On February 27, over 50 parents, educators, city officials and concerned residents met in Greenbelt Elementary School’s (GES) gymnasium to learn about why the school has been designated as an Additional Targeted Support and Improvement (ATSI) School, and the work that’s needed to raise its performance.
Assistant Principal Tynetta Dempsey, stepping in for Principal Joel Nelson who was sick that day, began by thanking everyone for coming in such high numbers. Monica Blundell – the school testing coordinator, data coach and school improvement liaison – then walked the attendees through how the state evaluates schools.
School Report Card
Every year, Maryland’s Department of Education evaluates schools in a School Report Card, which is broken into four accountability data categories: Academic Achievement, Academic Progress, Progress in Achieving English Language Proficiency, and School Quality and Student Success. Based on those categories, every public school in the state is rated from five stars to one star. GES has been rated as a three-star school since 2023, although it was previously four stars. Since the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, the state also designates a school as needing ATSI every three years when one or more of the school’s student groups performs in the lowest 5 percent of Title I schools (schools that receive extra funding to help students from low-income families) in the state. GES currently performs considerably worse, particularly with its Students with Disabilities (SWD); whereas the school as a whole scored 19.4 percent proficient in math and 41.2 percent in English and Language Arts (ELA) in 2024, SWD students only scored 4 and 10.7 percent proficient, respectively.
Chronic Absences
An additional pain point for GES metrics is the amount of its student population who are Chronically Absent by missing more than 18 days of school, or more than two days of a school month on average. Although less than 20 percent of GES students were chronically absent prior to the pandemic, since the school report cards resumed publishing in 2022, roughly 30 percent of its students have been chronically absent.
Details Displayed
The details of the school report card were shared in a Gallery Walk of the gymnasium, where each section of the state’s evaluation for the school was printed out on poster-sized pages. Attendees took turns looking at the historical trends and student demographics – adding their own thoughts on a second poster for Noticings and Wonderings. General questions and thoughts attendees had were also collected in a Parking Lot section. Although all of these metrics can be found on the State Department of Education’s website, report-card.msde.maryland.gov, this helped those assembled to collectively process the data.
This close review clarified that the areas where GES is struggling are not new. In fact, the low academic achievement scores for its SWD demographic in 2024 are actually a minor improvement over their scores in 2023, which was itself a minor improvement from 2022 when SWD students scored 0 percent proficient in math and 4 percent proficient in ELA. Handouts made by the GES PTA also pointed out that SWD students are not the only demographics being underserved; in the 2024 School Report Card, only 8.1 percent of Black and African American students and 9.5 percent of Hispanic and Latino students are proficient in math.
Other Issues
The decline in overall school performance also seems to correlate with the increase of students who are economically disadvantaged – from less than a quarter of the total student population in 2020 to over half in 2024. The impact of socioeconomic status on education has been a major focus of educational research for years, as poverty seems to significantly impact activities like testing. Since GES was designated as a Title I school, it has received additional support from Prince George’s County, but it is clear that the students and their families need support too.
Addressing Deficiencies
Fortunately, similar to GES’ Title I status, its designation as an ATSI school allows it to receive additional funding to address its deficiencies. GES has after-school programs for its SWD students on Tuesdays and Wednesdays to provide additional academic support. To address chronic absenteeism, the school is also taking proactive measures to address a stu-dent’s missed days with their parent or guardian before their attendance crosses that threshold. As long as the school continues to make improvements without losing ground in any of the other report card indicators, the school will continue to receive that additional support.
Assistant Principal Dempsey emphasized that the underlying issues are much greater than the school can resolve on its own. “The teacher shortage is real,” she noted, explaining that the comparatively low salary and benefits of an educator are attracting fewer people to become public school teachers. Special Education aides in particular are in short supply as they only receive $15 dollars an hour (without benefits) in Prince George’s County. Similarly, transportation is a major factor in children missing class. The great distance between different bus stops, some over a mile apart, forces some elementary students to walk a significant distance from their house to the nearest bus stop in order to have a ride to school. A two-hour delay due to inclement weather also puts parents in a tough position making sure their children get to class at 10 a.m. even while their job starts at 9 a.m. Dempsey implored anyone who was willing and able to sign up as a Special Education aide or school bus driver.
Extra Help Needed
A representative of the PTA spoke up, emphasizing that the group is able to provide help where it is needed, but that the school needs to ask the PTA for that help, and inform them of what is needed. Although many of the issues affecting GES are longstanding, some parents have only become aware of the school’s shortcomings in the last month. Blundell rec-ognized that the information gap is something that GES is working to correct, which is why it held this event. To further the discussion, the school will be collecting the questions and concerns put down by members during the Gallery Walk to respond to them in a future email for the families of GES students. The school’s evaluation survey also asked parents who were interested to join the School Performance Team.
