Discrepancy could change status of Waynesboro AYP

By Jimmy LaRoue

Published: September 10, 2008

Waynesboro Public Schools Superintendent Robin Crowder said Wednesday that there is a chance the school division could make Adequate Yearly Progress after a discrepancy was discovered between its numbers and those used by the Virginia Department of Education to calculate scores. 
Crowder said some of the data from last year that the state used when making its calculations earlier this summer was not data the school division turned in.
“Somehow during the winter, the data was changed,” Crowder said. “We didn’t change it.”
The state, he said, does not know how the data changed.
For a school division to make AYP, it has to meet benchmarks in five separate subcategories of students – African-American, special needs, Hispanic, limited English proficiency and free and reduced lunch.
Crowder said the school division has been able to narrow down at least one of the errors to a single sixth-grade student at Kate Collins Middle School who was erroneously categorized by the state as a Hispanic female instead of a white female. Kate Collins was the only Waynesboro school that did not meet AYP.
When Waynesboro officials informed the state, “their response was, ‘uh-oh,’” Crowder said.
He said that particular error could affect Waynesboro’s scores in the limited English proficiency and Hispanic categories. Waynesboro met 169 of the 175 AYP indicators.
“We’re not saying that it’s going to make all of our schools AYP, but we know for a fact that it’ll increase our percentages of passing in our subgroups.”
Crowder said he does not believe it was human error. He noted that the state delayed announcing AYP results this year twice due to errors it found.
“It looks like, I hate saying this, a technology error,” Crowder said.