Motivation effort boosts Brusly Middle School

• By KORAN ADDO
• Advocate Westside bureau
• Published: Oct 20, 2009 - Page: 4B

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Reprints
• Twitter
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

BRUSLY — In the spring, when the bulk of the school year has come and gone and students start counting down the days until summer break, there is a danger their attention to their studies will tail off.

But last spring, administrators at Brusly Middle School used that time to kick off a campaign for student motivation.

The results of that campaign were evident last week when the Louisiana Department of Education released school performance scores: the school had jumped 9.1 points, from 92.6 to 101.7, the largest one-year growth in the school’s history, Assistant Principal Leslie Bello said.

School performance scores are a snapshot of a school’s progress. Test scores, graduation rates and attendance all factor into a school’s score.

Parishwide, the school district’s 2009 performance score jumped 4.1 points from the prior year, from 87.5 to 91.6.

That score is more than 10 points higher than where the school district was in the 2005-06 school year when the district posted a score of 81.1.

The jump in scores is a testament to the school district’s emphasis on raising expectations over the past five years, Superintendent David Corona said.

At Brusly Middle, the school’s progress can be attributed to a number of measures, including the hiring of an interventionist to work one-on-one with students who were falling behind, Principal Callie Kershaw said.

The school also put in place mentorship groups and programs to boost students’ reading levels, she said.

But it was in the spring when school administrators transformed the school.  Contests were held, music was played, students participated in a pep rally and the school’s halls and classroom doors were decorated in a schoolwide rallying effort.

The push was to get students excited to take the LEAP and iLEAP exams as part of Louisiana’s standardized testing program, Bello said.

Students walked the halls wearing T-shirts that read “BMS Will Rock” and “Become a LEAP test and iLEAP Legend,” she said.

The school’s eighth-graders took the LEAP test, which stands for Louisiana Educational Assessment Program for the 21st Century. Students in grades six and seven took the iLEAP, which adds the word “integrated” to the acronym.