Getting off the “School Improvement List” is a tricky thing.

But Cedar Valley Elementary School has taken a significant step toward moving off that list with the results from the Measurement of Student Progress — the standardized test for students in third through eighth grade — for this past spring. The results were released by the state Office of the Superintendent for Public Instruction at the end of August.

When Chad Golden, the principal of Cedar Valley, arrived at the school last fall the elementary school of about 300 students was in trouble. Students hadn’t met Adequate Yearly Progress across the board in math, he explained, and students in select groups such as low income had also struggled in math.

As a result, Cedar Valley was in Step Two of AYP, meaning that students had the choice of going to another school.

“You get that feeling of a failing school, which can really be tough to break through,” Golden said. “The biggest challenge for me since I’ve been here is that there’s this perception in Timberlane that there are parents who don’t want to have their children here.”

Before he arrived, students had taken the Washington Assessment of Student Learning for the last time, but this spring they took the new MSP which is shorter and offers more multiple choice questions in an effort to battle what experts dub as “test fatigue” that can make the standardized exams that much more difficult.

“Some of our biggest challenges is the engagement of students outside of school and having the support,” Golden said. “So, that’s what we’ve been working on, trying to conquer that barrier.”

About 54 percent of students at Cedar Valley take advantage of free or reduced price lunches, while 29 percent are in special education classes and 29 percent of students are Hispanic.

With those kinds of demographics, helping students to meet state standards on the annual tests can be tricky, so the first thing to do is figure out a plan as well as find ways to offer youngsters as much support as possible outside of the classroom.

“We have a very strong partnership with Mountain Vineyard,” Golden said. “Anything we ask of them, they support it.”

Volunteers and staff from Mountain Vineyard Christian Fellowship, which is just a few minutes away by car from Cedar Valley, provide one on one tutoring for students.

In addition, Mountain Vineyard offers a kindergarten preparation program for at-risk students the summer before they start school to help improve skills they’ll need when they arrive at Cedar Valley so they won’t start off behind their peers.

Golden said the school also received a grant from Century 21 that allowed them to offer additional support to students in third through sixth grade during summer so students wouldn’t lose too much ground over the summer.

Mountain Vineyard then focused on kindergarten, first and second graders during the summer, he explained, and just three days into the new school year “we’ve already heard that this made a difference.”

There is a team in place at Cedar Valley that has developed a school improvement plan and they are working with the Kent School District’s school improvement officer and its support team to further address specific needs there.

Another strategy they have employed, Golden said, was what he described as an “ele-middle” model where fifth and sixth graders switch classes much like they will when they get to Cedar Heights Middle School so they are better prepared for that transition.

This has also allowed teachers to specialize in particular areas of curriculum like math, which is an area Golden would like to particularly focus on improving this year.

“We have a great staff and they really care about the kids,” Golden said. “Our focus this year is how do we teach to a student need… if we do it effectively then we’ll really see a huge impact on student achievement.”

Something Golden would like to see expanded to math is an incentive program much like the one they have done, with the help of the PTA, to encourage students to read more.

On the last day of school in June, the top 20 students who tallied the most minutes reading got to toss a whipped cream pie in the faces of their teachers, with the student who read the most given the opportunity to cream Golden.

“One of the thing the school improvement team is working on, because the reading incentive worked so well, what can we do for math,” Golden said. “We did a lot of math professional development last year.”

One thing that got a lot of discussion was trying to approach math lessons differently and finding more ways for students to take apart and put numbers back together, to explore math concepts not just through problem solving numbers or words on a page, but also literally hands on with math concepts.

“That’s one of the main things they’re focused on,” Golden said. “Another thing we’ve started this year is discourse. What we’ve found is that if students just listen to the teacher’s approach or thinking, it’s too narrow, so we’re really working on developing that discourse in the classroom, too, as well as teamwork and collaboration where students are working together and learning from one another.”

While it’s great to have made progress with the latest round of standardized tests, Golden said, there is still more work to do.

“I was saying to the staff, ‘It’s great that we met it one year, but, the second year is going to be tougher,’” he said. “You have to make it two years in a row in order to get off the school improvement list.”

The staff at Cedar Valley, Golden explained, will continue to look not just inside the building but outside to get the job done.

“Overall, for us, it really is the partnerships,” he said. “Everyone coming together working on student’s needs.”