Despite unprecedented challenges due to the pandemic and other factors, Taylor Independent School District is on a path to higher achievement for the 2022-23 school year, officials said.
“I am just really proud of the work our principals and our teachers are doing,” said Superintendent Devin Padavil. “I am very optimistic about what they are going to be able to show at the end of the year.” In August, the school district scored a C from the Texas Education Agency’s accountability ratings for the 2021-22 school year, linked in part to student attendance and math performances on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness test, officials said. Padavil, who was named superintendent in February 2021, said despite the C, it was still an improvement from 2020-21. “The district saw significant gains from 2021 in student performance, but it was not enough to go beyond a rating of a C,” Padavil said. “We would have been projected to have been a D rating in 2021, and after my first year here in Taylor, we brought it up to a C and our goal is to continue to improve.”
Texas’ public school districts receive ratings much like grades on a report card — A, B, C — and “not rated” instead of a D or an F. The latter can mean a school or a district will receive TEA sanctions during the coming academic year.
The labels are based on state standardized test performances; graduation rates, and college, career and military-readiness outcomes, educators said. According to the TEA website, “The ratings examine student achievement, school progress and whether districts and campuses are closing achievement gaps among various student groups.”
At last count, there were nearly 8,870 public schools in Texas including charter campuses.
Padavil said he expects Taylor ISD to improve to a B for the current academic year, with a goal of every student in the district showing a year’s growth on the STAAR test.
Nonetheless, Padavil cited several factors that led to the lower rating, and said the district was moving quickly to address those issues.
“We had a lack of alignment between classrooms,” Padavil said. “It was something we discovered in my first year here and so we have built curriculum to help teachers have a road map for what they are supposed to cover in terms of state standards and to make sure that the experience that the kid here has is very similar from classroom to classroom in the same grade level.”
Not having an internal metric for seeing how students performed during the year also influenced the C rating, the superintendent said.
“We didn’t have a good system for monitoring student progress,” Padavil said “It just didn’t exist here, so what we have done is create a series of benchmark tests to measure performance and to quickly analyze and take action on that performance in a different unit test over the year.” He added, “One thing we are looking at is where is the student at in September, and how can we measure how they grew by October and November, and then we have another benchmark we will do in February.
We are tracking student performance over the course of the year.”
In addition, because the state adjusts scores based on the percentage of students who are qualified for free and reduced lunch, another major factor for the lesser score arose from an inaccurate picture of the demographic makeup of the student body, as many qualified students failed to apply.
In an earlier presentation to the school board, Padavil said the district is making it a priority to encourage qualified students to apply. Overall, Padavil said he is confident the dedication and hard work of school administrators and teachers will pay off for students this school year.
“I believe in the work, but it is an incredible lift for all our educators in the school district,” Padavil said. “The work that we are asking them to do is not easy. When we have students who are behind grade level, you can’t just rely on the same old practices. You have to put in the extra effort that is going to help students grow.”
