Update on how HSCSD students are performing

Many have been wondering how students at Hot Springs County School District #1 are doing academically since the abrupt closing of school last spring due to COVID-19.

During the October 20 meeting of the Board of Trustees, the principals at each of the schools presented what gaps they are seeing in this fall’s student learning and what they are doing to close those gaps before the end of the school year.

Principal Breez Daniels at the high school has actually written an article for PLC Magazine outlining what our small district has been doing to bridge those gaps. The article will appear across the country in their winter edition.

Daniels said all of her teams have gathered data to compare learning from this past spring to this fall and they are finding the gaps, at least on the high school level, are not as large as they had originally anticipated.

With basically five months of no instruction the teachers and staff were very concerned there would be difficult hurdles to get over when classes resumed in person in the fall.

The core subject of math appears to have taken the biggest hit on the high school level with the five-month hiatus. Math is followed by science, but English has remained fairly steady across the four grade levels.

Using their three-tier system, they are working with students to regain those skills quickly in order to incorporate the new material.

Middle school principal Steve Soderstrom has seen more issues with the fifth and sixth grades than he has with seventh and eighth graders.

Fifth and sixth graders are showing signs of losing ground in reading, however, Soderstrom is using the same three-tiered system as the high school and is already seeing growth.

For the elementary students, principal Katie Deromedi has increased the amount of reading time significantly, knowing they will all need to be reading well by third grade. There has been some backsliding, but the intense instruction is paying off.

Superintendent Dustin Hunt also pointed out there have been some behavioral issues with some of the students that hadn’t been apparent last year. He has asked everyone to have some patience with the children as some of them did not have the proper supervision they needed during the lockdown and it is starting to show now.

While there are a variety of issues going on across the district, at all grade levels, the teaching staff has done an excellent job of collecting data for comparison. Usually, spring testing which comes from the state is the benchmark used, however, since schools were closed in the spring none of the testing was done, so our own hand-gathered data is taking the place of student testing and working quite well.

Board member Joe Martinez put it very well saying, “Using this same tiered model across all the grades is really creating a cohesive K-12 program for Hot Springs County.”