Jupiter Farms Elementary ranks in top 10 among Florida elementaries for school grade score

Even as districts across the state watched school grades tumble this year thanks to a number of changes to the school grading formula, Jupiter Farms Elementary saw in the school grades a reason to celebrate.

According to preliminary school grade results released by the state Friday, the community elementary school received one of the top-ten highest school grade scores among elementary schools statewide.

Click on the image to be taken to an interactive map of school grades.

?We?re really excited,? Principal William Thompson said by phone today. He noted that his school is a community school, not a magnet school, with most of the school?s students coming from the nearby neighborhoods.

?Our staff is dedicated and talented. They really come to work every day with their kids in mind,? he said.

Florida schools receive a score each year based on how their students did on the FCAT. A perfect score for elementary schools is 800 ? 525 is needed to receive an A grade.

Jupiter Farms Elementary received a score of 678.

School grade calculations are convoluted and have become more so thanks to a myriad of changes made in recent years by the state.

For instance, high-profile South Olive Elementary in West Palm Beach, which had the highest score in the county two years ago, this year fell to a B rating. The problem, however, was not its score of 559, but appears to be instead the fact that it did not ?demonstrate adequate progress? among its lowest-performing students in math. That caused the state to automatically bump the school down a letter grade.

The slew of changes to the grading formula have made some question whether parents understand what the school grade means or even if the grade has any validity at all.

To learn more about this year?s school grades, click on our story here.

And to find out how different Palm Beach County schools performed, check out this interactive map created by our new data/interactives guru, Fedor Zarkhin.

Tags: bnblogs, FCAT, Jupiter Farms Elementary, school grade, South Olive Elementary, William Thompson

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 30th, 2013 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Palm Beach County schools, Students, Teacher awards, Testing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Source: http://blogs.palmbeachpost.com/extracredit/2013/07/30/jupiter-farms-elementary-ranks-in-top-10-among-florida-elementaries-for-school-grade-score/

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