July 1, 2022
By News Director Jared Atha
In a letter sent to educators in the Elk City School District, and provided to Paragon Communications, it was revealed that after the latest academic year Elk City Public Schools achieved their highest performance overall for academic growth and progress in the last 5 years.
In the letter, Superintendent Mike Sparks said every school receives feedback from the State Department of Education regarding individual student progress and assigns a performance category to each child to determine College and Career Readiness. He said the latest progress report for the school district was revealed during the State Department’s reporting of their findings.
Sparks credits the teachers and students who worked together to establish learning goals, saying Elk City teachers were very intentional about lesson planning and measuring student mastery of skills that are expected to be taught by the Oklahoma State Department of Education. As a result of this work by the teachers and students, Elk City Public Schools achieved double digit growth in all areas assessed by the Oklahoma State Testing Program. He added that in addition to the Oklahoma State Testing Program results, Elk City High School increased their ACT Composite Score by 1.17 points. This reverses a trend that had seen the ACT Composite drop each of the last four years.
Sparks concluded by saying he does not support the School Voucher Program, saying that he does not believe it is good for public education as a whole. Saying such a program would most likely remove funding from public education and impact educators ability to serve students.
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