ECISD lauds increased graduation rate

Ector County ISD has the highest graduation rate it has seen in the last 22 years and Superintendent Scott Muri said there are several reasons for that.

The rate of 85.7 percent is for the class of 2023 and it is 2 percentage points higher than the previous year. Information from the Texas Education Agency data is a lagging indicator and it takes about a year to assemble all that data, Muri said.

The graduation numbers include students that walked across the stage in May, but students have until August to graduate. There is a summer graduation, so all of those students will be factored in.

“We are actually still counting the graduates for the class of 2024,” Muri said during his June 12 media call.

Muri credited the six high schools for the attention paid to their students from freshman through senior year, providing support to students who are struggling, ensuring that students and families know that they’re passing the courses they should, seeing if there are any gaps in students’ transcripts and leveraging summer learning opportunities more effectively.

Muri noted that the class of 2023 experienced a lot of challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It really affected a lot of those kids, so (we’re) super proud for increasing the graduation rate amidst all of the challenges that those students faced. With the class of 2024 that just graduated, again, they started their high school career at home so they lived through some pretty significant challenges, as well. We know that the pandemic still plays a piece, especially early in their high school career,” Muri said.

For 2023, ECISD reported more than 1,800 graduates before the summer graduation ceremony.

This year, there were about 1,900 graduates.

On a separate topic, he said Bond 2023 is well underway. “In fact, we’re really pleased to announce that we’ve already finished two pretty significant projects that were part of Bond 2023.

“The first project that we finished was the resurfacing of our middle school tennis courts. That project is now fully complete and (we are) excited to welcome our middle school students back both this summer and in the fall as they have a chance to utilize those tennis courts,” Muri said.

The second completed item is the installation of Promethean Boards, which are electronic chalk boards in each classroom.

“Those of us that were in school many years ago remember the chalk board. We have long since replaced that with digital tools for our teachers and students to use. All of our classrooms now have brand-new tools that were either a part of the bond or part of a general fund spending package that we exercised,” Muri said.

Another bond project ECISD has spent a lot of time on is the design and development of a new middle school on South Tripp Avenue in West Odessa.

“On Tuesday night, our board of trustees spent quite a bit of time looking at the design of that middle school, looking at the exterior design … as well as the interior components — everything from the classroom area to the arts area to the athletics area, all of the different components of that particular middle school,” Muri said.

Board members had a chance to review the plans and provide feedback.

“The next step of the process is we’ll continue to refine those elements, and then early this fall we’ll engage a group of stakeholders, members of our community, students, parents, teachers, administrators, that will actually be a part of that school environment.

“We’ll be asking them to do several things. One, what will be the new school mascot of that particular institution? What will be the school colors? What will be the name of that new middle school? A lot of decisions yet to be made. We look forward to engaging our community in that decision making process,” Muri added.

On the subject of Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP results, discussed at the June 11 board meeting, Muri said MAP is an assessment tool ECISD uses to monitor the academic growth of students.

“We use the STAAR test and the end of course exam to give us proficiency levels, but we use the MAP to tell us growth. The MAP results this year indicated that we are growing in quite a few areas … It also presented opportunities for continued work and so the wonderful thing about these data elements is that it tells us where we need to focus our attention.

“It helps us diagnose challenges that we face organizationally. Perhaps those challenges are within a particular grade level, or content area, or maybe even the school but it also shows those areas in which we have great strength. We use the MAP data to really inform the decisions that we make as an organization, so we’ll spend the summer unpacking and analyzing those data and then using that to inform the decisions that we make as a school system and as individual schools as we enter the new year,” Muri said.

MAP is also an indicator to help the district anticipate what it might see from STAAR results.

“We also are dealing with a different assessment, so we know that some elements of this assessment have been challenging for students. We also know that we’ve had some struggles in a variety of areas. We will also see some successes as well. I think we may see a mixed bag of results as the state releases those on Friday of this week,” Muri said.