Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

PHS students on track, Purtle says

Carroll Purtle, principal of Prescott High School, kept his report to the public short.

He pointed out there are 49.2 percent of PHS students on the free and reduced lunch program. This breaks down to 42.1 percent African American students being involved, 53.4 percent of those on the program are Caucasian, with 4.5 percent being Hispanic.

In discussing the end of course exams in Math and Literacy he said the combined population rose from 34.5 to 53.3, an increase of 18.8 percent in math, and went from 27.3 to 44.1 for an increase of 16.8 percent in Literacy.

Overall, the school met the federal standards, but, he said, PHS still has a long way to go to exceed where it's supposed to be.

Districts, he said, are supposed to offer four advanced placement (AP) courses, with PHS offering five. In all, 49 students took AP classes last year, but only 12 took the exams. Of this, five passed and earned college credit.

The 2003 graduation rate is misleading, he said, because there were no dropouts. However, because of the way the state counts students, those who took more than four years to graduate aren't counted. Still, PHS had 98.5 percent of its seniors graduate in 03.

Of these, 57 percent who went on to college had to take remedial classes.

From there, he handed off to Sally Nix, to discuss what's being done to help overcome the remediation problem.

To start with, she said, a panel was formed to work on how this could be done. The end result was a 25-minute segment of the day, four days a week, has been set aside for math and literacy.

Students in the eighth and ninth grades were split into two groups with four teachers. The math group meets Mondays and Wednesdays, while the literacy crew meets Tuesdays and Thursdays.

The math class will be a "fun" class where students are rewarded for doing what should be done. They will be taught things they and the teachers are interested in, such as hobbies.

These classes will rotate every two weeks, with students who make "D" and "F" going to remediation classes where they will get special tutoring.

Nix said the group worked to set the "class" where it wouldn't conflict with anything else, and if there are problems, the district can offer after school tutoring.

All of the students involved will be accounted for during this period.

Purtle said the time for this period comes from time formerly used for Channel 1 and an extra 10 minutes allotted by the state. By doing it this way, he said, it doesn't cut into any other class time.

Willie Wilson, dean of students, talked about parental involvement, saying parents night will be each Tuesday night, and the remediation classed will begin with ninth grade students.

Parents, he said, must sign off of the program, which will be explained to them. Home visits will be done when necessary.