Posted: Dec. 30, 2009

Muskego — Nearly all indicators are headed up or are holding steady on the 2009-10 scorecard for Muskego High School.

To measure how the school is doing, teachers and staff developed a scorecard and, just as in baseball, this scorecard keeps track of vital stats. But these stats are not batting averages or runs batted in, they are on student performance on such academic measures as the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam, the ACT college entrance test and the district's own benchmarks. Besides academics, the scorecard has stats on attendance and truancy and on four other kinds of measures of school success.

The idea of looking at a number of factors is like a doctor trying to get an idea of how healthy his patient is, Superintendent Joseph Schroeder said.

A doctor will take vital signs and from those and a host of other indicators will try to get a picture of the health of the patient, he said.

The 2009-10 scorecard measures performance from 2008-09.

Six goals for academics

For academic performance, the high school has six goals. The students have nailed two of them and are within striking distance of two more, based on 2008-09.

Although the WKCE score on math did not hit the goal, it was a record high score for the school, Muskego High School Principal Dennis Bussen said.

The score of 87.1 percent of students working at or above grade level in math has never been achieved, he said. And it is within reach of the goal of 87.9 percent of students at or above grade level in math, he said.

In addition, Bussen pointed out that the school has had three straight years of higher scores on the ACT tests.

Three years ago, the composite school score was 22.8. The 2008-09 average was 23.5, he said, also noting that a larger percentage of Muskego High School students took the ACT test. Normally, that lowers the composite, but it did not, Schroeder said.

Special ed closing gap

Another part of the scorecard keeps stats on reducing the gap between how many special education students are working at grade level and how many are at grade in the student body as a whole as shown by the WKCE testing. The school is well on its way to reducing the gap in math, Bussen said. The percentage shot up 15 percentage points from the 2007-08 to the 2008-09 school year, he said. Special education students rose from 27.8 percent proficient to 42.5 percent in only one year.

Bussen said much of the reason for the progress is that special ed teachers are co-teaching with regular classroom teachers in math.

The scorecard also measures progress in teaching the "whole student" as reflected in attendance rates, truancy and participation in sports and academic and music co-curricular activities.

Truancy was cut almost in half between 2007-08 and 2008-09. The 3.7 percent truancy rate in 2007-08 plummeted to 2 percent last year. That 2 percent beats the school goal and now the school is gunning for the Pewaukee truancy rate of 0.1 percent. Attendance was up slightly at the same time.

Meanwhile, participation in sports rose in 2008-09, but it slipped in academic and music co-curricular activities. School officials like to see participation in activities outside of classes because it indicates involvement with school and gives the opportunity for a more rounded high school experience.

Sports participation stood at 47.5 percent, within striking distance of the goal of 51.8 percent. Participation in academic co-curriculars stood at 30.3 percent. The goal is 37.8 percent. Finally, participation in music co-curriculars was 12.7 percent. The goal is 18.5 percent.