It’s slow going as Adams 14 tries to dig out of a deep hole

Commerce City’s main school district has spent a whole lot of years in the cellar. If Colorado’s 178 school districts were graded as students are, Adams 14 would have been getting F’s since before its current crop of fifth-graders was born.

The district as well as Adams City High School have earned the lowest ratings in Colorado’s accountability system for over 10 years because of consistently low test scores, low academic growth and low graduation rates, along with high dropout rates.

And just like kids who flunk, the district has some explaining to do to Commerce City parents.

It’s all part of a long saga we’ve recapped here before. It has gotten ugly at times, with the state Board of Education telling the district to clean up its act; yanking the district’s accreditation; ordering it to reorganize and, at one point, even threatening to dissolve the district and turn control of its schools over to neighboring school districts. Adams 14 has fought back in court to protect its turf.

But there are some recent rays of hope the district is trying to pull out of its academic nosedive. Adams 14 is now on what’s called a “partial management plan,” which is overseen by an outside contractor. Last week, district officials appeared before the state board and gave an encouraging progress report on the plan. The state Education Department shared that update with the news media in a press statement:

On Wednesday, representatives from Adams 14 presented performance data including information from assessments given to English-language learners. The district shared that they are seeing growth in reading and math across the system. The district presented a plan to work with an external manager, TNTP, and other partner organizations to improve teaching and learning by continuing to reshape academic systems and bolster efforts to recruit and retain high-quality staff. The high school’s plan mirrored that of the district with the added component of building out post-secondary-focused academies across the school.

The press statement continued:

(Education department) staff members who have been working with Adams 14 also reported positive results, saying that the district  has “developed a five-year strategic plan that .. articulates the district’s mission and vision” and that “local assessment data are indicating progress in student outcomes.”

…Executive Director of School and District Transformation Lindsey Jaeckel said that the strength of the plan is the district’s “clear implementation of benchmarks and student outcome targets, along with its approach to ongoing progress monitoring.” The board approved the district’s request to continue the partial management plan with a 7-1 vote with one excused.

Maybe it’s only a modest move forward, but better baby steps than no steps at all. As we noted here last August, when the results of annual achievement test scores at all school districts were released by the state, Adams 14 ranked near the bottom.

Only 14% of Adams 14’s students read and wrote at or above grade level, and only 9% scored at or above grade level in math.

As we also noted at that time, our city’s kids deserve a better education. The latest news gives us hope.