Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)
THE SCHOOL DISTRICT OF PHILADELPHIA
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA 19130
Blankenburg ES
Location # 1490
September 2019
Dear Parent(s)/Guardian(s):
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires that parents or guardians who have children attending a Title I school be notified of the school’s academic achievement as well as the school’s designation under Pennsylvania’s ESEA Flexibility Waiver. This letter is intended to provide additional information concerning the options available to your child under Pennsylvania’s ESEA Flexibility Waiver and to help you understand what the waiver will mean for you and your child.
Beginning with the 2013-14 school year, PDE stopped using Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) to determine a school’s school designation. Instead, in accordance with the ESEA
Flexibility Waiver, PDE uses four Annual Measurable Objectives (AMOs) to determine a school’s designation. The four AMOs include:
- measuring test participation rate;
- graduation/attendance rate;
- closing the achievement gap for all students; and,
- closing the achievement gap for the historically underperforming students.
These AMOs have been used as the basis for the Title I school designations that replaced the school improvement designations. The designations for Title I schools are:
- Priority
- Focus
- Reward – High Progress
- Reward – High Achievement.
Please see the attachment for the criteria for these designations. In addition to the four designations above, there are schools that also receive the designation “Title I – No Designation.” All public schools in the state will receive a School Performance Profile (SPP) score based on 100 points. This score will be considered the school’s academic performance score, and while not the criteria for determination of Reward, Priority or Focus status, it details student performance through the scoring of multiple measures that define achievement. The SPP also includes supports to permit schools to access materials and resources to improve in defined areas related to achievement.
Despite the progress made by our students, Blankenburg ES has been designated as a Focus School for the 2017-2018 school year. This designation was based on test data from the 2012-13 school year and our school has kept this designation for four years. New designations will be given for the 2018-2019 school
year, based on data from the 2016-2017 school year.
As a Focus School, we will work collaboratively with parents/guardians, our community and administration to develop a school turnaround plan which will implement interventions to respond to the specific needs of improving the performance of our low-performing student subgroups. For the 2017 – 2018 school year, our school is implementing the following interventions to increase student achievement:
- Lexia (K-8, LS, ES)
- Thinking through Math (3-8, LS, ES)
- Voyager Reading (K-6, LS, ES)
- Voyager Math (K-8, LS, ES)
- Corrective Reading (LS, ES)
- Corrective Math (LS, ES)
To learn more about our school’s School Performance Profile, please visit the website:
http://paschoolperformance.org/
Once at the Pennsylvania School Performance Profile website,
- to get started, select the “Role” of “Parent (In State)” at the bottom of the page.
- search for the school by name
An important part of the success plan for Blankenburg ES is parent participation and support in developing activities to improve student achievement. We hope that, as a parent/guardian, you will become involved in our school improvement initiatives as we continue to monitor student achievement and set high expectations. If you are interested in participating in developing our school improvement initiatives, or to learn more about our School Performance Profile, please contact the school.
Thank you for all that you do to support your child’s education.
Sincerely,
LeAndrea Baltimore-Hagan
Principal