HANCOCK COUNTY — A brand new statewide school assessment is enough of a challenge on its own. Then the pandemic canceled what should’ve been the test’s second year and disrupted learning ahead of when it was finally able to be administered last spring.
The 2021 Indiana Learning Evaluation and Readiness Network, or ILEARN, evaluates the proficiency of students in a variety of subjects, including key benchmarks of English/language arts, math and the two combined for grades three through eight. All but one of the county’s four public school districts saw drops of at least 10 percentage points in all three categories compared to 2019.
As school officials process the data, they look forward to what they hope will be a much more normal school year helping to make improvements possible when the annual assessment returns.
ILEARN also assesses science in grades four and six; social studies among fifth-graders; and biology and U.S. government for high school students. The government test is optional, however, and none of Hancock County’s high schools participated in 2021.
ILEARN was first administered in 2019, setting a new assessment baseline. It wasn’t administered in 2020 because of pandemic-related school closures and a federally granted waiver. State legislators passed a “hold harmless” measure for schools earlier this year, preventing poor results from affecting accountability measures and teacher evaluations.
The Daily Reporter asked administrators from all four school districts in Hancock County for their reactions to the test results. Here are their assessments:
Southern Hancock
The district had the highest corporation-wide marks in the county for English/language arts, math and the two combined. Results show 60% of students are at or above proficiency standards in English/language arts, 58.1% are in math and 48.7% are combined. The figures represent only a slight drop from 2019’s 60.8%, 63.8% and 52.1%, respectively.
Southern Hancock, along with the county’s three other districts, topped statewide proficiency percentages of 40.5% for English/language arts, 36.9% for math and 28.6% combined.
Lisa Lantrip, Southern Hancock superintendent, was pleased with the district’s results.
“Quite frankly, we were concerned with the pandemic and going into the testing — what that would look like,” Lantrip said. “Our teachers did incredibly well at identifying students’ needs, and targeting those, and working on them to get them to where they needed to be.”
Lantrip attributed the outcome to Southern Hancock having one-to-one technology integration — meaning each student gets their own device, like a laptop or tablet — for the past 10 years.
“Our teachers are experts at virtual learning,” she said.
It wasn’t easy, she continued, adding that doing virtual learning for a day or two at a time is far different than the full-time switch necessary during the last part of the school year in 2020.
Lantrip also recalled how the district was in session more than 90% of the past school year, opting not to implement any hybrid schedules calling for students to attend school in person on some days and virtually on others. Only the high school had to shut down and switch to virtual learning — for two weeks in November — due to a rise in COVID-19 cases.
Wes Anderson, director of school and community relations for Southern Hancock, and Lantrip credited ILEARN for going far more in depth than past state assessments. It will allow the district to form conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses in its curriculum.
“There’s still a lot of data for us to dig through on this,” Anderson said. “…We’re initially pleased with the results, but we know there’s a lot more work to do in terms of evaluating where our kids are at and the impacts of what the pandemic has had on them.”
Greenfield-Central
In the city’s school district, 42.1% of students are proficient in English/language arts, 48.9% are in math and 33.5% are in both. Those results dropped more than 10 percentage points from 2019, which saw 53.9%, 62.2% and 45.9%, respectively.
Superintendent Harold Olin said he wasn’t sure what to expect from the results of last spring’s ILEARN. Being the second time the test was ever administered after it wasn’t given in 2020 left a lot of unknowns, he added.
“Obviously, scores are lower than I’d like to see them be,” Olin said.
Students lost out on in-person school for the last quarter of the 2019-20 school year and had to take part virtually from home. Challenges continued throughout the 2020-21 year from schools not being able to implement best practices like small-group learning and having to wear masks in school.
“We knew there would be some setbacks,” Olin said.
Greenfield-Central’s 2021 ILEARN wasn’t completely void of successes, however. The district’s Eden Elementary School has the third-highest math proficiency of any school in the state, at 88.6%. It rose from 80.5 in 2019%.
“There are some silver linings here in places we continue to have some success,” Olin said.
But he generally looks at assessments from a corporation-wide perspective, and didn’t see the growth he would’ve hoped to see. However, it wasn’t for a lack of hard work from teachers, parents and students, he continued.
“We just know that the pandemic presented us with some obstacles we don’t normally have,” he said.
The results further confirm that the pandemic contributed to learning loss, which the district needs to embrace to overcome deficiencies, Olin said.
“We’re going to work at it,” he said. “It doesn’t happen overnight. I do think in time we’ll be able to rebound from it. … We’re going to continue to disaggregate that data till we have a better understanding of what the specific deficiencies are, so we can target our remediation efforts.”
Mt. Vernon
The district’s proficiency percentages in the 2021 ILEARN are 43.5% for English/language arts, 42.9% for math and 30.8% for both combined. They dropped at least 10 percentage points from 2019, which were 53.5%, 57.4% and 43.4%, respectively.
Superintendent Jack Parker said he wasn’t surprised.
“We expected that our student performance on the ILEARN would go down,” Parker said. “We were thrilled that our students have had such a high participation rate, even those students learning virtually — almost all of them came in to take the tests. So that really gives us a baseline to work with for the future.”
He echoed Olin’s concerns about COVID-19 disturbing education for a school year and a quarter, with much less engagement in direct learning.
“It had all the impact in the world,” he said.
The ILEARN is still a very new test, Parker continued.
“So for a year or two, there are still going to be rather unstable results,” he said. “I feel like 2021 is possibly the start of a new baseline.”
When establishing a new starting point and realizing how students have performed on a new assessment, sometimes adjustments need to be made.
“Your best quality baseline isn’t usually the first year of a test,” Parker said. “And I contend we just had the very first year of a new test again.”
He said he and the rest of Mt. Vernon are looking forward to the start of school on July 29.
“We have been preparing for five quarters to accelerate learning once we started coming out of the pandemic, and we are very excited about next school year,” he said. “With the exception of very few high school students, all will be in person every day.”
The others will take part in the district’s virtual program.
“We feel like we are in a very good position to accelerate learning rapidly,” Parker said. “We have put some new and extensive resources in place for teachers and students.”
Eastern Hancock
The county’s smallest school district came out of the recent ILEARN with 45.7% proficiency in English/language arts, 47.4% in math and 34.4% combined, compared to 55.7, 66.7 and 50.1, respectively, in 2019.
George Philhower, who recently started settling into his role as Eastern Hancock’s new superintendent, didn’t have to be around last year to know of the pandemic’s impacts.
“I think, like everybody else, we all expected a little bit of a dip, because we haven’t been business as usual since a year and a half ago,” Philhower said. “We know that kids learn best when we’re in person and we can implement the research-based strategies that include kids sitting in groups and collaborating, and we’re looking forward to returning to that type of learning environment.”
