Botelle Test Scores slow to recover after the pandemic

By Avice Meehan

When the Norfolk Board of Education meets in mid-November, Botelle Elementary School Principal Lauren Valentino will provide an update about student progress and the start of the new academic year. One metric that will be discussed is something called the Smarter Balanced Assessment.

Each year, thousands of Connecticut elementary school students in grades 3 through 6 take the assessment over a roughly three-day period. It evaluates their understanding of math and English language arts, looking at measures of achievement and growth. The assessment, developed by a consortium of states, meets federal testing requirements that have been in place in one form or another for nearly 50 years.

“We measure what we value,” said Ajit Gopalakrishnan, chief performance officer for the state Department of Education (DoE), noting that publishing the data helps engender conversations and guide planning by school districts. “Our focus is on helping people do better and do what’s best for students.”

Each year the data are published for the state as a whole and for every school district across Connecticut. Statewide, scores have begun to stabilize and even improve after the massive disruptions caused by the Covid pandemic. For Botelle, the story is different, and student performance has been slow to rebound.

Before the pandemic, Botelle students came close to reaching the statewide goal of 75 in English language arts, with an average score of 73. In the past three years, however, their scores have hovered in the low to mid-60s. That places Botelle above the statewide average, but below its peer schools in Region 7, Colebrook, Barkhamsted and New Hartford.

Botelle’s math scores for the past three years are also in the mid-60s. Although the statewide math goal is also an average score of 75, results within Region 7 have trended lower overall. The performance of Botelle students is comparable to the performance of students in New Hartford but lags those in Barkhamsted and Colebrook.

“My biggest concern is for the people who don’t think our students are smart or that they aren’t learning anything,” said Virginia Coleman-Prisco, who chairs the Board of Education. “From my experience, our Botelle students do fantastic work and are developing the critical skills necessary to succeed. The work that they do is more complex and advanced than what students had to do in the ‘good old days.’”

There are significant differences—and similarities—across the four elementary schools in Region 7. According to dashboards maintained by the state DoE, roughly 30 percent of the students enrolled at Colebrook and Botelle for the 2023-24 school year qualified for free or reduced-price lunches, a measure of socio-economic need. The percentage of students with identified academic disabilities was about 25 percent at each school. Barkhamsted and New Hartford have a lower percentage of students with identified economic and special education needs, although numbers can fluctuate significantly from year to year.

“The Smarter Balanced assessment is one data point of many that I would look at. I would also want to see trends over time,” said Lisa Carter, assistant executive director for EdAdvance, a regional education support agency and former superintendent for Region 1. “The most important bellwether to me is the classroom learning expectations, then the summative data.”

Like other educators, including leaders at Botelle, Carter notes that the statewide tests occur over just a few days during the 180-day school year and can be influenced by many factors, including whether a given set of students had a good night’s sleep. In addition, some measures are not made public because Norfolk’s class sizes are small and publishing them would compromise student confidentiality.

“We are not satisfied with anything less than all of our students meeting the benchmarks,” said Valentino. “That requires a safe, happy and engaged place for learning and that is [also] why we spend so much time on team collaboration.”

Valentino, who joined Botelle nine years ago, said the team looks at the Smarter Balance results in the context of a variety of other assessments and focuses on building a picture of the “whole child.” She said individual goals are set for each student and that those are evaluated multiple times over the course of the year.

“The question is, what is your definition of an excellent school?” said Valentino. “If you are only defining it by one number that gets published on a website, are we saying that the rest of the year doesn’t make for success? I don’t think there is any educator who thinks you can reduce a child’s success to one number. We expect them to grow, we expect them to close the gap, [but we do] not set the same standard for every child.” Coleman-Prisco puts it another way, noting that results on the statewide assessments should not be considered a “marketing tool” or as a judgement of individual students. “These assessments help teachers and specialists find the areas students need interventions and help on,” she said, adding, “Botelle’s alumni consistently do well in Region 7.”