Cheney graduations up despite pandemic

CHENEY – School board members got a bit of good news at their Feb. 10 meeting in the form of graduation rates that exceeded high water marks for the past five years.

Data and Assessment Director Carol Lewis told the board that overall graduation rates for students in the district hit 91.5% in 2020 - the highest since the 87.5% in 2017. Lewis said this was in spite of the state allowing districts to grant waivers for graduation credits to students struggling with required courses because of the COVID-19 pandemic reducing instruction to online only.

"But I think it's really important to remember that the only way we could do that was we had to demonstrate that for each student to have something waived, they were on track prior to the shutdown," Lewis said. "We didn't just round-up to get more kids to graduate. 91.5% were on track prior to closure and we had every reason to think they would make it."

While Cheney High School's graduation rate hit a high of 92%, the likely reason for the district's overall success lay with student at its alternative high school - Three Springs. Since 2016 the high school averaged a graduation rate of just over 39.5%, hitting a high of 42.9% in 2018.

In 2020, Three Springs High School's graduation rate was 82.4%. Lewis reminded the board that, like the high school, students had to show they were on track to graduation prior to the pandemic and being offered the option of having credits waived.

"Those kids were on track, and they did it," she added.

Superintendent Rob Roettger credited a number of factors for Three Springs' success, including staffing consistency at the school. He also noted the district has set a goal of 95% graduation rate among all students in its system.

"That's just the initial goal, right, that's not the end goal," Roettger said. "We want to get each and every student to get into that opportunity."

Roettger attributed the overall success to the hard work district staff have been putting in since institution of the Professional Learning Communities (PLC) program in 2017. The five-year district improvement plan is designed to strengthen instruction practices at all schools by focusing attention on working PLC teams that address academics, social and emotional learning and community and family engagement.

"Teams sitting down and looking at each course, standards, assessments, what to do if students don't know (the material) and what intervention looks like," Roettger said. "The staff did hard work doing this."

In other news, Finance Director Jamie Weingart said enrollment rose slightly from January to February but seems to be leveling off at this point in the school year. While those figures are much less than last year and the budgeted amount for 2020-2021, Cheney's 2.2% drop is much less than the statewide average of 3.9%.

"We're not seeing the same impact on average that we're seeing statewide," Weingart said. "We're seeing a little less than that impact, so hopefully we'll be able to rebound a little quicker from this as well."

Financially, the district is still on track to end the school year with 6% balance in its operating fund, somewhere close to $5 million by August. Some federal funding is coming through, but there are still questions about state transportation funding, poverty rates and how those could affect funding in the future.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].