District 303 adopts new report card format

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ST. CHARLES — District 303 is the last school system in the Tri-Cities to stop giving letter grades on elementary school students' report cards.

It introduced a report card this year that should give parents a more accurate depiction of their children's performance instead of pitting the kids against a scale, said Cheryl LaFave, assistant superintendent for learning and teaching.

Parents, administrators and teachers worked for about a year to create the format and sought input from Parent Teacher Organizations, she said.

"The report card hadn't been changed in 13 years," LaFave said. "We took the time to go through the process."

S, E and G — letters that told parents their children's work was satisfactory, excellent or in need of achieving a goal — are no longer used. Instead, the new format measures students' progress toward state standards, LaFave said.

"This will give the parent more detailed information regarding — I should say a deeper understanding of — the standards that we're looking for their children to achieve," she said. It "shows what the student should know and be able to do."

For example, kindergarten teachers would report how well a child uses correct grammar, spelling, punctuation and capitalization by telling parents whether the child writes uppercase and lowercase letters legibly and uses basic writing components, such as punctuation, in daily work, according to the kindergarten competencies and indicators posted on the district's Web site.

The district piloted the format at Corron Elementary School last year. Nancy Oller, mother of a third-grade son and first-grade daughter there, said it helped her understand what her children needed to work on. Her son lacked details and organization when describing stories he read, she said, so she helped him practice those skills during the summer. Such information would have been left out of the old, more general report card, she said.

Adjusting to the new format was easy, Oller said.

"I didn't have any trouble, honestly," she said. "I'm happy with it."

Geneva District 304 stopped using letter grades at the elementary level several years ago, spokesperson Kelley Munch said. Batavia Public Schools switched to the standards-based format at least five years ago, said Jan Wright, associate superintendent for teaching and learning.

"We started out with the elementary because that was the one level that was really asking for it," Wright said. "We had several teachers who felt that they were not giving parents a clear enough picture about students' performance."

While some Batavia parents told the district they would miss the reward of the letter grade, the district received an overwhelming positive response when it surveyed parents at the end of the first year, Wright said.

LaFave said she could not predict whether D303 will expand the format to grades 6-12.

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