At the last Crookston School Board meeting on September 26, Crookston High School Principal Matt Torgerson and Highland Principal Chris Trostad gave an update on the school’s district MCA test scores. Principal Trostad reported that Highland scored above the state average in two of the three categories of math, reading, and science while scoring just below average for the last subject. On the other hand, Principal Torgerson reported that the High School’s scores were mixed in each grade but believed that the school could take measures to improve their scores.
While Torgerson admits he believes the school scores could be much better than what they received, he believes that the aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic may still have an effect on the students trying to return to a normal school year. “I think the main thing that everyone needs to realize that we did not realize as the school district at the time too, is the lag and aftereffects of COVID, which is not anything special to Crookston or what we’re doing. It’s happening in our neighboring districts and across the state, and I’m sure other states have different assessment situations,” Principal Torgerson explained. “I think we went into last year thinking that it was going to be a little bit more normal, but we still had the aftermath on the academic side of COVID, where we didn’t have a normal school year for the last couple of years.” Despite this, the Crookston School District Staff Development Committee is making plans to get the entire district to work together to improve the students’ academics by educating the district’s teachers and administrators to make a more holistic approach to improving the school’s academics.
To do this, the district plans to use some of the resources provided by the Minnesota Department of Education for teachers to implement into their everyday lessons. “The resources from the MDE, we’re doing pieces of training on them, ensuring all of our staff development and professional development days. We do talk about this so we can do better planning and create better systems for our students to really improve the MCAs,” Torgerson explained. “What everyone needs to realize about the MCAs, too, is it’s meant to be a snapshot of the school district as a whole, not to access individual students. It’s our pulse and yearly check on how we’re doing as a district. There are some places where we do well and others where we have some work to do, and the MCA helps us direct where we might have some weaknesses that we need to work on and some of our strengths where we need to keep doing what we’re doing.” Some of these resources and trainings include teaching the lessons in new ways that can be easier for the students to understand and breaking down what parts of the subjects the students excel or struggle with at each grade level and then working with them on the subjects they struggle in. To help with this, the school will look at the benchmarks of the MCA to create a more holistic approach for the entire district and, hopefully, improve as we step away from the COVID pandemic.
