At Monday’s meeting of the Royal Palm Beach Education Advisory Board, Western Academy Charter School Principal Linda Terranova reported that the kindergarten through eighth-grade school placed higher than the state overall this year, as well as the Palm Beach County School District, on the Florida Standards Assessments (FSA).
“We did phenomenal,” Terranova said in a presentation to the board. “We’re really very proud of our students. We weren’t certain how our students were going to do because it is a brand-new test on the state standards, and it was rolled out kind of haphazardly to the districts and the teachers, but we did really, really well. We did beat the district and the state in scores at every grade level in every single subject. Some of them were quite exceptional.”
The FSA replaced the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) this year.
The school’s Algebra 1 and Geometry classes had 100 percent end-of-course passing grades, compared with 58 percent for Algebra 1 in the state and 60 percent for the district, and 53 percent of both the state and school district passing in geometry.
“Both of those are high school credit courses, so we have seventh-graders and eighth-graders who are earning high school credit,” Terranova said.
The school had 25 students in the Algebra 1 class, and this is the third year that all of its students have passed the end-of-course test. It was the first year that the school offered the geometry course.
The school had 98 percent of its students pass the Civics end-of course test, compared with 53 percent at the state level and 55 percent in the district.
The school also had significantly higher overall scores in all grades than the state and district. The results are available on the school’s web site at www.westernacademycharter.com.
The school’s Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math (STEAM) Academy, which opened two years ago for sixth-graders, was the result of a 10,000-square-foot expansion, and adds arts to the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) program.
“A lot of times you hear about STEM, it’s a big thing now; but we really felt it was important to include the arts, and that’s the ‘A’ in STEAM,” Terranova said.
She noted that adding arts to the STEM framework enables students to create the future, not just exist in it.
“I want our students to be the people who are creating those jobs in the industries out there, and the arts are really important for that,” Terranova said. “They have to foster the creativity and innovation in order to keep everything rolling and keep the whole thing going into the future. You can’t just teach kids to go work in a job. They need to be creating those jobs.”
She said students must have good grades to get into the program due to its advanced nature.
“We further their skills and abilities through a project-based and problem-based learning environment,” Terranova said. “They’re not really working out of textbooks. We have a lot of hands-on activities. They’re doing a lot of experiments. They’re creating projects, and they’re learning the standards and curriculum through the project.”
In other business, Area 5 Superintendent Dr. Frank Rodriguez reported that H.L. Johnson Elementary School Principal Dr. Patricia Lucas has taken a positon at another elementary school in the district.
“With that comes to me what is perhaps the most important thing that I do in the role that I serve, which is selecting the next leader of a school,” Rodriguez said. “And that is a responsibility that I take extremely seriously, and I’m very passionate about it because it is critical for us to make sure that we find the right person for that school and the right person for that position.”
Rodriguez noted that the process might take some time.
“It’s not something that I’m going to rush into. I want to make sure we move through the process and get input from the community and from teachers at the school and make sure that we’re able to select the right candidate,” Rodriguez added. “In the meantime, Cyndie Wolf is the assistant principal, and she is there, as well as members from the Area 5 office.”
During principals’ reports, Royal Palm Beach High School Principal Jesus Armas announced that the senior class graduation rate for 2015 had improved to 82.8 percent, over the 2014 graduation rate of 75.9 percent, and 72 percent in 2013.
Armas said the school beat its goal of 82.7 percent.
“It was an aggressive goal, but that was what we were trying to do,” he said.
