“In all honesty, I was not going to do this until October,” Gregg said. “But, after looking at the data and talking with Dr. Therouex, we felt like it was really important to get up tonight a little about our report card and our results.”
Gregg said district officials were “extremely proud” of the latest report cards.
To start, the district’s 2021-2022 “Performance Index,” which takes into account the performance of each student in the district, received four out of five stars, and ranked fourth in the county.
According to Gregg, Talawanda Schools were consistently among the Top 3 performers of all Butler County’s school districts for the 2021-2022 school year.
Starting this year, the Ohio Department of Education has begun grading each school out of five stars in specific categories: Achievement, Progress, Gap Closing, Graduation, Early Literacy and the new, not-yet-incorporated College, Career, Workforce and Military Readiness.
“All Talawanda Schools — every elementary, middle school and high school — were all ranked four stars for academic achievement,” Gregg said. Meaning, according to the state’s new grading system, that each Talawanda school has exceeded statewide expectations.
The state has also placed importance on what it calls “gap closing,” which takes specific student subgroups and measures their current performance against the state’s annual goals for that subgroup. Those specific subgroups are factored up by race, ethnicity, economic background and disability.
“The state expectation for all areas of these subgroups is to continue closing educational gaps year after year. Talawanda has earned five stars in this area,” Gregg said. Five stars means the district significantly exceeded state expectations.
In the other areas of the state’s grading, Talawanda Schools met expectations and received three out of five stars for Early Literacy and Progress (which grades students’ general academic growth compared to previous performance) and four stars for its graduation rates.
The new addition to the state’s grading regimen is the “College, Career, Workforce and Military Readiness” category, which will not be rolled into the state’s report cards until 2024-2025 but is still being tracked.
The category is meant to grade schools on the readiness of their graduating students as they enter the next phase of their lives. Specifically, it counts the number of students in the district’s “...four-year graduation cohort who completed a pathway and are prepared for college or career success.”
The state said Talawanda had 264 students in that graduation cohort, and 107 of them had completed a pathway, giving the district a score of 40.5%.
Those interested in looking at the state’s report cards can visit reportcard.education.ohio.gov/ and search for any school or district in the state.
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