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Students score lower after leaving Canfield, Springfield, Columbiana districts
By ROBERT CONNELLY
CANFIELD
Canfield schools had the highest point differential in testing for students who leave the district versus staying, a recent study revealed.
However, organizers of the study cautioned that due to a small sample size, those numbers could have fluctuated with a few students.
The open-enrollment study was conducted by Mahoning County Educational Service Center Superintendent Ron Iarussi, also the superintendent of the county Career and Technical Center, and Karen Larwin, assistant professor of educational foundations, research, technology and leadership in Youngstown State University’s Beeghly College of Education.
Three school districts showed lower achievement scores for students who left their home districts to open-enroll in another district, Larwin noted. Those are the Canfield school district, a 10.5 achievement score decrease; Columbiana Exempted Village School District, about an 8-point decrease; and Springfield schools, about a 6-point decrease.
“It’s youngsters [who] are working possibly at proficient compared to advanced,” summarized Alex Geordan, superintendent of Canfield schools. “So youngsters [who] are staying here at an average are working at an advanced rate compared to those [who] are leaving at a proficient rate.”
Don Mook, Columbiana schools superintendent, had similar sentiments. “I think test scores year in and year out show us that we are doing the right thing in our district. Those test scores are good data to show where you can improve.”
Iarussi and Larwin noted that those school districts with students who scored lower after leaving were all high-achieving districts. “When you talk about the significance of the difference in the results, it’s really not that much of a significance. In other words, one or two kids could change the entire average,” Iarussi said. “The results show that in some of our districts that are considered high-achieving, when those kids leave, those averages are somewhat less.”
Larwin was quick to say that this isn’t taking away from those schools. District report cards, released last September, displayed a “B” for Columbiana and Springfield and an “A” for Canfield in the performance index, the measure of student performance on the Ohio Graduation Test and Ohio Achievement Assessment.
“When you have such a small sample leaving a good district, that in and of itself is an anomaly,” Larwin said of Canfield. “There’s something going on there, but the sample is so small it’s not going to be representative. It’s not going to help us predict anything, and there’s probably changing reasons all the time.”
“Open enrollment is a really strange animal sometimes. People choose to go other places for all sorts of reasons,” Mook said. “We know that we have people move into our community and choose [a district] because of an athletic program, coach, Little League — there’s a lot of reasons.”
Iarussi and Geordan listed changing family situations, athletics and proximity to a different school as some reasons they have been told kids leave a district for another through open enrollment.
“The very interesting number that I’m looking” for “is at what point do the kids leave us? I don’t have that data in place yet,” Geordan said. There’s a difference between a student leaving after sixth grade “compared to those [who] leave us in kindergarten and we haven’t been able to reach them at all, so I need to find that out and I want to find that out,” he said.
Iarussi and Larwin’s study, which took in data from 2004 to 2014, found that students who come into a district through open enrollment do not negatively impact the district’s academics. While Columbiana has open enrollment, Springfield and Canfield do not. Three other school districts in Mahoning County also don’t have open enrollment: Boardman, Campbell and Poland.