Intervention ongoing to ensure third-grade students aren’t held back

With the retention component of the Alabama Literacy Act taking effect this school year, 29 third-grade students throughout Vestavia Hills City Schools missed the cut for advancing to fourth grade on the reading portion of the Alabama Comprehensive Assessment Program during their second grade year, said Aimee Rainey, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning.

While students will test again this spring, and whether or not they are held back depends on those scores, the school system has identified who is at risk and is working to provide intervention and help to ensure they are able to make the cut in 2022, Rainey told the Vestavia Hills Board of Education at its Oct. 25 meeting.

Every student in grades two through eight takes the ACAP, Rainey said, and the Alabama Literacy Act calls for students in third grade who do not meet a set score on the reading portion to be held back instead of advancing to fourth grade. Rainey said there are other avenues for promotion, and the system is working on helping those children improve their reading skills.

Rainey told the board that as a whole, Vestavia students performed better than state average on the ACAP.

Also at the meeting, the board heard from Superintendent Todd Freeman, who informed the board the school system had, as of Sept. 30, increased their reserve fund to one month’s operating balance as required by the state, following a yearlong effort to do so, as the fund had dipped below that mark due to the major capital investments made in the past several years, including the purchase of both the old Berry High School and Gresham Elementary School, along with major improvements at the Berry campus, which is now Pizitz Middle School. Those moves were made, Freeman said, in order to improve the system’s capacity following a 13% growth in students from 2010-16.

In other busines, the board approved renewing a line of credit and a roughly $4,800 bid from Wright Equipment for strength and conditioning equipment.