Wow.

At our faculty meeting today our principal announced that a. if we go along with the professional development plan set for us this year that the district has agreed to pay for us to get college credits that count towards our lane changes (and therefore pay scale) and b. we passed AYP. For those of you not embroiled in the acronym hell that is public education, AYP stands for "Annual Yearly Progress." That means that we met "No Child Left Behind" (aka. NCLB) standards and we are therefor not in trouble as a school.
This is kind of a miracle seeing as we are about 50% Hispanic and over 50% Economically Disadvantaged (the two populations most likely to score lowest on standardized exams in our area) AND we have a sizeable LEP (Limited English Proficiency a.k.a. ESL) and Special Ed population. We didn't meet AYP last year in Math, which failed our school. Stupid math.... grumble, grumble, grumble...
We almost didn't pass this year. Apparently English Language Arts didn't meet the required pass rate for Hispanics and Economically Disadvantaged (go fig), BUT we did pass based on improvement (if you don't pass based on percentage, you can still pass if you show a 10% improvement in scores). Our LEP kids went from a 38% pass rate to a 65% pass rate. Ahem. Did you catch that? 65% of our LEP kids passed. Guess who taught English to those kids...
Yours Truly.
Obviously I'm not responsible for it all- I work with a highly qualified professional team, all of whom make a tremendous difference in these kids lives... but I am the one who actually taught them language arts, so I'm tooting my own horn on this. It's nice, every once in a while to hear that you are doing your job right, and that your boss is taking notice of that. It's even nicer when your boss's bosses are there to hear that you are doing your job right, as well as the higher ups from your "rival" school.
:D