Ripon Area School District makes strides toward closing the COVID gap | News

The Ripon Area School District (RASD) continues to make progress in closing the learning gap caused by the interruption of in-person instruction at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but still has plenty of work to do.

That was part of the message delivered by district administrators to the School Board Monday, when they examined the end-of-the-year dashboard report for the 2022-2023 school year and looked at ways to improve.

“We will continue to see the impacts of COVID for years to come,” RASD Curriculum Director Chrissy Damm said. “It’s that second-grade group that really is what we consider the last of our COVID years, and it certainly has had some tremendous impacts socially, emotionally, but also academically … which is why we’re asking for some additional academic support to to get our kids to proficiency and to those levels that we had seen pre-COVID.”

While the end-of-the year report was overwhelmingly positive, there were some areas that needed improvement. Among them was the district’s benchmark reading assessment for students in kindergarten through second grade. Of the kindergarteners, 36.8% were below the benchmark, which was equal to the percentage at the benchmark. First and second graders fared worst, with 57% of first graders and 48.9% of the second graders being below.

Barlow Park/Journey Principal Tanya Sanderfoot noted that it is not unusual to see a lower number of first-grade students who are at or above that benchmark as it is a year of “tremendous growth” both physically and mentally.

“Typically, what we will see is a dip in our scores in first grade and then a rebound when they get to second grade,” she said. “The second grade that we have on [the report] is the last of what we call our ‘COVID babies.’ These were the kiddos that were in 4k when we were doing virtual school. What we found actually with this group was there was a higher need for support in the area of social-emotional learning because these kids didn’t have all of the typical social experiences that kids in the past had because it wasn’t necessarily safe to always go out into the community and public, so they were just needing more support in those areas, but they grew quite substantially.”

Sanderfoot added that she, along with other distinct officials, are confident that the academics will catch up a little bit next year as the second graders move to third grade.

Ripon fared better in the benchmark reading assessment for third- to fifth graders as all three grades came in above the benchmark. Of the third-graders, 70.2% were either at or above the benchmark, while fourth- and fifth-graders saw 78.3% and 86% at or above the level, respectively.

RASD Reading Specialist Jill-Puhlmann Becker noted that usually by fifth grade the district has about 92% of its students reading at or above the benchmark and it’s not quite at that level yet as it currently is in the high 80s.

“We’ve still got a little bit of gap to close yet, but it’s so much better than they were when they came back after the stay-at-home time,” Puhlmann-Becker said. “It’s getting there. It’s just not something that we’re able to fix in like one year. It’s taking two or three years out and so it’s a really slow kind of process.”

Puhlmann-Becker added that when the district has more interventionists it can serve more students.

“That’s always our constraint is time,” she said, noting what makes it more challenging is when the district has students who because of their particular needs require more intense instruction and trying to find that balance between serving those students and getting them up to the level they need to be at, while still focusing on others.

To help with some of those issues, the School Board approved the hiring of two additional full-time teaching positions to provide interventions. According to a document provided to the School Board, one will likely work full-time at Murray Park Quest Elementary School to support literacy growth, with a special focus on third-grade students. The additional full-time position will support Barlow Park Journey Elementary School and may provide some additional literacy support at Ripon High School.

Administrators also recommended hiring a full-time special education teaching position and a full-time special education support staff member, which was approved by the School Board. The memo noted that these positions will support a larger population of students in special education at Murray Park/Quest Elementary School.

The proposed positions will cost approximately $240,000 to $280,000, using an estimate that each new teaching position will cost roughly $80,000 and an additional support staff member would cost roughly $40,000. Funding for these positions will be provided by the ESSER III federal grant and new revenue proposed in the next Wisconsin biennial budget, which Business Manager Jonah Adams noted appears to be favorable for Ripon.

At the middle school level, the end-the-year-dashboard noted that students made “significant growth from the fall to the end of the year in reading and math diagnostics” and that “intervention has been working well for students.”

The high school saw an all-time high percentage (98.2%) of students passing classes according to the report, while more than half of the student body continues to be on the honor roll and interventions have helped fuel success. Behavior referrals spiked, which the report noted “seems to be a trend in all buildings” as well as conference schools. Attendance was very similar or better at most of Ripon schools this past year.

“We are very proud of our diligence with our students and then certainly the work that our teachers have done in terms of providing academic support to our kids,” Damm said.