THE GAZETTE
Page A-6
Wednesday, August 28, 2013 o
Plenty to do at Back-to-School Fair, but no backpacks in sight n
Event provided activities and information but no free school supplies BY
STAFF WRITER
1907544
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Beat state, national averages
BY
LINDSAY A. POWERS STAFF WRITER
PEGGY MCEWAN
Montgomery County Public Schools held its annual Back-to-School Fair on Saturday, but students didn’t leave the fair this year in Rockville with new backpacks slung over their shoulders. That’s because this year backpacks were sent directly to schools to be distributed. “We thought empowering the schools to meet the needs of their students was a positive,” school system spokeswoman Gboyinde Onijala said. More than 41 schools were selected to receive backpacks, mostly Title I schools as identified by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. “The legislation provides federal funds to help students in schools with high economic needs achieve high standards. The specific objective of the Title I program is to enable all students to meet state and local student performance standards and for schools to achieve the Annual Measurable Objectives targets set by the Maryland State Department of Education,” Onijala wrote in an email. That meant no long lines of hopeful parents and students snaked around the fair held in the large parking lot at Carver Educational Services Center, as in prior years. Rather than ask for donations of supplies and backpacks, this year the school district asked for donations of money to purchase them. District officials said they hoped to raise enough money from corporate and private
Montgomery students improve ACT scores
TOM FEDOR/THE GAZETTE
Letisha Wander of Rockville, with children Lucas, 6, and Logan, 4, and her mother, Grace Kishna, make their way around the Montgomery County Public Schools Back-to-School Fair on Saturday at the Carver Educational Services Center in Rockville. donations to distribute 50,000 backpacks, enough for almost one-third of the 151,000 students expected to attend county schools this year. Each of those backpacks, filled with supplies, costs $10. Some people still donated supplies and backpacks, Onijala wrote. Although the effort fell well short of that goal, 13,390 backpacks filled with school supplies were provided, up from 8,000 last year, Onijala said in her email. Onijala said some people came to the Back-to-School Fair looking for backpacks but most knew ahead of time that the supplies would not be part of the festivities. Some were disappointed. Erika Ferreras of Takoma Park, who has three children
at Rolling Terrace Elementary School, said she came to the fair looking for backpacks but really didn’t care that they were not available. “That’s fine,” she said. “It’s good for the family to get together. The kids can have fun and I get a lot of information, like the name of an eye doctor close to where we live.” The fair did include health screenings, including eye checks provided by the Montgomery County Medical Society. “It was pretty busy, always a bit of a line, but most kids did well on vision screening,” said Cuong Vu of Bethesda, a retina surgeon. There also were inflatable moonbounces, a pirate ship and slides, a climbing wall
staffed by local Boy Scouts and musical entertainment that had fairgoers of all ages dancing. Lorren Austin of Burtonsville and his daughter Julie, 6, a first-grader at Greencastle Elementary School in Silver Spring, were at the fair for their second year. Last year, Austin said, he was a new county school system parent, so he liked the opportunity to get information on the programs available. Julie, he said, liked the games. They were not looking for backpacks and had heard they would not be available. “It was on the website,” he said. pmcewan@gazette.net
Montgomery County Public Schools’ latest batch of graduates who took the ACT college entrance exam scored higher in each of the test’s four areas compared to last year’s students and beat both state and national average scores. On the test with possible scores ranging from 0 to 36, the roughly 3,000 test takers from the county school system held an average composite score of 23.5, an increase from 23.2 in 2012, Superintendent Joshua P. Starr said during the Aug. 21 county Board of Education meeting. This year’s state average composite score stood at 22.3 and and the national average at 20.9. The number of students participating in the test fell slightly — from 3,181 students in 2012 to 3,146 students in 2013 — and totaled about 30 percent of the system’s 2013 graduates. Starr said at the Board of Education meeting that the scores marked “good news” for the county school system. He added, however, he had heard reports saying the ACT results generally show a lack of college preparedness among the country’s students. Pointing to the implementation of the Common Core State Standards, Starr said “the standard is changing” and that he sees county schools working hard as they make the transition. “I am not an apologist for the results we get,” he said. “There’s no doubt we have an enormous amount of work to do in American public education.” Atareacolleges,standardizedtest scores have varying significance and aren’t a make-or-break factor on an application, college and university officials say. Marcus Rosano, a spokesman for Montgomery College, said
that the college doesn’t take ACT or SAT scores into account because its students enter the school through open enrollment. While the SAT tests students on their “reasoning and verbal abilities,” the ACT focuses on “what a student has learned in school,” according to the official ACT website for students. “We see such a small number of these ACT scores because we don’t ask for them,” Rosano said. If students come to the college with strong ACT results, they can use them to receive an exemption from taking the college’s math or English assessment tests. Students must score a 24 or above on both the English and math portions of the ACT to be exempted from the college’s assessment test in either subject. Out of about 6,255 new students at Montgomery College this fall, about 330 approached the school with either their ACT or SAT scores and were able to bypass an assessment test, Rosano said. Shannon Gundy — director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Maryland — said that ACT scores are one factor among many that the university takes into account when looking at“thewholepicture”ofastudent. Of the students admitted for this fall semester, the middle 50 percent scored between 28 and 32 on the ACT, Gundy said. Each year, she said, the university is seeing more and more ACT scores on applications, usually in addition to SAT scores. In the county school system, ACT participation has generally increased about 21 percent over the last five years, according to school officials, with the number of Hispanic students increasing about 60 percent and the number of African-American students increasing about 25 percent over the same time period. lpowers@gazette.net