students’ academic achievement locally, mirroring some national trends.
The NWEA, which provides assessments to schools, recently released a report detailing the “stalled progress” of education in the 2022-23 school year. It reports that the “achievement gap” between the most recent school year and pre-pandemic academic trends is widening with “sluggish achievement gains” in both reading and math.
While the report relies on a subset of student data — approximately 6.7 million American public school students from grades 3 through 8 — the local school district has also seen some student progress continue to be impacted by the pandemic.
Melisa Rewold Thuon, Eagle County School District’s assistant superintendent of student support services, said that while the district has experienced similar downward trends in reading and math from the onset of COVID through today, “growth in our local data this year has been better than expected.”
She also noted that the district’s “minority students have been more highly impacted than our non-minority students,” by some of the pandemic trends.
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The Eagle County School District uses STAR assessments to locally measure students’ academic progress from the start to the end of the year. Primarily, these tests are used to monitor student learning in math and English and are administered to grades K-8 and select 9th- and 10th-grade students. In June, the district shared its final checkpoint report with its Board of Education.
The district compares these scores against two different benchmarks. The first is a state benchmark, which “measures how students do on the assessment questions that are tied to meeting proficiency level on the Colorado Academic Standards,” Rewold Thuon said.
The second is a district benchmark, which is based on “percentile rank national norms for all the students that take the Star Assessments across the United States,” she added.
At a high level, Rewold Thuon reported, “reading achievement is recouping more quickly than math achievement, but math is trending positively.”
While the district is not necessarily surprised to see COVID continue to impact students, it is “still concerned about the students that are not rebounding from COVID-19 learning loss as quickly as we would like to see,” she added.
Reading
From the start of the school year to the end of the end, the percentage of students that were at or above the district’s benchmark grew from 20.4% to 45.9%. In Spanish, reading proficiency grew from 30.5% to 52%. Against the state benchmark, the number of students meeting or above standards grew from 29.1% to 36.3%.
“Our achievement levels are still not reaching the levels that we strive for as a district, but the student growth percentile improvement from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, especially in the younger grades exceeded our expectations,” Rewold Thuon said.
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The highest levels of reading achievement and growth for the district were seen in grades K-2, she added.
One hypothesis as to why is that “these grades were not in school during the transition to remote learning for the pandemic,” Rewold Thuon said.
However, progressing through third grade to seventh grade, she said they’re seeing “lower achievement levels that decrease as the grades increase “until a slight bump in eighth grade in both math and reading.”
“These students were in grades K-3 during the transition to remote learning and reduced in-person learning days during crucial developmental years,” she added.
Math
From the start of the school year to the end of the end, the percentage of students that were at or above the district’s benchmark grew from 37.5% to 57.1%. In Spanish, reading proficiency grew from 35.7% to 57.8%. Against the state benchmark, the number of students meeting or above standards grew from 15.8% to 21.9%.
“On local assessments, students’ general math skills are scoring within the national norm range, but our local data on Colorado math standards is indicating lower performance,” Rewold Thuon said.
Specifically, fifth- through eighth-grade students showed “lower levels of performance in math,” Rewold Thuon said.
“These students were in grades 2-5 during school closures and reduced contact days during the pandemic. These grades are crucial developmental years for number sense related to foundational mathematical operations,” she added.
Another obstacle is that the district has “faced challenges in being able to recruit qualified math teachers at the middle school level,” Rewold Thuon reported, adding that this follows a national trend as well.
While recruiting any position is challenging due to “low salaries and high cost of living,” this area in particular has had even fewer candidates, she noted.
Interventions and support
The district is employing several tools and resources to continue growing its student achievement, including providing teachers with ongoing training and utilizing federal funding.
For reading, there have been a few steady sources of funding in the past that have likely contributed to “district reading data being more consistent over time,” Rewold Thuon said. This includes Title I federal funds, which it has used for reading interventionists and reading intervention resources traditionally, as well as READ Act funding, which goes toward literacy instruction and intervention.
The district receives Title I funding based on the number of its students that qualify under the federal free and reduced lunch program. Next year, Rewold Thuon said the district will receive $535,617 to fund five reading interventionists in the four elementary schools that have 50% or greater free and reduced lunch concentrations. This includes the Avon, Gypsum, Edwards and Homestake Peak elementary schools.
A portion of funds also go toward parent education and engagement activities as well as to St. Clare and Vail Christian Academy (which although they are private schools outside of the public school district, the district manages Title I funds for these schools).
