Monroe School District Test Scores Up

SMITHVILLE, Miss. (WCBI) – Well test scores are up. Mississippi State Public School scores have shown an overall improvement this year.

Hard work pays off, for the students and their teachers. Smithville Attendance Center in the last three years has gone from successful to a high performing school, though Principal Chad O’Brian says theres always room for improvement.

“The first thing we do on a daily basis is to ensure that there’s quality instruction going on in the classroom, research proves that beyond any doubt that the number one factor that influences students is effective classroom instruction,” says Chad O’Brian.

It starts in the classroom, with book work and assignments. Where teachers set goals for their students to motivate them to improve their studies.

“We have a motivation system in place for our students, rather than just say here’s a test we want you to take it. We want to have a goal, we want to have something that the students are shooting for, we did that this year with our rewards program and that seemed to really help out,” added O’Brian.

Though Smithville Attendance Center showed a great improvement, Hamilton’s scores stayed the same, and Hatley’s went down. All three schools are still high performing.

“We know that we’re a high performing school district, and that’s in the top 20 percent of all the school districts in the state and we’re doing a lot of good things but we just always wanna see ourselves improve and we just didn’t see that this time as much as we’d like,” says Superintendent Scott Cantrell.

Cantrell says the school district will have more tests to gage student performance. The tests will be available for review the same day.

The test scores are part of the accountability ratings for schools and districts.