{"id":245,"date":"2019-03-01T23:36:45","date_gmt":"2019-03-01T23:36:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/achievementgap\/?p=245"},"modified":"2019-03-01T23:36:45","modified_gmt":"2019-03-01T23:36:45","slug":"plagued-by-a-culture-of-mediocrity-rural-maine-school-district","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/achievementgap\/2019\/03\/01\/plagued-by-a-culture-of-mediocrity-rural-maine-school-district\/","title":{"rendered":"Plagued by a “Culture of Mediocrity”: Rural Maine School District"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lake Region School District is located in rural Maine and is well-known for consistently producing \u00a0underachieving students. In 2010, the state\u00a0publicized<\/u><\/span><\/span>\u00a0and circulated this information throughout local media outlets labeling Lake Region High School (LRHS)\u00a0as “one of the 10 persistently lowest-performing schools in the state.” In response, the district replace the high school’s principal, after 16 years, and have taken steps to remove Lake Region from the list of low performing schools in the state. With so much energy directed towards renovating the high school and restructuring the curriculum, the school board still struggles to garner support to enhance the experience of primary school students in the district. For years the district has voted against increasing the budget to renovate and expand buildings and classrooms that are overcrowded and not conducive to equal learning opportunities. Many students have classes in “portable classrooms” and those who require extra help are taught in reconfigured janitors closets. Though these facts are common knowledge among the voters of Lake Region school district, school board members continue to fight to increase the school budget, with another attempt this\u00a0month<\/a>. It is unrealistic to expect high school students to meet or exceed state standards if they are grossly underprepared for high school to begin with.<\/p>\n

Standardized test scores<\/a>\u00a0show that elementary students in the district struggle to meet state standards in general, but these figures are exacerbated at the intersection of variables such as a family’s income. The figure below depicts fifth grade mathematics test scores in Lake Region over the past three years. The data shows the percentage of economically disadvantaged students versus non-economically disadvantaged students who either meet or exceed the state standards.<\/p>\n

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Research<\/a>\u00a0suggests that a student’s socioeconomic \u00a0background greatly contributes to their performance in school. Such factors contribute to the amount of time that parents can spend reading with their child, opportunities for summer and after school programming that enhance cognitive skills and more. As the graph suggests, only about 20% of economically disadvantaged students are meeting the state’s standards. The achievement gap across economic status in the district is staggering. In the 2016-2017 school year, 55% of non-economically disadvantaged students met state standards while only 18% of economically disadvantaged students met state standards. The amount of economically disadvantaged students compared to non-economically disadvantaged students is another statistic worthy of attention. In the 2017-2018 school year non-economically disadvantaged fifth grade students outnumbered non-economically disadvantaged fifth grade students 84 to 70. Schools and teachers cannot be held completely responsible for closing the achievement gap (see\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0here<\/a>) but they can work to minimize its expansion.\u00a0With so many students who fail to meet state standards, across all economic statuses, in the fifth grade, it is clear that the district must invest more in the development of its elementary students in order to enhance the performance of its high school students. Without the support of voters across the district, however, these investments may not be possible, although Maine’s new governor, Janet Mills, has promised to invest more of the state’s budget in educational\u00a0development<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lake Region School District is located in rural Maine and is well-known for consistently producing \u00a0underachieving students. In 2010, the state\u00a0publicized\u00a0and circulated this information throughout local media outlets labeling Lake Region High School (LRHS)\u00a0as “one of the 10 persistently lowest-performing schools in the state.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7313,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/achievementgap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/achievementgap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/achievementgap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/achievementgap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7313"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/achievementgap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/achievementgap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":255,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/achievementgap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions\/255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/achievementgap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/achievementgap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/achievementgap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}