Hamilton Schools: Successes to be celebrated despite ‘D’ on state report card

Credit: DaytonDailyNews

Officials at one of Butler County’s largest school systems — the 10,000-student Hamilton City Schools — weren’t pleased with their overall grade of D in the state’s latest annual report cards.

For the first time in six years, the Ohio Department of Education has returned to using the traditional A-F grades as part of the state’s annual measurement of its 613 public school systems.

Locally, half of the 10 Butler County school districts received Bs.

Among those that didn’t were the three large city districts in the county: Fairfield City Schools earned an overall grade of C; and Hamilton and Middletown school districts received Ds.

Hamilton Schools Superintendent Larry Knapp echoed several other area district leaders who sharply criticized the annual report cards as providing only a limited picture on school system’s quality.

“Obviously we are not satisfied with our recent indicators on the state report card. As many other educational leaders have pointed out, the broadly based indicators of the report card are misleading and do not show our district’s recent progress on individual state testing results,” said Knapp, who added students “demonstrated significant improvement in 16 of 21 state tested areas from this past spring testing.”

Hamilton Schools also registered the lowest, four-year graduation rate in Butler County at 77.2 percent — earning an F in that category.

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