By Morgan Harvey
Intern

After nearly a three-month delay, 2010 FCAT scores were finally released June 29, with Osceola County students showing significant improvements in writing and science.

In a county where scores for the last five years have shown significant improvement on the FCAT test overall, this year was no different. While math and reading scores showed similar results when compared to the 2005-09 period, both the writing and science component scores improved.

“We are very happy, especially with our writing scores. They showed the greatest improvement this year, especially in middle- and high-school levels,” Osceola County School District Superintendent Michael Grego said. “We're happy overall; our principals, our teachers and our students did an amazing job this year. We're going in the right direction. In many of the areas, we closed the performance gap with the state.”

This year the percentage of students scoring a three, which is at grade level and considered passing, or above on the writing component of the FCAT jumped significantly from 2009. The three grades that take the writing component – fourth, eighth and 10th – all reached a 90 percent passing rate, with 96 percent of eighth-graders making grade level.

This year’s results were significantly higher compared to last year, when fourth- and eighth-graders scored in the high 80th percentile and 10th graders at 69th percentile. Only 9 percent of students in Osceola County are writing below average, with a 10 percent increase of students writing in the above-average range.

“Writing was a huge focus, but you know with FCAT, everything is the focus, but in writing we really took a nice jump,” Grego said.

In science, fifth-graders showed significant improvement, with 43 percent of students scoring at least a three, up from 39 percent last year. Science scores have stabilized since 2006 when this subject was first introduced into FCAT testing.

“For our second year in a row, our fifth-grade science scores increased significantly. We've had a two-year increase in our fifth-grade science of 10 percent, which is above the state increase. We're very excited about that,” Grego said.

There is still a portion of students, however, not passing the FCAT, with anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of them not scoring a three or above on math and reading.

“Our work is far from done, let me make that very clear, but we've really accelerated and come up quite a bit,” Grego said. “Our goal is to pass the state, to write better, to calculate better and to read better than the average student. Our desire is to be the best school district in Central Florida, and as a result of that, we have to shoot to first eliminate the gap and then to move on and try to go on. We want to continue to excel and we want to focus on math and science, but when we say that, we realize that we have to continue to focus on everything.”

In relation to the state, Osceola County is only 1 or 2 percentage points from meeting state averages in reading and mathematics across all grade levels. Science scores and writing scores are at a level with the state's scores.

“FCAT is a progress report and ultimately you're going to have to pass the high school grade 10 test and you're going to have to meet graduation requirements,” Grego said. “It truly is a progress report, so I look to our graduation rates and I say this is where we're at in grade three and four and so many students need additional English Language Learners help.”

Grego said he's hoping to see future graduation rates go up like they have this past year, where Osceola County graduation rates went from 67 percent to 79 percent. He says that the FCAT graduation requirement helps to ensure that more students graduate every year.

“We are going to ensure that students have to meet these standards over the course of K-12,” Grego said.