BERNE — The late-summer release of state test results gave Berne-Knox-Westerlo administrators the cue to focus on weak math scores in grades 7 and 8 and strong performance in fourth grade, while elementary school teachers this month found they favor the state-endorsed math curriculum.

The scores were released just a month after June’s Report Card on test data from the year before showed several groups of Berne-Knox-Westerlo students weren’t making “adequate yearly progress.”

The status is given by the State Education Department to hold districts accountable for their performance, based on participation and scores on tests, with separate benchmarks for subgroups of race, disability, background, and economic status.

For 2012-13, BKW did not make adequate yearly progress for all students in secondary-level mathematics, for economically disadvantaged students in Elementary/Middle-Level math, or the “White” subgroup in Elementary/Middle-Level science and secondary-level English, although White students make up nearly all of the district. For all other subgroups and its overall graduation rate, the district made adequate yearly progress.

With significant gains in 2014 scores for three- through sixth-grade math students, Interim Superintendent Joseph Natale said math for grades 7 and 8 will be a strong focus in the analysis teachers dig into this week before school starts on Thursday. He set his optimism on the push made in the 2014-15 budget for more support for teachers and students, including a new system of coaches that help teachers work out how their newly revised curricula will look in the classrooms throughout the year.

“But then, one of the things you’re going to hope for by strengthening the primary grades, hopefully some of that will flow into the intermediate grades,” Natale said Tuesday, pointing out the low math scores.

Specific reasons for grade-by-grade differences won’t be defined, administrators say, until teachers and administrators analyze the results, with a presentation to the school board including Regents exams scores scheduled for November.

Natale was hesitant to draw any major conclusions when board member Vasilios Lefkaditis asked at Monday’s school board meeting whether using state-endorsed curricula caused the encouraging jump in fourth-grade math scores.

Scores considered “proficient” and above, those that are 3 or 4 on a scale from 1 to 4, are passing for the state tests; students who score 1 or 2 are deemed to be in need of academic intervention, for which BKW allocated more money this year.

Grade 8 went from 3 percent of students with passing scores in 2013 to 4 percent this year. Grade 7 dropped from 16 to 9 percent, but grade 4, during the same period, jumped from 35 to 52 percent and grade 3 showed a similar gain.

Fourth-grade English scores also had a relatively large increase from 18 percent of students with passing scores to 38.

Grades 5 through 8 saw decreases in English scores, with 20 percent of students in the four grades reaching scores of 3 or 4.

A roughly 15-percent drop in the number of students who took tests could mean the district’s scores were skewed downward, as Natale and his predecessor have said the students who opted out of the tests this year might have scored a 3 or 4.

The effect on results by each grade is likely minimal, Natale said, with only a few students opting out for each test.

Elementary Principal Audrey Roettgers said, without having examined the data in detail, she thought the elementary students who didn’t take the test might have been a balance of high and low scorers.

Two years ago, 411 BKW students took the state assessments for grades 3 through 8. Last year, 336 took math tests and 360 took English tests. At the same time, district enrollment has been declining more gradually.

In the overall picture painted by test results from Berne-Knox-Westerlo, math scores improved slightly more than they did statewide while scores in English went down, compared to a virtually flat performance across New York.

The gap between the number of students classified as “economically disadvantaged” and “non-economically disadvantaged,” which tend to have much lower scores, was narrower this year. Thirty-two percent of the non-economically disadvantaged students overall had passing scores, compared to just 12 percent for disadvantaged students.

Berne-Knox-Westerlo students are 97 percent white, according to its 2012-13 state report card issued by the State Education Department; 33 percent are eligible for the reduced-price or free school lunch program.

Coaching

As the last school year of Common Core roll-out begins, Roettgers, during the Aug. 25 school board meeting, described teachers as enthusiastic.

“The teachers asked me personally to thank you for this time,” Roettgers told board members of the curriculum training that was held for teachers this summer, “because they felt this was some of the most purposeful professional development that they’ve been doing through the course of their years.”

Visiting consultants hired through the Board Of Cooperative Educational Services, used classroom observations and their expertise with the Common Core modules to help elementary and secondary school teachers come up with ways of using them for their curricula — the coursework outline that local school districts use to teach to state standards in their classrooms.

Roettgers said teachers would be “adopting math modules wholly.” The modules are curriculum materials compiled by the Education Department on its EngageNY.org website. They are not mandated, as the standards are, but, Roettgers said, BKW elementary teachers found that the GO Math! curricula, which claims to be aligned with the standards, didn’t have enough “authentic application” and “deep conceptual understanding.” GO Math!, a Houghton Mifflin Harcourt program, doesn’t tie procedural fluency with conceptual understanding, she said.

In English, teachers will use the concept of balanced literacy, where students read in different settings — in groups, with guidance, or independently — and answer questions using evidence from the readings. Each classroom has a library of more than 300 books, Roettgers said, which are assigned reading levels by Fountas and Pinnell, leading researchers in balanced literacy.

Teachers will use some of the modules in English, but Roettgers described them as too dense and complicated.

“To take them whole, you don’t get enough writing, not enough extended writing — writing in response to reading but not beyond that,” she said during Monday’s board meeting.

With both English and math, elementary teachers will use what Roettgers described to The Enterprise as a gradual release of control: “Read to students and you model your thinking, then students read with you and they start answering some of the questions, then students read and you help them to read and answer questions, then, finally, students read and answer on their own.”

Roettgers is hoping the success of grade 4 is a model to learn from. Grades 3 through 5 this year will have a similar integrated co-teaching system, where a full-time special education teacher works in a classroom with the same general education teacher, instead of moving from section to section.

“I think that was something we long felt was beneficial,” said Roettgers.