In the legal notices section of this week’s The Mail-Journal, readers are encouraged to view the 2013 annual performance report of the Wawasee Community School Corp. It is essentially a “snapshot” of the corporation and contains data pulled by the Indiana Department of Education obtained from multiple reports submitted to IDOE.

An annual performance report is required by IDOE.

Readers will find a wide variety of data for the school corporation as a whole and for each of the five school buildings in the district. This would include student enrollment numbers, ISTEP+ results, how much money is spent per student, attendance rate, how many students were expelled or suspended and much more. An explanation accompanies the published report in the legal notices.

Data is provided for the previous three school years plus what is available for the current school year. It should be noted to get the most accurate picture of ISTEP+ results, one should not read across the columns from left to right but instead jump down and then across to follow a particular class from year to year.

“Year in and year out, we would like to see at least an 80 percent pass rate regardless of which test it is or even up into the 90 percent pass rate,” said Dr. Tom Edington, Wawasee superintendent. He emphasized ISTEP+ was plagued with difficulties for more than a week last May for those taking the test online and “that certainly affected our scores.”

Wawasee has nearly 50 percent of its students — 47.6 percent — receiving free or reduced price lunches. That percentage has increased since 44 percent in 2010-11, but is still slightly below the state average of 49 percent.

Enrollment numbers continue to decline for the corporation. Wawasee had 3,251 students enrolled for 2010-11, but by this year the number dropped to 3,086, a decline of 165 students. Edington noted the numbers started declining in 2001 and “we have been either flat or losing students every year since then.” This mirrors a statewide trend where a large majority of school corporations considered more rural are losing students, but more suburban districts (Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, South Bend and others) are gaining students.

He added the number of transfer students is typically not a factor because Wawasee’s outgoing and incoming rate is about even. The local economy and the number of available jobs could be a factor and some Wawasee graduates are not returning to the local area to live and raise their families.

And the amount of money spent by the state per student has declined from $12,500 in 2010-11 to $11,481 in 2012-13. “The state is draining funds off by giving more money for vouchers to private schools and also by encouraging the start of charter schools,” Edington commented.

Also of note is Wawasee has a high number of its middle school students taking high school level algebra courses. For example, Wawasee Middle School had 38.4 percent of eighth-graders and Milford Middle School 56.7 percent enrolled in algebra I during the 2012-13 school year, both significantly higher than the state average. At Wawasee High School, the number of suspended students dropped from 115 in 2010-11 to 82 in 2012-13 and during the same time frame the number of expelled students dropped from 19 to 7. Joy Goshert, director of instruction and curriculum for Wawasee, attributed the decline to more of a focus being placed on students earning credits in alternative schools.

Also at WHS, the number of first-time test takers passing the end of course assessment for math dropped from 93.9 percent in 2011-12 to 77.5 percent in 2012-13.

High School Graduation Rate

IDOE reports the WHS graduation rate for 2012-13 was 85.6 percent but Wawasee administrators feel it should be at least 90 percent. Edington noted the discrepancy could possibly be due to the number of special needs students who did not pass the state exam to graduate, but attended high school all four years and are not considered dropouts. Or it could be a problem with how students are coded, or identified, when reported to the state.

A student by student review is being done with the state. Wawasee’s graduation rate for 2011-12 was 91 percent and 91.7 percent for 2010-11.