Montezuma-Cortez schoolchildren seem to have improved slightly on the Colorado Student Assessment Program tests this year but the district still trails the state average for proficiency in every category in every grade level for the 2000-2001 school year.

Although the district has made progress, Re-1 Superintendent Bill Thompson said the results remain a source of frustration for faculty and administrators.

"Our teachers and our principals are working so hard at trying to do the right things," Thompson said. "We’ve done staff development for teachers and they’re applying it in the classroom with the kids, and then it’s frustrating to see the results."

Faring the worst in reading scores were the district’s fourth-graders, who tested at 44 percent proficiency compared to the state’s average of 63 percent.

But perhaps the most startling revelation was that only 5 percent of the district’s 10th-graders are proficient in math. Of those 10th-graders, none of the Hispanic or Native American students performed at the proficiency level.

Thompson said that math scores were low across the state and attributed the poor showing to new testing measures that incorporate a writing emphasis into every category.

"We’ve got a lot of kids who have never taken a test like this before," he said. "When you take a math test, usually you come up with an answer and that’s final . . . but several questions in this test, they not only had to come up with the answer but then write a constructive response on how they came up with that answer. They may have had the right answer but were unsuccessful in writing the constructive response and that’s part of the math score.

"That’s a whole new learning process for the kids and a whole new teaching process for teaching how to do constructive responses. They’re not only teaching math processes, but they’re teaching writing processes too. As this test is given in the future, there’s going to be some good progress after learning how to do the constructive responses."

Assistant Superintendent George Shumpelt noted the differences in tests is most obvious when CSAP math scores are compared to ACT test scores.

"With CSAPs, only 14 percent of the state is considered proficient (in math), yet our state is better than the national average in math on the ACTs," he said.

Shumpelt also cautioned that there are few instances in which longitudinal comparisons — tracking students from year to year — can be made because the tests were not administered in every category and in every grade and also because of a 30 percent mobility rate in the district.

Last year’s third-graders tested 8 percent lower in reading this year, but last year’s fourth-graders showed a 7 percent improvement as fifth-graders.

"Last year’s third grade is this year’s fourth grade, so you can compare last year’s score with this year’s score," Shumpelt said. But at the same time, we’ve got about a 30 percent mobility rate, so many of those students we tested last year we didn’t test this year because they were gone."

Thompson said this year the state expanded its testing to more categories and grade levels and will allow for better comparisons in the future.

Regardless of the scores, administrators feel they are making every necessary move to improve CSAP scores.

"We really feel our teachers are doing the best they can," Shumpelt said. "We can’t work any harder so we’re learning how to work smarter."

Other results of the test showed that, in the last year:

• Lewis-Arriola Elementary third-graders scored the highest in reading, with 72 percent proficiency, and Mesa Elementary third-graders finished with the lowest average score of 43 percent.

• Lewis-Arriola Elementary also took top honors in fourth-grade reading, with a proficiency average of 77 percent, and again Mesa Elementaryfourth-graders were the least proficient in reading, with a 32 percent proficiency.

• Fifth-grade readers at Kemper had the highest reading proficiency of 65 percent and Mesa fifth-graders were the least proficient at 53 percent.

• Math scores improved in both fifth- and eighth-graders by 9 and 4 percent respectively.

• Eighth-grade science scores also improved by 10 percent.