ShawneeDispatch.com

It's not official yet, but Nieman Elementary School principal Fred Vaughn said preliminary results from state assessments look promising.

"We improved in every category; we made AYP," Vaughn said.

AYP, or Adequate Yearly Progress, measures the amount of students who meet proficiency in math and reading as mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind Law.

Nieman was one of six schools in Shawnee Mission USD 512 that did not make Adequate Yearly Progress in 2007.

Betsy Degen, director of curriculum and instruction for Shawnee Mission USD 512, attributed Neiman's gains to several factors.

In reading, teachers concentrated on the core curriculum as specified by the district with fidelity, Degen said.

"We know from looking at our district's scores that the students that benefit the most from learning with fidelity are the students at risk," she said.

Nieman also had a tutoring program put in place both within the school day and outside the school day that helped students who needed an extra push in reading, Degen said.

The school's master schedule also was reconfigured, allowing all of the resources available in the building to support a grade level, Degen said. That includes the availability of support staff like special education teachers and paraprofessionals during reading time.

In fact, what Nieman essentially was doing was following an approach called Multi-Tiered System of Support, which uses evidence-based practices to support a rapid response to academic and behavioral needs. However, Degan pointed out while the school was using practices emphasized in MTSS last year, it officially didn't begin using the approach until this year.

Degan said students with disabilities also got the advantage of the collaborative education model.

"Students with disabilities were in the regular classroom receiving core instruction while receiving support form their special education teachers," she said.

Because Nieman was on improvement, the school also had to provide School Choice, which allowed parents of Nieman students to send their children to Bluejacket-Flint and Ray Marsh elementary schools.

Although some of the steps to bring Nieman's scores back up to meet AYP were reactive, Degen said the district is working on being more proactive.

"One of the proactive initiatives especially for our elementary schools is MTSS," Degen said.

With the MTSS approach, teachers and administrators use a model that looks like a pyramid. By evaluating students, the teachers can determine how much support a particular student needs in the subject matter. According to the MTSS model, all students need the base level of support, some need additional support and a few will need an even more intense level of support. All three of those levels form the base, middle and point of the pyramid.

"I think MTSS is definitely giving us a means to which we can help our kids become more successful," Vaughn said. "The district has given us some tools and data to look at where the kids are presently at and how we are going to get them to the next level."

No Child Left Behind currently has all students making AYP by 2014, and Degen said if something doesn't change in how students are evaluated, then most schools nationwide will be listed as "on improvement" by the time schools are required to reach 90 percent of students or above scoring at the proficiency level.

"All we can do is respond with our best efforts that we have tried to meet the needs of individual students and then work with legislature on changing the rules on how they are being counted," she said. "What we embrace about No Child Left Behind is that it has set a high standard and we are responding to that and we are paying much more attention to the needs of students than we have before."

The state of Kansas will release official Adequate Yearly Progress results for all Kansas schools in September.