Superintendent's Message
Dr. Lisa Coons, Superintendent of Public Instruction
Dear Colleagues,
I am so honored to share the results of our hard work this week. On Tuesday, the Governor held a press conference and shared where we started with ALL In VA a year ago, where we are today, and where we need to go in the years ahead. Within the data snapshot on Tuesday, we discussed the hard work school divisions have been doing with high-intensity tutoring, and how you have extended time before and after school, redesigned summer programming, started school early, and participated in the free statewide resources- Zearn, Lexia and Ignite. Over 119 school divisions have signed up to use one or more of the state's free personalized resources in 2024-2025.
During the review of where we are, we shared the current data trends:
Statewide K-12 Chronic Absenteeism Reduction
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Virginia's K-12 schools saw a 16% reduction in students who were chronically absent last year. The rate of chronic absenteeism fell to 16.1% in 2023-2024 from 19.3% in 2022-2023.
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40,974 fewer students were chronically absent in 2023-2024 than in 2022-2023.
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All K-12 students had 1,276,522 fewer absent days, which resulted in an increase of 8,935,654hours of instruction.
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Reinforcing the importance of regular school attendance, chronically absent students performed 19 percentage points below their peers in reading and 26 percentage points below in math.
Statewide Grades 3-8 Reading SOL Results
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70% of school divisions showed student improvement in Reading SOL scores (93 school divisions)
Statewide Grades 3-8 Math SOL Results
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75% of school divisions showed student improvement in Math SOL scores (99 school divisions)
Statewide High School SOL Results
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In math, high school students raised their SOL pass results to 84% in 2023-2024 from 81% in 2022-2023, seeing increased pass rates on all 3 high school math end-of-course exams.
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In reading, high school students showed a slight decrease in SOL results with 84% of students passing in 2023-2024 versus 85% passing in 2022-2023.
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In science, high school students showed slight improvement in their SOL results rising to 71% in 2023-2024 from 70% in 2022-2023.
Most importantly, our students who were hit the hardest have shown the fastest gains. Economically disadvantaged students doubled the rate of growth of all students post-pandemic in reading growth; English learners' rate of growth in reading was more than 6 times the rate of growth of all students in post pandemic reading growth; and students with disabilities' rate of growth in math was 1.2 times the rate of growth of all students in math.
Each of us should take a moment to celebrate this important work and know that our efforts are starting to pay off for our students. However, we must continue the hard work. We have two additional years of ALL In funding, and we should continue our efforts to ensure the Virginia Literacy Act implementation accelerates our students' reading performance, continue to support our students in mathematics, and ensure our student groups hardest hit by COVID 19 school closures continue to recover their learning loss.
As we took a progress check on Tuesday, we saw our hard work is paying off for our students, and we also saw that we have to dig in and continue the course -provide strong literacy and math instruction grounded in our new academic standards, support students with high-intensity tutoring and extended time, stress the importance of regular daily attendance, and take advantage of our free resources in math with Zearn, and literacy with Ignite and Lexia.
Thank you for all you do every day. It is making a difference.
Best,
Lisa
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