Panther Valley School Board members got a snapshot of how the district is doing on state assessments compared to other schools when they met last week.

Elementary Principal Robert Palazzo told the board he analyzed data, looking specifically at how the district is doing compared to other schools with an economic disadvantage rate of 70% or higher.

Panther Valley’s three schools all score in an economic disadvantage level of 75.3% or higher with the highest range in the intermediate school at 87.8%, he said.

“All of the research shows that poverty is probably one of the greatest indicators of academic barriers and academic learning,” Palazzo said.

And many of Panther Valley’s numbers are really good compared to other schools with the same hurdles, he said.

Both the elementary and junior/senior high schools did better than 80% or more of the other schools in English language proficiency, Palazzo said. The junior/senior high did 87.5% better, he said.

In math proficiency, the elementary did 81.4% better than other schools, while the intermediate school was 76.5% better, he said.

The junior/senior high school was on 38.1% better than other schools in math, but Palazzo described the seventh and eighth grade math test as brutal.

“The state averages across the board are really low there,” he said, adding that it is an area the district is looking to grow.

The fourth grade science proficiency was 90.6% better than 604 other schools, Palazzo said. The intermediate school also had a growth rate of 100% in math, just one of 126 schools to do so, he said.

Growth rates in English weren’t as high, but the district’s English scores were higher, making it harder to achieve growth, Palazzo said.

“There are some really bright spots in the data,” he said, pointing to some of the math and English scores. “To say that we’re doing better than 80-90% of the schools in that area is really fantastic.”

The area where the district has challenges is the attendance rate, Palazzo said.

“Attendance rate is an area we really want to look at moving forward,” he said. “You know that is a big barrier to all our school performance profiles scores. The regular attendance rate is an area that we struggle with.”

All three schools struggled, Palazzo said. The elementary was 31.3% better than other schools, the intermediate, 41.4%; and the junior/senior high school, 39.4%, he showed.

In the elementary school alone, Palazzo found that of the kids on track to miss 18 days in a year, half met the criteria for truancy and half did not, meaning they had legal excuses for missing school.

“There’s really not much we as a school can do in those situations,” Palazzo said, noting that the parents are getting the doctor’s notes and excuses, and some take kids out for vacation during the school year.

“We’ve all been holding truancy meetings,” he said.

Superintendent David McAndrew Jr. said that he has met with the local magistrate regarding truancy proceedings recently, and also met with his school administrators regarding improving attendance.

“It’s one of our major goals for this summer,” he said. “We’re going to come to the board with some police updates and some things we’re looking at for next year.”

One example of potential changes would be not allowing a senior with 20 unexcused absences to walk at graduation, McAndrew said.

“We have to do something. We don’t know what they are yet,” he said. “We will be meeting and looking at other schools that are more successful with this and come up with plan this summer. That’s our goal.”

Board member Michael Alabovitz said that schools with higher poverty rates don’t do as well on state assessments, and asked Palazzo if it was fair to say that schools that aren’t adequately funded also do poorly.

“The higher poverty rate and the way the funding formula works puts us at a disadvantage in terms of how our students perform,” Palazzo said. “Absolutely.”

Alabovitz said there is a direct correlation with funding and test scores, and a few people in the room agreed.

“Somehow our state legislators don’t see fit to adequately fund our schools,” he said. “I was just curious about that.”