OISD earns ‘A’ rating from Texas Education Agency

Olney Independent School district earned an overall ranking of A, or 90 points out of 100, for the 2020-21 school year in the Texas Education Agency’s first “A-F Accountability Ratings” since 2019. Olney High School and Olney Junior High School earned overall A ratings, the same as their 2019 score. Olney Elementary School earned a B rating, also the same as its last ranking in 2019.

OISD Superintendent Dr. Greg Roach said he was “very thankful and humbled by the efforts of our instructional and support staff and the support our district receives from the entire community.”

The rankings of 1,195 districts and 8,451 Texas campuses were the first to be issued since 2019 because of a COVID-related pause, the agency said. TEA saw “promising signs of progress in Texas’s efforts to catch students up academically,” according to the agency’s statement. The TEA’s Overall rating measures how much students are learning in each grade and whether or not they are ready for the next grade. It also shows how well a school or district prepares its students for success after high school in college, the workforce, or the military, the agency said.

An “A” is considered “exemplary performance,” and is earned when a district or school “serves most students well, encouraging high academic achievement and/ or appropriate academic growth for almost all students,” the agency said. Only 33 percent of Texas school districts earned an overall ‘A’ grade, up from 25 percent in 2019, the data shows.

TEA bases the overall district and school grades on performance in three key areas: Student Achievement, or how much better students are doing than last year; School Progress, or how students performed relative to peers in similar schools, and Closing the Gap, or whether performance gaps exist among different groups of students.

Olney High School received grades of A, or 92, for Student Achievement; A, or 91, for School Progress; and B, or 87, for Closing the Gap.

Olney Junior High School received a B grade, or 89, in Student Achievement; an A grade, or 91, in School Progress and an A grade, or 98, in Closing the Gap.

Olney Elementary School scored a C, or 79, in Student Achievement; an A, or 90, in School Progress; and a C, or 78, in Closing the Gap. OISD has an enrollment of 705 students, 56.3 percent of whom are economically disadvantaged, 15 percent are in special education and 5.8 percent of whom are emergent bilingual/English learners, the TEA report showed.