Kennett Consolidated School District continues to show improvement in across the board tests show
By P.J. D’Annunzio, Staff Writer, KennettTimes.com
KENNETT SQUARE — Parents of Kennett Consolidated School District students should not only be proud of the high marks their children are earning, but also of the grades that the district is bringing home, as evidenced in the 2010-2011 District Report Card issued by the Pennsylvania Department of Education.
Last year KCSD surpassed state-wide averages in the four major subject areas. The numbers below represent the percentage of students classified in the state’s Proficient and Advanced PSSA performance categories:
| SUBJECT |
DISTRICT |
STATE |
| Mathematics |
81.2 |
77.1 |
| Reading |
76.1 |
73.5 |
| Science |
71.1 |
60.8 |
| Writing |
86.3 |
75.0 |
The continual increase in academic performance reflects all demographics in the district, including students who traditionally have difficulty in English Language comprehension.
“Our Hispanic population achieves very highly,” District Superintendent Barry Tomasetti said. “The first achievement for many of these students is not having to take English as a Second Language classes anymore. They have to take a specific test given to us by the state…they’ve been achieving; we have 25-30% percent of these students exiting ESL classes every year.”
Kennett’s graduation rate continues to maintain its high percentage as well, despite recent changes in state-wide student designations.
“Our graduation rate is much more stringent,” Tomasetti said. “It’s in the high 80s, before it was in the high 90s. If you look previously at a student—say it may have taken him five years to graduate—he still graduated. Now it’s a cohort group, so they measure the freshman class. If you have a kid that comes from another county that needs more time to graduate, they count them as dropouts.”
“With the cohort group everybody’s [graduation rate] is going to go down,” he continued. “It’s like apples and oranges; you can’t compare the past to the present; we just made this switch about two years ago. But the high 80s is still very high”
Tomasetti attributes the district’s high achievement level partly to the administration’s adaptive strategy toward education.
“When the administrators meet, the beginning of our conversation revolves around our educational goals, and we talk about what evidence we have that the principals are meeting that effort,” he said. “Once the school year starts the job is to articulate the goals, then to make sure that they’re being carried out, and then possibly altering the strategies we have to accomplish these goals.”
“For instance,” he continued, “We monitor how many kids are failing classes. From that point we have to take a look and say ‘what can we do?’ We certainly have after school opportunities for them, and then we have to take a look at alternatives. Online education? Maybe that gives teachers opportunities to work with students in small groups while the majority of kids are working online—we’re talking about these kinds of things.”
Additionally, Tomasetti is a believer in the old adage “it takes a village to raise a child,” stating that the entire Kennett Square community helps to shape the future of the students enrolled in KCSD.
“Our diversity works here in Kennett,” he said. “It works not only because of what we do here in the schools—and we do a lot—but in the community, it’s a real community effort. We’ve got Chatham Financial that supports The Garage which works with underprivileged students. We have ‘After the Bell’ at the middle school. Exelon works with Big Brothers and Big Sisters and they take about 30 of our elementary/middle school age students and work with those kids, Communities That Care, Chester County Futures; the list goes on. In a nutshell, the whole community has wrapped their arms around the young people in our school district.”
For a look at the complete District Report Card, visit http://www.kcsd.org/pdf/District-Report-Card-10-11.pdf
