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Date: 10/5/2021
FRANKLIN COUNTY – For the most part, the local school dodged a bullet.
“When you look at last year’s challenges, it certainly was going to have an impact on standardized testing,” said Superintendent Darius Modestow.
Modestow and other Frontier Regional School District officials may have expected Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) scores to fall farther than they did, and were relieved they didn’t.
“Our district is really strong, compared to the state,” Modestow said. “We had some declining in math, but we’re above the state average.”
The reduced scores in the math categories of the commonwealth’s standardized tests were almost across the board. Most were between two and six point drops. According to information on the website of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) however, 75 percent of 10 graders at Frontier met or exceeded expectations in math-related tests.
School size also makes a difference.
“The problem is, the state’s up and down is huge, compared to the numbers you’re looking at,” Modestow said. “We are a district with smaller schools. We have ups and downs because of the students we have, and the numbers we have. For the most part we’re normal, but when you look overall there was a drop this year over last year.”
Schools throughout the commonwealth did not administer all the MCAS tests. Some tests for fourth and tenth graders, according to the DESE website, were not administered due to COVID-19 challenges. Local impacts of the pandemic also hit both students and teachers. Modestow commented that teachers faced greater difficulties in delivering content and students weren’t getting as much help over the rough patches.
“If you have a struggling reader and you’re not able to have a regular meeting with the reading specialist, that would be evidence that child is not receiving all they need…We did our best, and the performance improved as the year went along, as we tried to get them acclimated (but) normalcy was lost,” Modestow said.
Teachers faced great challenges from the pandemic, according to Modestow. He appreciated how hard they worked, their tenacity in the face of COVID-19 obstacles, and appreciated the flexibility they showed in responding to the many changes they had to deal with.
“Last year we couldn’t do a lot of instruction that we normally do, that teachers are trained to do, from small group work, to intervention strategies where we’re using different teachers, reading and math specialists to help students,” Modestow said. “It was far more difficult in mixing groups, [but we] didn’t drop more than the rest of the state.”
Modestow lingered on the contributions made by the dedicated teachers at Frontier.
“Each teacher had to go above and beyond, and learn how to work on an online platform, and most had to also teach classes in person,” Modestow said. “It was a very disjointed year. Eighteen squirrelly fourth graders, it’s a whole new experience. The teachers, by the end of the year, they were exhausted from doing all they had to do.”
Modestow sounded relieved by Frontier’s MCAS test scores, but also that 2020 is in the rear view mirror.
“It was a challenging year,” he said. “And everybody was looking forward to more normalcy.”