The issue of literacy rates—especially in the wake of educational disruptions stemming from the COVID-19 response—is the subject of an agenda item at a Cobb Board of Education work session Thursday.
The agenda item, entitled “Literacy Updates,” doesn’t detail what will be presented; East Cobb News has left a message with the Cobb County School District seeking more information.
The board also will hear a presentation about the district’s 2024 legislative priorities, which also weren’t specified on the published meeting agenda.
The board is meeting in public at a 1 p.m. work session Thursday and a 7 p.m. business session at the Cobb County School District Central Office (514 Glover St., Marietta).
The agendas for both meetings can be found here; an executive session will take place in between.
The meetings also will be live-streamed on the district’s BoxCast channel and on CobbEdTV, Comcast Channel 24.
While schools in East Cobb had some of the best Milestones test scores in Cobb for the 2022-23 school year, educators across the state and in Cobb County have been emphasizing ways to address learning loss due to COVID-19 disruptions, especially in third-grade reading, a key benchmark of early literacy.
But others struggled, with several elementary schools having percentages of third-graders at proficiency levels at 65 percent or lower.
Georgia has adopted new standards for teaching English after only a third of third-graders were regarded as proficient or better in Milestones English Language Arts results in 2022.
Across the state, ELA Milestones scores among third-graders in 2023 rose three percentage points and the percentage of third-graders reading at or above grade-level was up slightly, from 64 to 66 percent.
In ELA, 78.9 percent of Cobb students were rated as developing learners or above, and 78.7 percent met the same threshold in all subjects.
Marietta City Schools has embarked on a program called the “Science of Reading” that school district officials there said has yielded higher scores for third-grade readers. It’s a concept that’s been adopted by the Georgia Department of Education and will be implemented statewide into Milestones by 2025.
At the school board’s evening meeting, recognitions will include STEM certifications at Bells Ferry Elementary School and Mountain View Elementary School and for Lassiter High School teacher Jean Linner, who was recently awarded the Georgia Council of Teachers of Mathematics 2023 Gladys M. Thomason Award.
Related:
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- Wheeler teacher honored by Georgia Art Educators Association
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- Muslim parents criticize Cobb schools over Hamas message
- Cobb school board rejects proposed library book policy
- Cobb school district objects to redistricting lawsuit settlement
- New Eastvalley ES ribbon-cutting draws a crowd
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