Dear John,

Kim Petrina, our district’s Director of Communications, indicated that you were looking to write an article on how the Ohio Department of Education rated our school district through their report card. You certainly can go on to ODE’s website or wade through cleveland.com to see those grades. I recognize that you’re “doing your job” and I hope that you can appreciate that I need to do mine. The conversation about this needs to change.

Our response is this…we reject their accountability system. We recognize that current Ohio Law requires the Department of Education to create these grades and that we’re required to administer the assessments to our children and provide the data that the ODE requires. Nevertheless, we reject the system because it runs counter to our locally created agenda. If you go to our Facebook page and scroll down you will see a recent Board Resolution that was passed. It serves as our response to any question asked about Ohio’s current accountability system and how we performed within it.

We believe that the student achievement metric is but one component within a system that should be meant to define a much larger and more important metric–Student Success. While the Ohio General Assembly is obsessed with test scores, the Olmsted Falls City School District is not and we have chosen to pursue another path. We are encouraging other school districts to join us on that journey and believe that the more that do, the higher probability that sanity will win the day. You can have a system of school reporting that isn’t test score based and one that does not put one district against another as if it is some sort of “space race.”  It may be the road less traveled, but it is nonetheless our chosen road and we’re not looking back.

Thanks for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,
Jim