Pima Butte ranked as top school in county

While the number of 2010 state excelling schools decreased by 31 percent, Maricopa Unified School District’s Pima Butte Elementary saw its stock rise, becoming the only excelling school in the county.

“It is a ranking that we are very proud of,” said Pima Butte Principal Korrin Ledbetter.

The excelling nameplate is the highest ranking in the state’s AZ Learns system, which evaluates school performance based on AIMS scores, measures of academic progress, graduation/dropout rates, and English language learner success rates.

Because AZ Learns is a compensatory evaluation system, substandard performance on one measure can be offset by superior performance on another.

The 2010 labels show the number of excelling schools across the state decreasing from 394 in 2009 to 271. The number of highly performing schools also went down to 240, eight fewer schools than last year.

Ledbetter could not attribute the cause for Pima Butte’s success to one particular item, but, instead, said it was more a myriad of other factors leading to the great achievement for the school.

“I wish we had a simple answer to the success,” she said.

Pima Butte first opened in Maricopa for the 2005-2006 school year and has constantly attained the highest scores of all MUSD elementary schools. One of the keys to this success, provided by the school’s principal, is the stability of the staff.

“Each of the four years I have been here we have seen one person leave or come on board each year,” she said.

Ledbetter added that the majority of staffing changes were due to changes in enrollment and class sizes, not to teachers leaving the district. “The majority of staff have been here since day one,” she added.

Staff continuity at the school has helped to create an atmosphere that encourages sharing of teaching techniques, security and familiarity.

“While we have many different teaching styles, we all focus on the same goal:  to be an excelling school,” Ledbetter said, adding that to achieve that goal the teachers at Pima Butte bring a passion to the classroom and teach students from the heart.

It is an infectious attitude that makes students want to learn and be in school. Students then take this attitude home, and the parents become infected and want to be more involved in their child’s education, she explained.

Ledbetter, who is serving her first year as principal at Pima Butte after working at the school the past three years, would not compare the level of parental support in Pima Butte to other schools in the district but did say, compared to other schools she has worked for, the level of support was as high, if not higher.

Through that support teachers in the school are able to gain access to additional materials to expand the teaching curriculum and garner support for field trips and other teaching incentives.

“Parents have really helped us to succeed,” she said.

One of the areas enhanced this year by the Pima Butte teachers’ curriculum extension was AIMS math testing.

This year the state implemented more difficult math testing which led to lower scores across Arizona. In grades 3-8 at the state level, the percentage of students passing the math portion ranged from 56 percent to 64 percent – a drop from the 2008-2009 school year when 63 percent to 74 percent of students passed math.

At Pima Butte the percentage of students passing math climbed from 84 percent overall in 2009 to 88.4 percent overall in 2010. It was the only elementary school in the district to show an overall improvement in math, with the worst performing school in the district having a K-5 combined passing percentage of 33.5 percent.

The success in math, according to Ledbetter, is evidence of the teachers working hard to implement supplementary materials to support the educational standards of the state.

“As a district you try to best match up the textbooks you purchase with the state’s standards, but all of those standards do not always match,” she said. “The district will provide some supplementary materials to fill the holes, but it is ultimately a teacher’s decision to bring in additional materials.”

At Pima Butte and in the district, Ledbetter said, teachers were made aware of the changes in state standards two years ago and worked hard to ensure there wasn’t a drop in student performance.

While Pima Butte ranked as excelling, seven of the district’s other schools, Butterfield Elementary, Desert Wind Middle School, Maricopa Elementary, Saddleback, Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa Elementary Schools were rated as performing plus by AZ Learns. Maricopa High School was rated as performing, due in part to a low graduation rate.

The state rates schools using six categories: excelling, highly performing, performing plus, performing, underperforming and failing.

However, this will be the last year parents will see the confusing ranking system; next year the state will roll out letter grades of A, B, C, D and F to rate performance.

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