CHEYENNE, Wyo. (Wyoming News Now) - Wyoming achieved a 96.4 percent participation rate on the 2020-21 statewide assessment which was administered this spring.
“This morning I was reading my hometown paper, The Gillette News Record, and there was a headline about yesterday being the first day of school and it being ‘overwhelmingly normal’,” Wyoming Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jillian Balow, said in a Zoom meeting. “And that’s not my term but I’d like to apply that term to the results that we’re seeing this year.”
Coming out of the pandemic, the Wyoming school districts said they were encouraged by these numbers since it seemed like things were finally returning to normal after a very tumultuous year.
Scores this year were consistent with the baseline scores set in 2018, which Superintendent Balow said are still relevant.
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However, due to the unusual circumstances surrounding this year as opposed to previous ones, Balow urged the public to resist using the data from this year to compare to other years in order to look for trends.
“This is a great starting point for the new normal,” Charles Auzqui, Superintendent of Johnson County School District said. “We talked about what normal looks like. Well, normal isn’t coming back so we got a new normal as far as where districts are and how we’re approaching and teaching kids so this is a great data piece, but it’s just one of multiple data pieces that we use to drive our instruction and districts.”
More information and an in-depth look at the data can be found here: https://edu.wyoming.gov/data/assessment-reports/.
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