While school staff and leaders around Washington County continued to read the tea leaves of their state report cards this week, the Washington County Career Center was basking in the glow of having finished near the top of its peers among Ohio vocational institutes.

The center’s marks placed it in a three-way tie for second best performance out of more than 90 such schools in the state. It got an ‘A’ as an overall mark.

Superintendent Dennis Blatt said Monday the career center hit the mark where it counts for its students, with top grades in graduation rate – 98.7 percent — and post-program outcomes, 95.2 percent.

“Post-program outcomes, that huge, it’s really what we’re all about – jobs, joining the military, or moving on to college,” he said.

Blatt joined other superintendents and administration representatives Monday at a meeting requested by The Marietta Times and organized by Fort Frye Local Schools Superintendent Stephanie Starcher. The intent was to delve deeper into the underlying data in the state report cards to see what each district was learning about itself and the process of boiling the mass of information down into simplified letter grades.

Even that process is difficult, demanding and time consuming.

Other than the achievement data, which mainly is based on end-of-course scores, school districts don’t have access to the data until shortly before the report cards are released.

“I looked at it about a week before the report cards were released, there’s no time beforehand to do any kind of examination,” Warren Local Schools Superintendent Kyle Newton said.

The data itself comes from each district but is reorganized by the department of education in such a way as to require a sort of reverse engineering by each district to verify that it is correct and determine what it applies to.

“The EMIS (Education Management Information System) coordinator in each district is tasked with entering the data, which comes from many different sources,” Belpre Superintendent Tony Dunn said. “The system is over 20 years old, they’ve put Band-aids on Band-aids to keep this system going. It’s also, by the way, the system used for funding schools. You have curriculum directors, special education coordinators, all sorts of people responsible for different pieces of the puzzle.”

The data includes the identification numbers for individual students, but Dunn said the state assigns its own student ID number in the interest of protecting student privacy, which means the district has to do further data scrubbing to verify the student’s identification and confirm that the student is in fact assigned to the correct district.

Starcher and Newton both said they examine their district’s data in comparison to state averages to get a sense of how their students are stacking up against the rest of the state. Although Warren was assigned a ‘C’ overall and a ‘D’ for Prepared for Success, Newton said, “I’d put our Warren kids up against any others in the Prepared for Success category. I know that at Warren, we were above the state average in every single test except one, and last year it was three.”

Starcher, echoing the concerns around the table, said the Prepared for Success category includes points built into the base for Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate Studies, which are preferred by students from affluent suburban districts. However, the College Credit Plus advanced studies which are preferred by students from small rural districts such as those in Washington County, in part because of the cost factor, are an “add-on,” carrying less weight.

Students who join the military after high school also are not counted toward Prepared for Success, Starcher said.

“Does that make sense?” she said. “How are we defining this – if a student serves successfully in the military, is that student not prepared for success?”

The superintendents all felt it was possible to improve the results, in part because the method by which districts are rated by the state have stabilized and they now have three years of results that can be compared reliably.

“We’ve had the same assessment for the third year now,” Baldwin said. “We went through a tumultuous time before that when it was changing every year.”

The welfare of individual students, however, remains paramount, and sometimes doing the right thing by a child – Baldwin offered the example of students with learning disabilities who remain in school into their early 20s, which the school often supports and is required under law – can adversely affect the district’s annual grades.

“We would all sacrifice our report cards to do the best thing by an individual student,” Starcher said. “The irony is that the best choice for a kid is not always best for the district report card.”

Brittany Schob, principal at Marietta Middle School, said she tends to focus on what can be done within her building.

“Even though we have barriers, the teachers work together,” she said. “We focus on what we have control over, what we can do to help our students.”

Blatt said the career center has an advantage in that career and technical centers are rated by a different set of measurements.

“I think what they’re saying is that a lot of their grades, they can’t control,” he said. “With the career-technical report card, over time there have been some changes, and there’s still one factor we don’t really control.”

That factor is the Indicators Met submark under Achievement, which is substantially based on the same end-of-course exams used in high schools, and in fact, Blatt said, other than the American Government exam, the tests are not taken on the career center campus.

Counterpoised against that under the Achievement mark is technical skill attainment, in which the school scored an A.

The school directs much of its effort to preparing students for real-world employment situations, Blatt said, tailoring its course work to the needs of businesses.

“We offer our own curriculum, partnering with business and industries to make sure these kids have a real credential coming out,” he said.

The career center has its students in general for the last two years of high school. Blatt said the schools of Washington County from which the center draws its students have done a good job of preparing them.

He said the career center staff members deserve credit for the work they’ve done.

“It’s really a great accomplishment,” he said. “The data is important, and you like it when it makes you look good, but our leadership group will meet with the teachers and say, ‘Here’s what the data says, here’s the grade, here’s what we’re doing well, and why.’ The biggest question is, how do we get better?”

Washington County Career Center state education report card

•Overall: A.

•Achievement: B.

•Graduation rate: A.

•Prepared for Success: C.

Ohio Department of Education report cards, Washington County school districts, overall grades

•Belpre: D.

•Fort Frye: B.

•Frontier: C.

•Marietta: D.

•Warren: C.

•Wolf Creek: C.

Source: Ohio Department of Education.

•To see all the data behind the grades: education.ohio.gov/Topics/Data/Report-Card-Resources