Hamilton Southeastern School District’s 2024 state IREAD test results for third-graders show improvement districtwide from 2023.
The results, received on Aug. 14, were presented that night to the HSE School Board by Deputy Superintendent Matt Kegley, who said that district officials will dig into the data for a more detailed presentation at the next board meeting.
Overall results, though, show the district is headed in the right direction to meet the state goal of 95 percent or higher in third-grade reading skills. Five of the 13 elementaries achieved 95 percent or more and most schools showed improved scores. Three schools had lower scores than the previous year.
Kegley said the district overall had an IREADS-3 score of 94.2 percent, up from 92.9 percent last year.
“To have 94 percent of our kids in third grade pass IREAD-3, that’s a really remarkable benchmark,” he said.
District second-graders also took the IREAD-3 test to see where they were as they headed into third grade. Kegley said nearly 60 percent passed.
“(The test) provides us really almost an entire school year where we look at the 26 percent that are in the at-risk category and 15 percent that are on track — we know who those kids are and so do our teachers,” he said of the second-graders who have now started third grade. “They’ve got the balance of the school year, until the students take IREAD-3, to really work at and look at areas of improvement for those students.”
BUDGET TIMELINE
In other matters, the board received a timeline for the upcoming budget process, with a Finance Committee meeting on the topic set for Sept. 10. The timeline included board action in October to establish monthly transfers from the district’s education fund to operations, which some speakers took issue with during public comment.
Tyler Zerbe is a teacher at Hamilton Southeastern High School and a member of the Hamilton Southeastern Education Association’s executive team. He said the transfers would remove money from the fund that directly impacts students.
“It pays for teachers, school counselors, speech pathologists, media and library staff, principal support staff and classroom supplies and equipment,” he said. “We as the union see it as just one more way that the HSE central office administration is predetermining the money available for bargaining. … We hope the administration is not trying to predetermine bargaining by creating this false sense of doom. And finally, we hope that the administration does not plan to deplete our education funds and in doing so, eliminate raises for our teachers — the true backbone of HSE.”
Later in the meeting, Chief Financial Officer Tim Brown told the board that monthly transfers from the education fund to the operating fund is standard practice for many school districts, including HSE. A similar motion was approved by the board last year, he said, and the district is allowed to transfer up to 15 percent of its education fund for operations.
District officials and union representatives will be negotiating a new teacher contract this fall. The relationship between the two sides has been contentious, with HSEA filing an unfair labor complaint against the district following communications between Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources Brian Murphy and HSEA President Abby Taylor.
In November 2023, the school board unanimously approved a new teacher contract following a collaborative interest-based bargaining process, which was lauded by administrators and union representatives for its non-adversarial approach.
The next HSE school board meeting is a work session scheduled for 6 p.m. Aug. 28 at the district’s central office, 13485 Cumberland Rd. Meetings are livestreamed on the board’s website, hseschools.org/board/board-of-school-trustees.
