Mount Vernon News

MOUNT VERNON — Statewide testing mandates involve the printing and distribution of millions of test and answer forms for each subject area being assessed. Sometimes, glitches occur, as happened in some areas with the spring administration of Ohio Achievement Tests; not enough of certain test forms for students needing special accommodations were received by schools.
Some schools in the area, such as Adams Middle School in Johnstown, experienced no difficulty. Others did.
At Highland, according to middle school principal Robert Terrill, they were short of A forms. Although they didn’t have the forms, they made do with alternative forms. “We tested everybody at the same time,” Terrill said. “The teachers and students have worked too hard to prepare for the tests. We didn’t want to make them wait for makeup tests. They worked too hard for us to do that to them.”
Part of the problem, he said, is that each testing packet had five different forms in it. In the past, each building may have had a different form (the same questions but in a different order). This year, every building had different forms in the packet. Every packet had five different forms in it.
Terrill said the schools order the test materials well in advance of the test administration date. He said he made one submission in December. “Then we do what they call pre-ID files,” he said, ”where they take our students’ state number, the school’s IRN and the building IRN, and then they make a premade label for the students’ books. We have to submit that back in February. When the tests come in, there are individual labels on each answer booklet. Every book has an eight-digit number on it, and we have to assign each booklet, and we have to account for each and every book. Even if a kid throws up on it, they want it in a plastic baggy back to them. ... No stone goes unturned. But they can’t get us the right forms.”
Some schools with insufficient forms planned to wait for additional forms and use the official test make-up week to get caught up with the test. Lynda Weston, director of teaching and learning for Mount Vernon City Schools, said that was their plan, unless the forms came in earlier. “They can’t fax us the form and we aren’t allowed to copy it. We have to wait until the official form comes in.” (They arrived Wednesday.)
Weston said the department of education had informed schools they would be using multiple forms this year. “We were prepared for that,” Weston said. “Any child who had an IEP accommodation was supposed to use form A, and that came through mostly for read-aloud accommodations. So, if you were reading aloud to three children, you wanted them all to have the same form. So ODE notified us several much ago and we asked the teachers to let us know. That’s where some confusion came in at the middle school. They told us they needed 10 form As, for each grade level, so that’s what we ordered. They meant they needed 10 packs of 50, and not just 10 forms.
“Rather than delaying the tests, we were going to just make sure all students needing read-aloud, for example, used Form B. But, we got a direction from the state department (of education) we were not allowed to do that. We had to give any accommodation form A. It’s the same test, but the pilot questions (used for data tracking) are interspersed at different places on each test”.
Weston said one of the reasons the shortfall was not discovered before the official test date is the security required by the state. “You’re not supposed to open a test or anything until the actual test date. We have a thousand kids at the middle school, and we’re not supposed to open or put out anywhere the tests until the day of the test. I have people who come at four in the morning to get the tests ready. I’ve even heard principal talk about coming in at midnight, so they’re not opening the test packets before the day of the test.”