May 25, 2012

Dear Students and Parents:

           
     Just a brief note to inform you that since our math testing began yesterday, we have had to make some adjustments to our SOL schedule. We will have these changes revised on the schedule on our website tomorrow. The changes are due to two factors - first, the new math SOL's are taking longer for some students to complete, which has extended some of our morning testing blocks and pushed back others later in the day. In addition, this morning most of the county had significant issues with logging in to the online testing, and it greatly delayed the group we had slated to start. We determined that we could not test during 4th and 6th periods today due to the backlog, and so any students scheduled for testing today will instead test on Friday. We apologize for the glitches, but most are beyond our control, and are just a normal part of the online testing as we've known it these past few years.

     You may have heard/read about the new Math Standards of Learning tests - the state has changed many of the standards at each grade level and upped cut scores in an effort to make the exams more rigorous. We are seeing some of that play out early on in our preliminary results, and I will send a more extensive KIT with some additional resources in the next week. Speaking of preliminary results, we will share them with students beginning next Tuesday in each core class if they took an online test. For any student taking a paper and pencil version, the scores come much later (usually some time in early July or even August). Preliminary results are just that, they can sometimes change a little after the state looks at all of the testing, so while they are nice to know, the official results will be mailed to you from the state in August.

     Once we finish with this week, I hope that you have a super Memorial Day weekend - so far our plans are to stay in town, and there's no Little League baseball or Scouts this weekend, so we are looking forward to some relaxation! Have a great weekend and we'll see your students back on Tuesday.

Scott F. Phillips
Principal