By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
It's only 11 days into the USD 428 school year and Riley Elementary students in Great Bend are already setting goals. At the end of January, 135 English Language (EL) students at the school took the Kansas English Language Proficiency Assessment (KELPA). Riley Elementary has 18 certified EL staff members, including teachers Kelsey Scheuerman and Traci Miller, who administer the test. Miller described how students are using last year's results to prepare for this year's KELPA test during Wednesday's board of education luncheon at the school.
"We meet with groups of kids throughout the first semester - we try to do it within the first nine weeks - to set goals," she said. "They look at their scores from last year and they pick an area of target they want to improve on."
The board heard from two fourth graders. One has set the goal of writing complete sentences that make sense, and the other has set the goal of using context clues to figure out what words mean. Later this year, EL students will be tested in four areas: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Principal Beth Rein said they must receive a score of four in each category to earn an overall score of three to be deemed proficient.
"Unlike the state assessments that, once you start as a third grader you're going to see through eighth grade and then 10th grade," she said, "the cool thing about the KELPA is once you reach that No. 3, you never take it again."
READ MORE: English Language Assessment an ongoing project for Great Bend Students
Nineteen of the 135 students who took the test in January were deemed proficient. The test is administered in grade-level bands kindergarten, first, grades 2-3, grades 4-5, 7-8, and 9-12. Rein said Riley staff spends so much time on the test because proficiency crosses over into other subjects.
"Half of our kids are language learners, so when they go to take a third-grade state assessment, they maybe have only been speaking English for a year," she said. "As you can see, perhaps sometimes our state assessment scores, we're not really proficient, maybe, in the third grade."