El Verano School

October 12, 2007

Dear Friends and Families of El Verano School,

Each spring our students in grades 2-5 participate in state testing. The results of this testing are shared with us in late August and now I’d like to share these results with you! There are two systems for looking at the results. The Federal “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP), measures the percentage of students who are considered Proficient or Advanced in Language Arts and Math (5^th grade students are also tested in Science). The other is our state’s “Academic Performance Index” (API) which measures how well students are progressing in Language Arts and Math. The API is what we call a “growth model” as it looks at whether students are making progress (towards being proficient) from year to year. Additionally, both the state and the federal government break down our student populations into subgroups, labeling them as “White,” “Hispanic,” “English Language Learner,” etc… These labels are given to us as a way to look at how well each subgroup is succeeding.

The results for this year’s AYP show that we have made substantial growth in every single one of our subgroups and that we are on the right track! This is simply phenomenal and truly, we couldn’t do it without the support of our community members. Time and time again, local community members have demonstrated support for El Verano School in a variety of ways, but none as important as the time you put into mentoring and supporting our students. It is through your dedicated efforts that we are continuing to move our students towards proficiency in math and language arts. It is through all your efforts in fund raising and participating in our events. Additionally, the time you spend on our campus through the Adopt-a-Teacher program is absolutely beneficial to our staff and students – we thank you whole-heartedly.

Below is a summary of results for all our subgroups which demonstrates that we are making substantial progress. This year we have made tremendous progress and missed our AYP by only .2%. We are committed to educating all our students and helping them succeed. Your efforts and support ensure our success!

English Language Arts

Math

API Overall Growth

Our state’s system of accountability through the Academic Performance Index (API), which looks at growth, is a much better indicator of how a school is performing compared to the Federal AYP data. The good news for El Verano School is that we had a 11 point gain from last year on our API score and since 2001 we have gained 115 points!!

Once again, thank you for your continued support. We are looking forward to a successful 2007-2008 school year and as always we welcome each and every one of you to be a part of our school community - YOU are making a difference!

Sincerely,

Maité Iturri, Principal