In COVID-plagued year, how did your Beaufort Co. school perform on SC school report cards?
Clarification: This article has been updated to clarify that elementary and middle schoolers’ English performance is measured on SC READY tests.
Beaufort County School District’s math scores have taken a beating in the year and a half since schools first shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic.
In math, 8.2% fewer elementary and middle school students are scoring at their grade level, with some schools having just 20% of students on grade level. And in high school, the percentage of students scoring a C or higher on the Algebra 1 exam dropped by 6% across the district between 2018-19 and 2020-21 year (testing data is not available for 2019-20).
Performance on the end-of-course English 1 test for high schoolers rose by 6%, and SC READY English scores declined 0.2% for elementary and middle schoolers.
Graduation rates rose across the district compared with 2018-19.
Across the state, schools performed significantly worse in math and slightly worse in English at lower grades than they did in 2018-19, while high school English scores saw a 6.5% bump.
South Carolina’s Department of Education released its annual school report cards Wednesday, measuring students’ scores on standardized tests, English learners’ proficiency, school quality, high school graduation rates and more.
The report cards normally come with a rank, ranging from “Excellent” to “Unsatisfactory” for each school — something that’s missing this year.
In a Tuesday press conference, State Superintendent Molly Spearman cautioned against comparing this year’s reports to pre-pandemic scores, citing COVID flexibility around testing, different modes of instruction across the state and the possibility that some students didn’t show up for testing.
That’s the reason that rankings aren’t included this year, according to the S.C. Department of Education’s FAQ sheet for the report cards.
“It’s really, really difficult to take the context of these students’ lives away from this assessment data,” Spearman said Tuesday. “We have to look very closely at it and be willing to realize there’s additional support that has to be given to particular areas of the state.”
Even without rankings, the report cards have more information than they contained for the 2019-20 school year, which omitted end-of-year testing results.
In 2020-21, students were required to show up in-person to take end-of-year tests, but they could opt out of testing altogether. In Beaufort County School District, 91.4% of students participated in these in-person tests, above the state average of 87.9%. In spring of 2019, 99.5% of district students took their end-of-year tests.
Even with the chaos of COVID learning and lower-than-normal participation, the report cards still provide the only hard data of school performance since the start of the pandemic.
“I was not shocked at the results. I am very, very concerned about the results,” Spearman said. “Our students, particularly our young students, did not show as much growth as we had hoped and had shown in previous years.”
Comparing to 2018-19
For the most part, Beaufort County’s numbers are slightly above state averages and in line with declines across South Carolina.
Across the state in 2021, 62.8% of students scored above a C on their English 1 EOCs, and 46.7% did so on algebra 1 EOCs; in 2019, those numbers were 56.3% and 54.9%, respectively.
In Beaufort County, student performance on the English section of the SC READY end-of-year tests for third- through eighth-graders held steady, dropping from 45.5% of students meeting or exceeding expectations for their grade level to 45.3%.
The percentage of students scoring a C or higher on the end-of-course English 1 exam, an introductory-level high school course, increased from 60 to 66%.
Math was a different story. SC READY math scores dropped from 48% meeting or exceeding expectations in 2019 to 39.8% in 2021, and EOC Algebra 1 scores dropped from 60.7% to 54.7% scoring a C or higher.
Five schools — Beaufort Middle, Port Royal Elementary, Robert Smalls International Academy, Joseph Shanklin Elementary and Pritchardville Elementary — saw a more than 15% decrease in SC READY math scores.
Four of those schools had a higher percentage of virtual students than the district average when students began returning to hybrid classes in October 2020.
It’s difficult to track the percentage of virtual vs. in-person students for the school year as a whole because several families switched their decisions mid-year. That’s especially true for elementary schools, where the district pushed especially hard for students to return to buildings.
But on the whole, clusters that had a consistently high percentage of virtual students, such as Whale Branch and Beaufort, saw a higher drop in test scores than their counterparts south of the Broad River, where in-person attendance was higher.
This story was originally published September 1, 2021 at 4:30 AM.