Community School ranked high by state

High school ranks in top 8 percent in Colorado

Usually a school gives out grades to students, but occasionally the local schools get a grade of their own. The Crested Butte Community School got top honors from the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) in the 2007-2008 School Accountability Report.

The report rates schools based on students’ performance on the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) tests and Colorado ACT. It gave the CBCS grades one through five a “high” score and grades six through eight and nine through 12 a rating of “excellent,” the highest grade possible.
“It is fantastic news,” says Crested Butte Community School principal Stephanie Niemi of the ratings. “I view CBCS as an anomaly in education. There are so many gifted people on the staff and that has paid off.”
Of the school’s 38 teachers, Niemi says, 24 have a master’s degree and nine are pursuing post-graduate degrees.
In addition to the relatively high level of education among the staff, Niemi says the “heavy parental involvement and community support for students gives them all the right cards to be successful.”
The Crested Butte High School was also chosen as a John Irwin School of Excellence for the 2007-2008 school year, meaning that students performed in the top 8 percent of schools in the state in overall academic performance.
It’s an honor that has been bestowed on the school for six of the last eight years.
Niemi says another piece of the school’s success can be attributed to a favorable teacher-to-student ratio.
“We’ve made conscientious decisions to split large classrooms into smaller groups. Studies have shown that anything over 25 students in a class and you begin to lose kids. So we have to give something out of our resources to attain that, but [keeping small classes] has merit,” she says.
The only criticism Niemi had of the school’s performance from last year was the 25 student suspensions resulting from disciplinary problems.
“That was the one negative thing that came out of last year and I was very disappointed. But this year, we’re right on the money,” she says.
Although CBCS’ academic rating is still relatively high, over the last two years the percentage of students who tested as proficient or advanced in all of the content areas has decreased slightly. For grades one through five, 79.2 percent of students met that standard in 2006 and 73.8 percent met the standard this year.
As the grade levels go up, the number of high test scores goes down, with 81.5 percent of six through eighth graders testing as proficient or advanced two years ago and 79.3 percent at that level in 2008.
Because the percentage of students testing as proficient is still high among other schools and higher than what is required by the state, the school gets to keep its “excellent” rating.
The CDE’s new way of calculating student performance tracks an individual student’s CSAP scores over time and removes the test scores of students new to the district and others who artificially change the overall performance of a school. The CDE then compares the student’s mean score to that of the state’s other schools.
It also tracks each student’s scores from the three content areas—reading, writing and mathematics.
Only the top 8 percent of schools get a rating of “excellent” and the next 25 percent are rated as “high” performing. The five performance ratings are excellent, high, average, low and unsatisfactory.
Dr. Chris Purkiss, the Gunnison RE1J school district’s director of curriculum, says the report is completely accurate only for the middle school grades.
“Crested Butte High School only has ninth and tenth graders taking CSAP and you have the growth for those students giving the rating for the entire high school. Similarly, there are only third through fifth grades taking the test at the elementary level, so that can cause a change in CSAP achievement,” says Purkiss.
“But there are enough kids at CBCS within the numbers and they do well that the school’s size doesn’t affect the report,” she says.