CRCT retests improve county schools’ results

Area school systems gave the CRCT in April and those students who didn’t pass the exam were given the opportunity for additional instruction, followed by a second shot at the test. The Georgia Department of Education released the initial school-level results in July.
For fifth grade, five schools in the Jackson County School System had all of their students pass the reading and/or math portion of the CRCT, after retests were given this summer.

At West Jackson Intermediate School, all fifth grade students passed the reading and math portions of the CRCT. The initial CRCT results showed that 1.7 percent of fifth grades failed the reading portion at the school, while 2.6 percent failed the math portion.
East Jackson Elementary School and Maysville Elementary School also had all of its fifth graders pass the reading portion of the CRCT, after retests were given. All North Jackson Elementary School fifth graders passed the math portion of the CRCT, after retests.

Benton Elementary School didn’t have to give fifth graders a second chance at the reading portion of the CRCT, as all of its students passed the exam on the first time. After retests, all third grade students at BES passed the reading portion of the CRCT — compared to the seven percent that initially failed the test.

Overall, the retest scores for third, fifth and eighth graders in Jackson County’s three school systems brought most of those schools relatively close to having all students pass the reading portion of the CRCT. After retests, the failure rate for the math portion was slightly higher, compared to reading scores.

And while Kings Bridge Middle School significantly reduced the percentage of eighth grade students who failed the math portion of the CRCT — from 38.2 percent to 24.6 percent, after retesting — the school still had more students fail that exam than the initial statewide failure rate of 22.3 percent.