Staff Report

The Lindbergh and Mehlville school districts recently announced preliminary student test score data for 2009.

Lindbergh’s proficiency scores in the 2009 Missouri Assessment Program, or MAP, exceeded Missouri’s target scores by roughly 20 percentage points, according to a Lindbergh School District news release.

While Missouri’s adequate yearly progress, or AYP, targets are 59.2 percent proficient for communication arts and 54.1 percent proficient for math, 70.2 percent of Lindbergh students were proficient or advanced in communication arts, and 72.5 percent were proficient or advanced on the math part of the MAP test.

Mehlville also saw math proficiency scores exceed the state AYP target, with 59.4 percent of district students performing at proficient or advanced levels. The district’s communication arts score came in about 1.5 percentage points below the state AYP, with 57.7 percent of students performing at proficient or advanced levels.

The state average proficient or advanced scores are 51.2 percent for communication arts and 47.6 percent for math.

However, with the guidelines of the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, neither Lindbergh nor Mehlville met AYP for 2009.

The goal of NCLB is to have 100 percent of U.S. students perform at the proficient or advanced levels on state tests by 2014.

Schools, therefore, must meet an annually increasing performance target in communication arts and math to achieve AYP.

For a Missouri school district to meet AYP, MAP test performance targets must be met by all of the district’s student subgroups. Both Lindbergh and Mehlville have eight subgroups — All Students, Asian/Pacific Islander, Black, Hispanic, White, Students with an Individualized Education Program, Students Receiving Free or Reduced Price Lunches and Stu-dents with Limited English Proficiency.

If one subgroup falls short of meeting the NCLB-mandated AYP target, a district does not meet AYP for that year.

Five of the eight subgroups in Lindbergh met AYP goals for communication arts, and six of the eight subgroups met AYP goals for math.

In Mehlville, five of the eight subgroups met AYP goals for communication arts, while four of the eight subgroups met AYP goals for math.

However, both districts this year boasted schools where overall MAP test scores ranked them among the top 10 in the state.

In addition, the districts’ overall MAP performance continues to exceed standards set by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, according to news releases from each district.

The districts’ 2008-2009 composite ACT scores also exceeded the state average.

While the state average composite ACT score remained unchanged at 21.6, Lindbergh High School’s composite score increased for the fifth consecutive year, to 23.7, the highest in the district’s history, according to the Lindbergh news release.

The school’s composite score for the previous school year was 23.5.

In addition, Lindbergh High School sophomore Kevin Bock achieved a perfect score — 36 — on the ACT in April.

Mehlville and Oakville high schools’ composite ACT scores were 21.2 and 22.6 respectively, according to the Mehlville news release. The average of the two schools’ composite scores is 22.0, which is 0.5 higher than the schools’ average from 2008 and 0.4 higher than the state average.