The Oglethorpe Echo
The Governor’s Office of Student Achievement included Oglethorpe County High School among the state’s 25% lowest-performing schools last week, only to retract the list on Tuesday to validate additional data.
However, BOE chair Becky Soto continues to raise concerns about the state’s lack of transparency regarding the data.
“We were not aware that Oglethorpe County High School was on this list until we saw the list through the media,” Soto said. “Our initial reaction was confusion because we were given no advance notice and no information on what would have put us in this low-performing bracket.”
Soto emphasized the school’s recent achievements, including strong graduation rates, dual enrollment plans and advanced placement programs.
“Our high school graduation rate is way higher than the state average,” Soto said. “In the last five years, we’ve seen our students excelling, starting high school, graduating in four years, and doing just a phenomenal job.”
No Oglethorpe County school was included in a preliminary list of concerning schools released by GOSA in May. To add to the confusion, state officials have been unable to clarify which criteria was used to determine the lowest 25% rankings.
“No one from the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement and no one from the Department of Education has been able to give us any information to explain anything,” Soto said. “So, we immediately started working on trying to ascertain some information ourselves.”
Soto noted ninth-grade performance among “subgroups” like English language learners wasn’t ideal.
"They look at what they call growth scores,” Soto said. “Which means, ‘how much did they grow from the end of eighth grade to the end of ninth grade.’ And those scores were not where we wanted them to be.”
On Dec. 10, GOSA retracted the list to allow time to verify the accuracy of their results.
“Well, it would have been nice had they made sure the list was correct prior to making the list public,” Soto said.
The rankings were published in connection to Georgia Senate Bill 233, also known as the Georgia Promise Scholarship Act, passed in April. The bill will provide vouchers of up to $6,500 to parents of children attending the bottom 25% of public schools.
The funds can be used for private school tuition, home-schooling supplies, therapy, tutoring and early college courses.
“Sixty-five hundred dollars isn’t going to get you very far in the private school realm,” Soto said.
She also noted private schools are not held to the same testing standards as public schools, saying it’s “not an apples-to-apples comparison.”
"We take every child,” Soto said. “It’s not like a private school where private schools get to pick and choose who they're going to take."
While Soto acknowledges that the school can always do better, she said the state must clarify which areas need improvement.
“Am I saying that everything about Oglethorpe County High School is perfect? No,” Soto said. “But the mechanism they are using now is flawed. If it wasn’t flawed, they could tell me exactly what we did that put us on this list, and they can’t do that.”