More than 80 percent of public schools in Virginia fully accredited

Middleburg Charter’s SOL test results improved this year and the school received full accreditation.

Hawks said the school system has applied to see if Halifax County Middle School and Sinai Elementary would receive denied accreditation or would be reconstituted.

Three Alexandria public schools – John Adams Elementary School, William Ramsay Elementary School and T. C. Williams High School – are Partially Accredited: Warned School – Pass Rate for the 2016-2017 school year. For high schools, graduation rates are also a factor.

Priority schools – comprising the lowest-performing five percent of Title I schools – must engage a state-approved turnaround partner to help design and implement school-reform models that meet state and federal requirements. Title I refers to a federal program that provides funding to local schools with high percentages of students from lower income families to help students improve academic achievement, according the U.S. Department of Education’s website.

About a third of Alexandria’s schools fell short of full accreditation, including one, the Jefferson-Houston School, that was again denied accreditation.

29 schools have had their accreditation denied – including seven in Newport News, six in Norfolk, and another seven in Richmond. Schools that persistently miss the mark lose accreditation altogether and receive state interventions.

At the Halifax County School Board meeting Monday evening, Division Testing Coordinator Jeanie Hawks said both local elementary schools were named either a focus school or priority school a year ago, and predicted that the two would continue to hold that status.

In Albemarle County, 21 out of its 26 schools received full accreditation. In Alexandria, 11 of the City’s 16 public schools are fully accredited for the 2016-2017 school year; four schools are partially accredited and one school was denied accreditation.

81-percent of the state’s schools are now fully accredited, an improvement on past year by 3-percent.

“We’re in that same kind of process”, Jones said. “These results indicate that we are building a strong foundation for SOL test score gains in future years”. Their students’ English and Math scores only reached 58 percent while their science scores only reached 55 percent. Federal accountability standards define Focus Schools as comprising 10% of Title I schools selected on the basis of achievement gaps.

Greer, Cale, Red Hill and Woodbrook elementary schools in Albemarle County; Nathanael Greene Elementary and Primary schools in Greene County; Madison Primary and Waverly Yowell Elementary schools in Madison County and Tye River Elementary School in Nelson County are nine of the 72 Focus schools in the state. Focus schools are required to employ “state-approved, school-improvement coaches”.

Senate Bill 326 directed the VBE to grant three additional years of full accreditation to schools that had previously earned full accreditation for three consecutive years.