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Math has been a focus of the districts for several years as its achievement levels were lower to start, Rewold Thuon said. As such, it used COVID relief funds to hire a math interventionist and provide intervention in the subject for the past two school years. However, as the relief funds are set to expire, replacing this resource will be a challenge, she added.
Regardless, the district has an understanding that “ongoing intervention for math is a need for the district” Rewold Thuon said, adding that this also means “more professional development on the universal instruction of math and intervention,”
In both reading and math, the district knows it needs to continue providing this ongoing training and professional development to help support its educators and help bolster student achievement. However, that is not without its challenges.
“Due to licensed teacher shortages, the district has many foreign staff and alternative license candidates that are needing more training and coaching than traditional teacher candidates. This training is difficult to be able to provide throughout the school year because of the shortage of guest teachers,” Rewold Thuon said.
Additionally, the district’s rollout of standards-based grading is meant “in part to address this issue and other achievement concerns in the district,” she said.
This way of grading is intertwined with performance in various ways, Rewold Thuon said. Not only does it align instruction more clearly with standards and set clear expectations, but it also allows for more individualized feedback, more accountability and room for improvement, she noted.
“Standards-based reporting helps clarify learning expectations, align assessments, inform instruction, provide individualized feedback, and promote accountability. By establishing a clear connection between performance and the defined standards, it aims to improve student learning outcomes and facilitate targeted support for growth and development,” Rewold Thuon said.
Additional support for its goal of increasing achievement comes from curricular resources and intervention programs like Reading 180 and Math as well as programming with community partners like YouthPower365, which helps provide summer learning for students identified as “highest need.”
Behavioral screening
As the pandemic impacted not just academic progress, but many aspects of students’ lives, the district also started administering a behavioral and emotional screening system last spring. As such, this year it had its first full school year’s worth of data on students’ behavioral and emotional risk.
The assessment asks a series of questions about behaviors and feelings and defines risk based on standard deviations from local student data. It then places students into normal, elevated and extremely elevated risk categories. The surveys were administered in the fall and spring.
At a high level, in October 2022, 77% of students screened were defined as “normal risk,” 18% as elevated risk and 5% as extremely elevated. In the spring of 2023, these numbers were at 76% normal, 18% elevated and 6% extremely elevated.
Breaking it down by grade level, fourth-, fifth-, sixth- and eighth-grade students saw an increase in the number of students that were categorized as “extremely elevated risk.”
One possible reason, Rewold Thuon said, is that these are often seen as transition periods for students, which the district has consistently seen elevated risk for.
“These transition periods can be difficult for students as they anticipate heading into unfamiliar environments and new social structures,” she said.
To ease this, the district provides tours and information for students transitioning grade levels.
Another possibility, particularly with the fourth-grade increase, could be related to the “increased numbers of younger students with risk behaviors, such as vaping,” the district is seeing, Rewold Thuon said.
That, and the pandemic, she added.
“The screener relies heavily on social and emotional based responses, where the pandemic impacted some students significantly. There is no explicit reason for why certain grades or students have higher risk or lower risk, and we will lean on the longitudinal data for trend data and possible antecedents,” Rewold Thuon said.
On the flip side, many high school grades saw decreases from the start of the year to the end in terms of elevated and extremely elevated risk levels.
“Students are normalizing and returning to more pre-COVID traditional activities and routines, and social situations. Mental Health and counseling support was increased in the schools,” Rewold Thuon said.
The district is planning to do another screener in the fall, after which it will use that data to “plan universal support for students and provide services to specific groups and individuals,” Rewold Thuon said.
Already, it is implementing some programs to reduce risks as well as to reduce gaps based on socio-economic status and student ethnicity. This includes engaging students in decision-making and leadership, standards-based grading, increased opportunities for parent education and engagement as well as supports, Rewold Thuon said.
The COVID relief funds have provided resources for the district to hire interventionists as well as social workers that provide necessary academic and behavioral support for students. Next year, the district is losing 24 interventionist positions, Rewold Thuon reported. This is in addition to an already-challenging hiring environment.
“It is a struggle to get licensed, credentialed staff to come to our community due to low education funding (wages) in Colorado and our high cost of living. ECSD currently has six unfilled counselor positions with school starting in five weeks,” she said.
“The district data is trending in a positive direction, so this is reassuring that our students are on the road to recovery from the past few years,” Rewold Thuon said. “We are very concerned about the lack of funding for the support and interventions in academics and social-emotional needs of our students.”
