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Despite worries over COVID learning loss, Fayette student winter test scores improve

Despite a yearlong pandemic school shut down, data from winter 2021 tests showed growth from fall 2020 by Fayette County students at every grade level tested from first through eighth, according to Acting Superintendent Marlene Helm.

Data from the school district showed that grades 6 through 8 demonstrated the highest growth in both reading and math.

Eighth grade reading scores, for example, increased by two points from fall 2020 to winter 2021 and by four points from fall 2019 to winter 2021 and also increased from winter 2020 to winter 2021.

Helm told families in a message on Tuesday that scores earned in 2021 at each grade level were nearly identical to the benchmarks earned by students in that same grade level prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The scores from fall 2019 to winter 2021 bear that out.

However, there was a three point drop in fifth grade math from winter 2020 to winter 2021 and a two point drop in fourth grade math during that time.

Helm said in the Tuesday message that elementary and middle school students are taking spring tests designed to gauge their learning in reading and math. The National MAP test – short for Measures of Academic Progress – is given three times a year to track improvement for each grade level.

She said that not all students took the tests while they were learning virtually, “so this current cycle is critical to get a complete picture.”

Parents and school board members in Fayette County and state and national officials have said they were worried about student learning loss since the coronavirus school shut down in March 2020. Fayette students have been returning to in person learning in phases since February of this year.

At a Monday school board planning meeting before Helm announced test score improvements, school board member Tom Jones, a former Fayette school principal, expressed his concerns about the effect of the COVID-19 shutdown.

“My concern is that the learning gap that we’ve been talking about for 30 years is going to turn into the learning Grand Canyon,” he said.

Programs such as the district’s Summer Ignite, which will be offered at 69 sites in June and July, and other instruction in the 2021-22 school year will be aimed at recovering learning loss, Helm said.