The International School of Louisiana’a Camp Street campus.
“We knock it out of the park in terms of where the state is, where the parishes are,” said Head of Schools Sean Wilson at Wednesday night’s board meeting. “It doesn’t mean we rest on our laurels. It means we now look at where we can improve.”
Camp Street
At the Camp Street campus, 92.5 percent of students scored at Basic or above in English Language Arts, and 93.7 percent of students passed the math exam. Those figures represent an increase of about 1.5 percentage points in each subject, Wilson said in a report to the school’s board of directors.
“This is no small feat to accomplish, again noting that all assessments are given in English and our students are taught in an immersion environment,” Wilson wrote in his report on the scores.
Other highlights from the testing, Wilson said, are that the school saw a similar 1.5-point shift into the Advanced and Mastery categories, and that all 17 of the school’s eighth-grade students will be promoted based on their scores.
The test scores provide the basis for the School Performance Score that will be released in the fall. Last year, ISL scored 118.5, just beneath the 120 that would have earned the school an A rating.
Under that system, this year’s gains would have been sufficient to earn the school an ‘A,’ Wilson said. But the rating system will be changed over the summer, and Wilson said he was hesitant to make a prediction.
“We will be close, in terms of reaching that prestigious status of an ‘A’ school,” Wilson said.
Jefferson Parish
In Jefferson Parish, 77.7 percent of the students passed in English, and 65.2 percent passed in math. These numbers exceed the state and parish-level results, Wilson said, and represent a strong starting point to grow from. He noted that it was most students’ first year in the ISL system, and they came from many different programs, including private schools where they may not have previously taken the state exams.
Moving forward, Jefferson Parish will benefit from practices and techniques already established at Camp Street, Wilson said. As a new school, ISL-Jefferson Parish will not receive a performance score for three years.
“In the next three years, I trust that our first school performance score will be something we won’t have to hold our head in shame for,” Wilson said.
The exams are only given to students in grades 3 through 8, so the Olivier Street campus — which only has kindergarten and first grades — did not have test scores released.
The board also discussed preparing for technology costs for future exams, as well as nominated new board officers for next year.
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