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Educators across North Carolina are still digesting last week’s state test results release. One area school district had the highest scores in the state.
At Union County Schools’ Sun Valley Middle School in Indian Trail, eighth grade English/Language Arts teacher Nicole Darko reads passages aloud and asks her students for interpretations. She says the school has been focused on using an evidence-based approach to teaching reading.
“We really focused on some tried and true strategies like summarizing, using inferencing, the five Ws, things that we used to do, but we came back to those things this school year,” Darko said.
There are signs it worked — Sun Valley Middle School had the most dramatic growth of any school in the state, improving its performance grade from a D to a B in a single year. Darko credited school leadership and new principal Brian Patience for creating a schoolwide vision that the whole school community bought into.
“It feels amazing because we know the hard work that our students put into achieving this great accomplishment,” Darko said. “As educators, this is why we get into the field. We want to see our students meet their potential, and we really feel like our students did that this year.”
As a whole, 70.7% of Union County Schools students scored at the grade-level proficient level on state tests last school year. That’s the highest percentage in the state. The statewide rate was 55%.
Union County also saw some improvements in school performance. Nine schools moved up a letter grade in their school performance ratings, and 90% of schools have a performance grade of an A, B or C. Three schools moved out of low-performing status, bringing the district’s total down to 5.
"It comes down to key strategies we implemented last year and really a lot of growth that happened in specific schools, but really across all of our middle schools is where we had a huge impact,” Houlihan said.
Houlihan also credited statewide investment in reading instruction for grades K-5. In 2021, North Carolina invested $114 million in a new professional development program for teachers called LETRS that’s built on the so-called “science of reading,” a multi-disciplinary approach of teaching based on the science behind how children learn to read.
He said there’s “clearly a direct correlation between the way we’re teaching reading now and the impact in 4th and 5th,” and added some of Union County’s middle school teachers have gone through the middle school version of that training.
There is still room for improvement — third grade reading scores were down for the second year in a row. Third grade reading was also down statewide.
Houlihan says the district was still pleased with the overall results, but that leaders want to focus on strengthening the transition between second and third grade, when students move to different assessment systems.
