By Dan Karpiel

The Surveyor

Berthoud’s Ivy Stockwell Elementary School earned a 98.6 rating (out of a possible 100) on the 2018 School Performance Rankings from the Colorado Department of Education. The score puts Ivy at the top of the four Berthoud schools in the ratings as well as atop all Thompson R2J schools and 10^th overall in the state of Colorado.

For the other three schools in town, Berthoud Elementary scored an 81.8, Berthoud High School a 71.1 and Turner Middle School scored 52.7. Turner’s score means the school will be placed on an improvement plan for the second time in three years. Turner is Berthoud’s only school that received anything other than a “performance” ranking, the highest category in the state’s metrics. As a whole, the Thompson School District received a 56.7-percent rating, roughly on-par with the state average and enough to maintain its “accredited” status.

More detailed data also released in the Colorado Measures of Academic Success (CMAS) results for 2018 in English/langue arts (ELA), mathematics and science show some mixed results for Berthoud’s four schools, but more positives than negatives.

Berthoud Elementary saw a small dip (-1.6 percent) from 2017 in students who met or exceeded expectations in English/language arts and a somewhat larger dip of -3.9 percent in mathematics. Conversely, Ivy saw an increase of 1.3 percent in ELA and 7.4 percent in mathematics in students who met or exceeded expectations relative to 2017. Yet, all told, 69.3 percent of all students at Berthoud Elementary met or exceeded expectations in ELA and 63.4 percent in math. Ivy’s numbers were 64.9 percent and 57.7 percent, respectively, in ELA and math.

Turner saw improvement in ELA and math from 2017; 51.2 percent of students tested met or exceeded expectations in ELA, an improvement of 1.3 percent from 2017 and 41.1 percent met or exceeded expectations in math, an improvement of 2.1 percent. All three schools were above the total scores for the entire Thompson School District, where the data found that 48.2 percent of all students met or exceeded expectations in ELA and 35.4 percent in math.

The science assessment is the only one in which high school students participate and Berthoud High School (BHS) saw a whopping 33.6 percent increase in students who met or exceeded expectations in the field, from 25.1 percent in 2017 to 58.7 percent in 2018.

Berthoud’s other three schools, however, all saw small decreases from 2017 in science assessment. Berthoud Elementary had 65.4 percent of students meet or exceed expectations, a decrease of just 0.2 percent from 201, 50.8 percent of Ivy students met or exceeded expectations in 2018, a drop of 7.2 percent from 2017. At Turner, 29.5 percent of students met or exceeded expectations in science, down 1.9 percent from last year.

In addition to the science assessment, BHS ninth- and 10th-graders take the PSAT test, and 11th graders take the SAT. On the SAT, the mean composite score for BHS students was 1080, above both the state (1014) and district (1024) averages. For evidence-based reading and writing, Berthoud students scored an average of 547, also exceeding the state (513) and district (523) averages. On mathematics, Berthoud’s 533 was the best score in the district and also exceeded the state-wide mean score of 501.

BHS students also surpassed state and district averages in both grade levels the PSAT tests in all three of evidence-based reading and writing, mathematics and composite scores. For the ninth grade PSAT, BHS students mean score was 472 in reading and writing, 457 in math and 929 composite. For the 10th grade PSAT, the means were 501 for reading and writing, 478 for math and an average of 979 on the composite score.

Further information on all the testing results can be found at https://www.cde.state.co.us/assessment/cmas.