Students in New Hyde Park-Garden City Park schools outpaced their peers in neighboring districts and across the county on this year’s state tests, district officials said Monday.
The district’s third- through sixth-graders scored higher than the averages for Nassau County and for the sister districts in Floral Park, Elmont and Franklin Square on the English and math exams this spring.
Despite evidence of fifth-graders struggling with difficult tests, the scores show growth over past years and prove the district’s programs are working well thanks to its strong teachers, said Jim Svendsen, the district’s director of curriculum and instruction.
“We have, as you all know, incredible teachers that are doing the job that needs to be done in our buildings, and the results show in this New York State test,” Svendsen said at Monday’s school board meeting.
Passing rates grew in five of the eight test categories. Some 82 percent of third-graders taking the English test passed, up from 60 percent last year and 47 percent in 2014.
Sixth-grade English and fifth-grade math passing rates saw 2- and 4-percentage-point drops to 59 percent and 65 percent, respectively. The sixth-grade math passing rates stayed flat at 70 percent.
The district did better than the Nassau County average in all categories and beat the average by at least 10 percentage points in six of them, Svendsen said. It also was the top scorer on all tests among the four elementary districts that feed into the Sewanhaka Central High School District.
The fifth-grade class showed the lowest passing rates this year, with 55 percent on the English test and 65 percent on the math test.
It’s impossible to know exactly why that is, but teachers say the exams were harder this year because the questions contained difficult vocabulary words and were not aligned with students’ interests, said Robert Katulak, the district’s superintendent.
Teachers will soon start parsing the test questions the state releases to determine where the current sixth-graders struggled last year and tailor this year’s lessons to help them catch up, Svendsen and Katulak said.
“When we drill down into the questions, we get more information that is more helpful in analyzing results,” he said.
New Hyde Park-Garden City Park trailed Roslyn and Syosset schools on every test except third- and fourth-grade English, but far outpaced Mineola schools on all of them.
The three districts spend up to $12,000 more per student than New Hyde Park-Garden City Park, Svendsen said.
“We’re certainly getting great bang for our buck,” he said.
