Queen Anne’s County public schools have implemented a variety of strategies to address poor subgroup performance, including specialized training, individualized learning plans, and co-teaching. Mentors, tutors, reading/math specialists, and the after school programming are current resources for students who need additional support. Challenges facing the public schools include funding reductions which have resulted in the loss of learning support specialists.

It has become more difficult (at least in the short term) to monitor continued progress in this area due to the fact that the State recently changed measuring tools and the two measures can’t be compared with each other. For that reason charts from both the MSA and the PARCC are posted above. Initially we have chosen to measure eighth grade performance for both English Language Arts/Literacy and Mathematics as our Headline Indicator for this result area. However, this could change next year as the LMB reviews all of the potential indicators.

Demographic factors which influence student achievement include the rise in the number of single parent households and high out-of-County commuter rates. Children often remain at home unsupervised after school until 6:00 p.m. or later.

Due to the change in the focus from MSA to CORE curriculum, the school system anticipated a drop in data for the percent of middle school students in Queen Anne’s County Passing the MSA in Math and Reading. Their prediction was correct. We are unable to draw conclusions from the data in the first year of the PARCC assessment yet.

The members of the Local Management Board continue to be strong advocates of the Character Counts! program believing that a community with strong character can achieve a lot. The Six Pillar Inventory was administered in the County for the sixth time (it’s administered in January of every odd year). The 2015 findings for the students aged 10 -15 years of age indicate that they had higher scores in 2015 than in 2013 for five pillars. On Trustworthy, the scores remained the same. They continued to have the most variable practice of qualities in Trustworthiness. For example 81% said that they always honored another's property, whereas only 31% said that they “tell the truth even when it may cost me.” The item that demonstrated the largest increase was doing volunteer community work. Overall among all age groups it was noted that the middle-income group scored higher than the no-income/low and high-income groups on all 6 pillars. This is another data item leaning towards a need for a continued high focus on sub-groups.

School success impacts youth development, school completion, personal well-being and transition to the workforce.