The State of Arizona released its letter grades for the 2018-19 school year, nearly four months into the current year. Fortunately, the administrative team of the district has had some time to review data prior to the grade release and began moving forward with plans to adjust instruction and learning for the current school year. Many of these efforts began in July, and will continue to be implemented throughout this school year.

Congratulations are in order for Camp Mohave Elementary School, who maintained a grade of “B” for the 2018-2019 school year.  “In order to improve, the school altered its instructional delivery for special education and used technology based programs to fill in gaps for all of our students’ learning” shared Rick Cottrell, Administrative Principal at Camp Mohave. “In addition, Camp Mohave used these programs to increase the instructional academic rigor to the level of the AZMerit test” continued Cottrell.

Academic Principal John Laurent added: “To continue the march toward an A, this year the school added AVID, which is helping our students college and career preparedness. The first steps to making this possible is to help the students with organization, teach the kids to use the skills needed to be successful, increase the rigor of our thinking and understanding, and increase the use of instructional best practices”.

Mohave Valley Jr. High’s grade dropped to a D. Noted Administrative Principal Charlotte Hansen: “Despite the junior high’s positive implementation of strong school wide programs-such as AVID-the letter grade dropped, as did the grades of most public junior highs”.   In order to mitigate an upward trend, the school has implemented the following strategies: 

  • Reassess all students based on AZ State Power Standards and reallocate students to provide remediation and enrichment during a daily intervention period.
  • Academic focus on Power Standards using our adopted curriculum and additional academic resources
  • Targeted students are required to attend after school tutoring and transportation is provided.
  • Made several teacher reassignments.

“We will continue to look for additional research-based strategies and resources to improve our 2020 results” added new Academic Principal Hayley Moss.

“While no one is happy with the current junior high letter grade, the district has operated under the assumption that we will not rest until all our schools receive the “A” grade, and therefore we have been continually are looking for ways to improve our teaching and learning long before the letter grades came out” noted Superintendent Whitney Crow. “This “D”, while a speed bump in the road to continuous improvement, will not and cannot define us and the hard work we’ve leveraged in the past, and will continue to leverage in the future.”

The Arizona Department of Education has not developed a formula to assign grades to primary schools that do not take part in state testing, and therefore Fort Mojave Elementary has not been assigned a letter grade. However, the district has chosen to use Camp Mohave’s letter grade for Fort Mojave in the absence of being assigned their own.