But DPS officials did say the report cards would likely have been better if the data had been reported.
At an Oct. 17 meeting, Melinda Clark, academic coordinator for Dayton Public, said the district missed reporting some test result data for all students in the district in grades kindergarten through third grade to the state.
That means the progress students made during the past school year also wasn’t accurately reported to the state, Clark said.
“These assumptions due to a lack of reporting hurt the 2022-2023 report card overall,” Clark said. “Based on the test data that was never reported, students actually performed better than the state assumed.”
Clark said the district didn’t report students who were behind, so the state would have assumed those kids were on track, even if they weren’t. The district didn’t get credit for improving those students’ outcomes when they eventually got back on track.
Lacey Snoke, spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Education, said the state uses district-reported data to make the report cards.
“Depending on the data reporting error, an error could impact the Achievement component, Early literacy component, Progress, Gap Closing, and/or Graduation from one year to the next year,” Snoke said.
She said schools can request a watermark be put on their report card to indicate missing data, but DPS does not currently have such a mark on the 2022-2023 report card.
DPS interim superintendent David Lawrence and Clark said the school district is making sure this does not happen again.
Clark said she had met with her team to review dates and made sure everyone had the support they needed to submit reports on time.
Lawrence said the district will be continuing to work on improving academics in general.
“With a focus on a few things, we can make some significant progress,” he said.
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