Will Our Accelerated Instruction Plan Prepare Students Retaking the STAAR Test to Meet the Standard?

            Last year the STAAR test was first administered in a manner in which it affected student advancement toward meeting graduation requirements.  In our district we have opened a brand new high school campus this fall consisting of freshmen and sophomore students.  The sophomore class is made up mostly of students who attended one of the other two high schools in our district as freshmen.  This summer, our district curriculum and instruction department identified students who had not met the standard on one of the core subject STAAR tests taken as freshmen.  This data was provided to us at the beginning of the school year and we were charged with utilizing district resources and funds to provide the needed remediation to prepare these students to be successful when they retake the test this year.  Data was collected using STAAR assessment results.  Since this is a new project being conducted currently, I do not yet have the disaggregated data, but I do know that we have 175 students who will be retaking a STAAR exam this year.  Upon identifying these students, our group set the goal of having all of them meet the standard this year when they retake the assessment.  Our vision when establishing this program is to provide students the resources necessary to facilitate their success in meeting the standard for coursework they completed the previous year without detracting from the instruction they are receiving in the current year.  The communication of our vision is currently being disseminated to our parents, students, and community members because we have just recently formulated the plan.  When details are worked out, we will be notifying students, parents, and staff via email, phone, and website advertisement.  This will be the most efficient way to get the information out to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.  The management of the project will be shared fairly equally among many members of our team.  As a science department chair, I will be responsible for coordinating and staffing the efforts of our program as they pertain to science, while other department chairs will do the same for their subject areas.  Securing of facilities, handling finances, and controlling personnel issues will be handled by campus principals and administrators from the office of curriculum and instruction.  We are still in the forming phase of determining specific responsibilities for the operations within the program.  Part of our ongoing needs assessment will be identifying individual needs for the students we are serving by identifying specific areas of deficiency within their content areas.  We will then have teachers in each area to help address those needs as identified in the assessment.  In order to formulate our project, each of the three high school campuses was tasked with designing a program to assist students who had not met the acceptable standard on the STAAR test.  Campus principals returned to district leadership with the plans from each campus and the decision was made to go with the proposal from our campus.  Our program will serve students from all walks of life and with varying individual needs.  We have several students with Limited English Proficiency, students with varying special needs, and students from many different socioeconomic classes.  We will be able to provide differentiated instruction based on individual needs to help these students to be successful when they retake the STAAR exam.