LONE TREE

The pandemic years did a number on education. Students nationwide experienced learning disruptions that negatively affected test scores, especially in math, and the Nation’s Report Card published in January showed Iowa students are still scoring lower than those tested before the pandemic, although recovery is evident.

What’s interesting about Lone Tree Elementary is that students were earning low scores in math and English-Language Arts even before COVID crashed the system. In 2019, the school was given Priority status on its state report card – the lowest ranking possible – for math proficiency levels at 56.52% and ELA at 58.7%, among other factors.

But the school is making a comeback.

Preliminary numbers released from the Iowa Statewide Assessment of Student Progress (ISASP) administered this spring show 91.8% of elementary students proficient in math and 84% proficient in English-Language Arts.

That’s an incredible improvement over 2019, and one you could perhaps see coming. Although the school languished with low test scores through 2022, in 2023 scores rose: Lone Tree Elementary received an Acceptable rating with proficiency rates of 82.11% in math and 71.58% in ELA. Last year, in 2024, the school was rated High Performing – the second-highest rating – with 85.11% math proficiency and 79.79% ELA proficiency.

What changed?

“We adopted a new math program three years ago,” Elementary Principal Amber Jacque says, and “we’re very rigid on the process and instruction that our teachers do on a daily basis. We have it laid out very specifically, what they teach, how many minutes, the feedback they give to students, what they grade, what they put in the grade book, how we re-teach and assess.”

Teachers stay on top of the data they gather from tests, scrutinizing what students are missing and going back to cover material not grasped the first time around.

“In the area of math, we feel it’s a little more clear as to why the gains are so significant, and we do attribute that to our math curriculum that we adopted, and we hope that stays consistent,” Jacque says.

Things are murkier in ELA, she explains, as literacy testing includes both reading comprehension and writing. At present, the school’s writing program is its strength.

“One of the things that we do consistently across all grade levels, starting in kindergarten, is we teach the same writing program, the same strategies for writing,” Jacque says. “We use the same three color highlighters in every single grade level, the same T-charts, the same way we brainstorm. And then each year what it does is just builds up to a higher expectation by the time you get to fifth grade.”

In the classroom, teachers use the same rubric to evaluate student writing as the ISASP does, so students are familiar with what is expected on state test day.

Reading comprehension is an area the school is working to strengthen. The ISASP measures this by looking at how much students can read in one minute, and “not everybody’s a fast reader.” But teachers have found that if students don’t master phonics by the end of second grade, they continue to struggle with reading comprehension going forward.

“So this year we adopted a phonics program,” Jacque says. “Grades kindergarten, first and second all do the same program, teaching the sounds, putting letters together to make words, breaking words apart. It’s very systematic and builds on each other. So we’re hoping that will be a nice piece to add, so that our kids, by the time they get to second grade, they’re fluent readers and we can just focus on comprehension.”

Curricula are one of the changes Lone Tree Elementary has made to improve student learning, but there are others that, although broader, are also important.

One is attendance. “Obviously, if you’re not at school, you can’t learn. So we have really focused on that,” Jacque says. In 2024, 13% of students were chronically absent – that is, they missed more than 10% of school days. This year, that number is closer to 1%, Jacque says.

Another is small class sizes for kindergarten, first, and second grades. “We asked the board to allow us to have two sections in grades K-2, no matter what, within reason . . . so that we can maximize all of the foundational learning that we need to.”

Using the earliest hours of the day, when students are most fresh and focused, for instruction in primary subjects like math and ELA is another change the elementary school has made.

“We sort of analyzed our barriers,” Jacque says, and having art and music classes first thing may have been one of them. Now, “we maximize the entire morning for literacy and math.”

And finally, the school doesn’t get distracted.

“They don’t really refer to me as a fun-hater as much anymore,” Jacque says, but she’s serious about sticking to the daily schedule and not allowing interruptions. “School can still be fun and you can do fun things, but you really have to capture and secure that learning time. I mean, we only have 163 days this year.”