Franklin County Schools Score Above State Average in College and Career Readiness

Franklin County’s school system ranks in the top five systems in North Georgia after achieving a higher than average score in the Georgia Department of Education College and Career Readiness Performance Index (CCRPI)for the 2014-2015 academic year.

The scores for all school systems statewide were released Tuesday.

Overall, Franklin County schools received a score of 78 compared to the statewide average of 75.

School Superintendent Dr. Ruth O’Dell says she is very pleased with the scores.

“These scores are from 2015, so we’re just now finding out now what our accountability measures indicate for 2015,” O’Dell said. “We’ve had the test scores, but there’s a lot more involved with CCRPI accountability.”

The CCRPI score measures the how well school systems are doing in preparing students academically for college or technical school and for a pathway that will lead to a successful career in today’s competitive world economy.

“So they’re looking at things like attendance, they’re looking at your exceeds rate, your pathway completers at the high school, your SAT scores, the extent to which kids have to be remediated when they get to college or post-secondary,” O’Dell explained. “So they’re looking at a whole lot of different things and they blend that into one score.”

Points are given the school systems for academic achievement, progress of students overall, how well underachieving students are growing academically compared to the rest of the state, as well as how well minority students are improving.

“The high school has just blown out previous scores. So, I’m really very excited about what I saw at the high school,” O’Dell said. “They had a score of 84.6 ,which is the highest around here for sure. And in our whole RESA, there’s only three other systems that beat us out and two of those were only seven-tenths or three-tenths of a point higher.”

Additionally, O’Dell said Franklin County middle and elementary schools came in fifth among school systems in Pioneer RESA, which serves 15 school systems in North Georgia, including Franklin County.

According to Dr. O’Dell, Franklin County Schools scored highest in math, science and social studies, but fell short in English Language Arts.

“Really English Language Arts is the biggest struggle for us,” she said. “So we think that’s really the key to college and career readiness for our kids and that’s their literacy skills. In response to that we wrote a Striving Readers grant, we have a federal grant that’s going to bring in more professional learning. We have books that we have ordered and are coming in as we speak.”

Dr. O’Dell said those reading materials are being incorporated into the math, science and social studies classes in order to force students to read more and improve their reading and writing skills.