FWCS Makes Adequate Yearly Progress

It's been a tough year for Fort Wayne Community Schools: a year full of changes, challenges, and closures. But amid the rough patches is a milestone.

"The second largest district in this state, with 87-different languages…with free and reduced numbers climbing...we have made AYP for the first time in history” says FWCS Superintendent Dr. Wendy Robinson.

AYP or Adequate Yearly Progress is a federal accountability system and part of the No Child Left Behind Act passed 9-years-ago. It shows whether districts and schools have met performance goals.

"I’m not too proud to admit that I cried” Robinson told FOX Fort Wayne today.

            This is the first time FWCS made adequate yearly Progress since NCLB went into effect.

"I was afraid that I would not see this day before we went to some different system” says FWCS Board President Mark GiaQuinta.

The district met all thirty-seven performance and participation targets.

Criteria include ISTEP+ scores, along with attendance and graduation rates.

"We’re only just begun” says Robinson.

            Right now two Fort Wayne schools are among the top 40-lowest achieving in the state: Miami Middle School and Wayne High School.

"We’re not spiking the football in the endzone today. We're saying 'wait a second, what about Miami middle school and Wayne high school. We've got work to do’” says GiaQuinta.

By 2014 the goal is to have every student learning at grade level. Giaquinta say it's highly unlikely.

"I doubt that there will be a school in the country that will have 100-percent in 2014” he says.

Today's news is cause for celebration, but Robinson remains cautious, saying that a lot of work still needs to be done. She says tomorrow it'll be back to business as usual “because business as usual with all the changes we've made is why we are who we are now.”

These AYP results are preliminary and only for the district.

Individual school data won't be released for a few more weeks.