Moran Prairie, Rosalia honored

The entrance to Rosalia High School also leads to the middle school and the elementary school.

The rural Whitman County district, nestled among the wheat fields 30 miles south of Spokane, is a place where farming activities have historically driven school schedules, and teachers can likely tell you how each of the 270 students in grades kindergarten through 12 performed on a math test last week.

“Our smallness in size allows us to be different,” said Doug LaMunyan, a teacher who makes up the entire math department in the high school. “I know the name of every student, and that’s something that’s not possible in larger schools.”

It may be small, but according to the federal government, Rosalia is making big gains in student performance.

The district, along with Spokane’s Moran Prairie Elementary, was named a Blue Ribbon school by the U.S. Department of Education last week, a distinction that will go to only five other Washington state schools and some 250 nationwide.

The award is given mostly for outstanding improvements on state standardized tests required under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. In Washington that test is the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, or WASL.

“It’s a pretty prestigious award,” said Eric Earling, a Seattle-based regional spokesman for the federal Department of Education.

Earling said he will begin visiting the seven Washington Blue Ribbon schools next month, and a principal and teacher from each school will travel to Washington, D.C., in November for a special ceremony with U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.

“This is a wonderful honor for our students and staff,” said Matt Handelman, the principal at Moran Prairie. “It is clearly reflective of the incredibly hard work and focus of our teachers and staff over the last several years.”

Schools are nominated based on one of two criteria, graded over a three-year period.

The first category includes schools with at least 40 percent of their students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds who improve scores dramatically on the state tests.

The second category is for schools whose students, regardless of their background, perform in the top 10 percent of their state. Private schools nominated must perform in the top 10 percent nationwide.

Rosalia was nominated under the first category, while Moran Prairie fell under the second.

Out of the nearly 2,000 public schools in the state, Moran ranked fourth for its 2005 WASL math score, sixth for reading and ninth for writing, district officials said. The school has a low poverty rate, with 10 percent qualifying for free or reduced-price lunches.

The story is different in the rural Rosalia district, where over the years the percentage of students taking free lunch has ranged from 40 percent to 60 percent.

“There is a very strong correlation between WASL performance and poverty,” said Rosalia Superintendent Thomas Crowley. “The higher the poverty the lower your test scores are likely to be, with very few exceptions.”

In 2004-05, 100 percent of Rosalia fourth-graders met standard on the WASL in reading, and 85 percent met standard in math. Rosalia has about 20 students in the fourth grade.

“It’s a nice pat on the back that we’re doing something good for the kids,” said Brian Reid, a fourth-grade teacher. “That we are doing what we are supposed to.”

The award has been given for more than 20 years, but the criteria for nomination have changed over time, specifically with the adoption of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The law set the goal of having every child proficient in reading and writing by 2014. Student progress is measured by each state’s standardized test, such as the WASL.

Eastern Washington schools that have been named Blue Ribbon schools in the past include Colville High School, which won the honor in 1984 and 1989. Gonzaga Prep was given the distinction in 1993; Chewelah’s Jenkins High School in 2005, and most recently Spokane’s Franklin Elementary School in 2004.