When the report cards come out at West Virginia Academy there should be no surprises or arbitrary letters for you to decipher. Our approach to assessments and reporting will be to provide meaningful information designed to provide positive reinforcement. Every child should feel a pat on the back for their hard work and we intend to provide useful information to parents about their child's progress in an uplifting and congratulatory manner.
We at West Virginia Academy feel it is important for parents to be involved with their child's education. Communication between parents and teachers will be expected and will be provided on a consistent basis. Each parent will be aware of the core standards and how your child is progressing with those standards.
So, what are these standards and how will my child meet them at West Virginia Academy?
To understand where these standards came from we need to go back to 1997. In that year Congress formed the National Reading Panel, a group to evaluate existing education research and evidence to determine the best ways to teach a children to read. Their analysis provided valuable information for the education world.
In 2002, the Education Sciences Reform Act established the research arm of the Department of Education called the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). The IES’s mission is to continue the work of the National Reading Panel and evaluate education policy and practice to determine what works and what doesn’t in the classroom. It was during this time, states started creating and adopting their own standards according to their interpretation of the information provided by the IES. This spurred the development of the Common Core State Standards Initiative in 2009. Its goal was to combine all the individual state standards and policies into one cohesive group of standards that could be adopted across the nation. As of 2015 forty-two states, including West Virginia, have adopted these Common Core standards and are implementing them at the local public school level.
West Virginia Academy feels strongly that these core standards can be met for each child with explicit and systematic teaching. We are excited to see your child progress and flourish in these standards at our school.