Franklin County School Superintendent to Speak at Chamber Luncheon

Franklin County School Superintendent Dr. Ruth O’Dell will be giving her annual report today on the state of the school system.

Dr. O’Dell will be the guest speaker at the Franklin County Chamber ‘s quarterly luncheon.

In her report, O’Dell is expected to talk about a number of accomplishments and challenges facing the school system and school board. Among them, the new system of measuring a student’s progress instituted by the State Board of Education called the College and Career Readiness Performance Index or CCRPI.

Franklin County Schools have been working to make improvements in the system’s overall scores since the CCRPI program was instituted.

In December, the State released the CCRPI scores for all school systems.  And while Dr. O’Dell said earlier this year that students are making good progress in bringing that rate up in some groups, other groups, such as economically disadvantaged students, continue to struggle.

“The achievement gap has to do with the lower 25% of our students in each subject. Are we getting those lower performing students to close their gap. So even though we did well overall compared to the state average, our lower performing students are having trouble closing that gap.”

Another area where improvements need to be made, Dr. O’Dell has said is in the rate of absenteeism.  In January, Dr. O’Dell said many Franklin County students are absent too many times.

In January, she said the problem is not truancy, it is excused absences. She said most of the absences come with notes from the parents.

“This has become a huge problem in our school system; flat out school attendance. We have a high percentage of our kids that by this time of the year have missed six to ten days,” she said. “We only have 164 days of class time. It doesn’t matter how long I extend the day, you didn’t get up and come for however many minutes there were. So you can imagine how that impacts the progress of our students. We could make even more progress if they got up and came to school.”

Dr. O’Dell said the problem is county wide. She said it covers all socio-economic strata.  She said parents just do not seem to understand the importance of their children being college and career ready by taking advantage of this new 21st century learning environment.

Today’s Chamber quarterly luncheon takes place at noon at Royston Baptist Church.

For tickets or more information, contact the Chamber office at 706-384-4659.