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Overcrowding, aging schools and not
enough new school buildings are but one aspect with our community's challenges
with Fulton Schools. These issues are factors impacting the bottom line of
what school is really all about - learning, getting decent grades and performing well enough on
standardized tests to achieve college admission and earn scholarships to pay
for college.
For some it may be easy to celebrate
how well Fulton Schools as a whole performed in testing compared to other school systems.
It might sound narrow minded, but the pertinent question to South Fulton
residents is how are the children in South Fulton Schools performing.
Hopefully you have
heard that there is a serious educational gap that exists between North and South Fulton School
student performance on standardized tests. Hopefully you recognize this is
significant for you too when students that fall off the educational wagon,
loiter during the day and burglarize homes whether the resident has children
at home or not.
Clearly eighth grade is rather late in
the game to make significant midcourse corrections and unfortunately the CRCT
is a reasonable predictor of how many middle school students will perform on
the
College Board Tests. Listed below is the reality
of this disparity accumulated from the Georgia Department of Education by the AJC
*, sorted
and
reformatted by SCA.
The
list of Fulton County students that are semifinalists in the
2007 52nd annual National Merit Scholarship Program
was announced. Sixty of the students are from North Fulton Schools -
there aren't any semifinalists from South Fulton County Schools.
It is time for
comprehensive out of the box thinking to bring South Fulton student test scores up.
Our children should be able to achieve academic success in our own
neighborhoods without riding busses three hours a day to attend schools in
North Fulton. One size does not fit all and as subject matter experts is it
time for a plan
from Fulton Schools Administration
to address South Fulton issues.
2006 Fulton
Schools CRCT 8th Grade Scorecard
Reading -
ALL South
Fulton Middle Schools at the 8th Grade level scored below the
countywide average
Math -
ALL South Fulton Middle Schools at
the 8th Grade level scored below the
countywide average
Science -
ALL South
Fulton Middle Schools at the 8th Grade level scored below the countywide average
Social Studies
-ALL but one SF Middle School at the 8th Grade level
scored below the countywide average
Language Arts -
ALL but one SF Middle School at the 8th Grade level scored
below the countywide average
Of the bottom
eight MS in Science
all were from South Fulton except the North Fulton Alternative School
8th Grade School Rankings by %
Failing by Area
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