Humans are competitive, even more so when it comes to our children, so it is natural for us to place a great deal of importance on the scoreboard— whether it be in the test the Dogies will face in Friday night’s game or on the tests children across the state take every year to measure the “quality” of their education.
So we commend Weston County School District #1 for providing community members with the academic scoreboard— based on the 2016-17 Wyoming School Performance Rating and Statewide Assessment Results— found on page 10, and it is gratifying to see that local children performed above the state average last year in the majority of the grade levels/subjects tested.
That isn’t always the case, but you don’t always win the Homecoming game either, and while the final score tells you something, it doesn’t tell you everything. For example, the percentage of local students who tested “proficient” in math under Wyoming’s accountability benchmarks was eight points lower than the state average last year. A more detailed breakdown of the scores provided by NHS Principal Tracy Ragland, however, shows that NHS students who took four years of math scored, on average, a point higher on the ACT math test than the statewide average for kids who took the same four years of math. Some kids, however, choose to take wood shop or some other class instead of subjecting themselves to pre-calculus, and unless we as a community want to tell the district to force students into courses they aren’t interested in, we have to accept that there are some years when we will score below the state average.
We can win the Homecoming game almost every year if we force kids to play football all year, whether they want to or not, but we don’t think that’s a good idea either. It is better to teach and coach to the talents and interests of the children in front of you than it is to force those children into a mold that is often a poor fit for them.