Kent County High School has drawn the attention of two magazines — one national that is mostly admiring, and one regional that gives it the worst grade of any on the mid-Shore.
Education Week focuses on the use of whiteboard on teaching across the nation and cites KCHS as a good example of how it works.
“Students hop out of their seats” to complete geometry lessons on the interactive whiteboard in one ninth grade class, according to this magazine.
Teachers at KCHS are quoted as saying these devices, which have replaced the traditional blackboards, have dramatically enhanced their teaching and improved students’ engagement even with the most tedious subjects.
The way it works: students in a 9th grade biology class at KCHS use a whiteboard to simulate DNA replicating. Culinary arts students touch an interactive map on the board to learn about foods of the world.
Education week says nearly 100 teachers at Kent County schools have volunteered to use the whiteboard, which the magazine reports has cost the district almost half a million dollars in equipment and training to date.
Meantime, What’s Up Eastern Shore in the latest issue has a public high school report card that shows KCHS ranking ninth – at the tail end of its neighboring high schools — in something called High School Assessments. These are tests given students in four areas: algebra, biology, government, English.
After finishing each of these courses, all students take the corresponding assessments. They must achieve a total score of 1,602 in all four subjects to meet graduation requirements. The HSA status in the magazine’s report card refers to the pass rate for all students in each grade.
Kent County High School has the lowest graduation rate, 80.50 percent, of any of the nine schools in the comparison.
It’s HSA status for grade 12 is up near the top at 99.4. But there is a steep falloff in the HAS status for grades 10 and 11 – a bigger decline by far than any other school on the mid-Shore.
It suffers badly by comparison with Queen Anne’s County High School.
QACHS has a graduation rate of 91.21 – nearly 11 points higher than KCHS, and the highest of any of the nine schools.
The HSA test for Queen Anne’s shows a score of 100 for the 12th grade – to 99.4 for Kent. The score is 92.8 for Queen Anne’s 11th grade – to 77.9 for Kent’s. And it is 85.7 for Queen Anne’s 10th grade – to 71.4 for Kent’s.
What’s Up Eastern Shore said it did not include SAT scores in its overview because they are designed to evaluate scholastic aptitude of individual students. The HAS assessment is more of a gauge of the educational effectiveness of the school.
Write a Letter to the Editor on this Article
We encourage readers to offer their point of view on this article by submitting the following form. Editing is sometimes necessary and is done at the discretion of the editorial staff.