Community High School misses AYP mark

After making the mark two years in a row, a state "report card" released this week showed that West Chicago Community High District 94 students tested last year failed to achieve federal standards.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, administered locally by the Illinois Board of Education, schools' funding is largely determined by students' scores on the Prairie State Achievement Exam, or PSAE.

The law requires that all minority groups within a school meet adequate yearly progress, or AYP, standards, which rise each year.

While white Community High students' results exceeded the state-mandated minimum score of 55 percent, Latino students' didn't.

Hispanic Community High kids met AYP 33 percent of the time, as compared with 63 percent for white students.

Last year, Latinos made up 39.7 percent of the student population, and whites were 52.1 percent.

This academic year, the Hispanic population topped 40 percent of the student body for the first time; simultaneously, white students made up less than 50 percent, another record.

A language barrier and cultural issues keep Latinos from raising their test scores, Superintendent Lee Rieck said. To combat that problem, the school is increasing efforts to teach students about the importance of the exam. Community High also will focus more on parent outreach, Rieck said.

The overall decline in scores might also be due to the fact that fewer students are taking classes that prepare them for the PSAE test, Rieck said.

Instead, kids are taking electives to meet graduation requirements. As a result, Principal Moses Cheng is leading a committee that is looking at changing those requirements.

Cheng, who is in his first year at Community High, also is preparing to administer PSAE practice tests to freshmen and sophomores so they're prepared to take the real exam as juniors.

The fact that juniors had to take the PSAE the day after they were given the ACT also may contribute to the decline in scores, Rieck said.

"A significant number of students, for some reason or other, take the first day of testing much more seriously than second day testing," he said. "We've found examples of 20 students that scored considerably above state average on the ACT and then blew off the second day."