By Shelby Stewart-Soldan
Staff Writer
Brandon Twp. — Despite a pandemic, teacher shortages and bouts of remote learning, Brandon Schools are out-performing the state in 17 M-STEP and College Board assessments.
“We have some amazing teachers in the district,” said Carly Stone, director of curriculum and instruction. “The credit needs to go to them.”
In third grade ELA, fourth grade ELA, fifth grade math and fifth grade social studies, Brandon’s 2022 scores where higher than their pre-pandemic scores from the 2018-2019 school year.
“A lot of people are talking about how COVID has impacted teaching and learning,” said Stone. “You can see that we fall along the national trend, but we are really excited to share that we have actually out-preformed our pre-pandemic scores in four areas.”
Scores across the district were presented at the Monday night board of education meeting, and there were areas that surpassed the state average proficiency, as well as Oakland County.
At the high school, students scored higher than the state average in eight out of nine areas, including ninth grade ELA, ninth grade math, tenth grade math, eleventh grade ELA, eleventh grade math, eleventh grade social studies, and eleventh grade science.
Eleventh grade science out-performed the state by 22 percent, and the county by 17 percent. They also outperformed the county in eleventh grade social studies, but numbers were not yet gathered for county scores for other grades. The scores are based on M-STEP, SAT, and PSAT assessments.
“I know during COVID, we were all wondering, ‘what was that going to mean for us in education?’ And no one really knew,” said high school principal Dan Stevens. “And now we’re starting to get the results, and I’m really excited to get to share them with the board because it confirmed, at least at the high school level, that the decision that you guys (the board of education) made to stay in school and not go online was a great one for our kids when it comes to their education.”
In addition to that, the NWEA, which was taken by 5.4 million students nation-wide, showed that three of four areas met or exceeded projected growth in ninth and tenth grade reading and math.
At the middle school, students out-performed the stated in seventh grade math, eighth grade ELA, eighth grade math, eighth grade social studies and eighth grade science.
“Eighth grade math scores are even with Oakland County at 44 percent and eight percent higher than state scores, so our eighth graders do very, very well on our standardized tests,” said middle school principal Mike Tucker.
At the elementary school level, students grades 3-5 are tested by the M-STEP, and K-5 are given the NWEA assessment.
Harvey-Swanson outperformed the state in M-STEP in 6 fields, third grade ELA, fourth grade ELA, fourth grade math, fifth grade ELA, fifth grade math and fifth grade science. They out performed the county in third grade ELA, fourth grade ELA, and fifth grade science.
Also, based on the NWEA scores, almost all fields met or exceeded projected growth in math and reading.
“Every grade level met or exceeded in language arts,” said Harvey-Swanson principal Jessica Hevel. “All but one exceeded in math, the kindergartners were almost there.”
Oakwood Elementary had similar trends in performance, out-performing the state in third grade ELA, fifth grade ELA, fifth grade math and fifth grade science. They outperformed the county in fifth grade math and science.
The NEWA data showed that eight out of ten areas met or exceeded projected growth, with only first grade language arts and fifth grade language arts not hitting the projected growth.
“With regard to math, we have reached our goals or exceeded our goals at all grade levels,” said Oakwood principal Coy Stewart.
All of the administrators explained where they had room to grow and how they would be working on proficiency scores moving forward, including before and/or after school study and homework-help programs, math labs at the high school, ELA and Math labs at the middle school, academic intervention and working with teachers to identify areas for improvement with students.