Spring 2014 ISTEP+ testing results were released to the media Monday. Results for the Wawasee Community School Corp. were encouraging, noted Joy Goshert, director of instruction and curriculum for the school corporation.

As a corporation, Wawasee was above 70 percent passing English/language arts in grades five through eight and grades three and four exceeded 80 percent. For math, grades three, four and eight were 75 percent or better and grades five through seven exceeded 80 percent.

Corporation wide, the percentage of students passing both math and English/language arts ranged from 67 percent of sixth-graders to 74.4 percent of third-graders.

“As a district, we were up from our last spring’s results in all grades for English/language arts except in grade four where we had a 4 percent drop,” Goshert said. “We had large gains in grade five and grade seven where we experienced some large drops the previous spring during the many testing interruptions.”

Math had drops compared to 2013 in grades three and four of the percentage of students passing, but the other grades either had an increase or stayed even. Grade five had 88.4 percent of students passing math in the spring of 2014, while 80.8 percent of fourth-graders passed the English/language arts portion.

Breaking the numbers down by each school, 89.3 percent of Milford third-graders passed English/language arts, while only 62.8 percent of Wawasee Middle School eighth-graders passed. For math, 91.9 percent of Milford fifth-graders passed, while 65.8 percent of eighth-graders at WMS passed.

But WMS, a priority school because of low ISTEP+ results in 2013, made significant gains in 2014. “Principal Mishler and her staff have been working hard this past year, and that hard work is paying off and is impacting student learning,” Goshert said. “There is still work to do and I am confident we will continue implementing the improvement plan.”

Things will change during the 2014-15 academic year as the new Indiana academic standards are being implemented. Teachers have been working on the curriculum this summer to help prepare for the new school year that begins Aug. 12. “We will continue the work we started to make sure our curriculum is aligned to the new standards,” she noted.

Statewide, according to the Indiana Department of Education, math and English/language arts scores were better than in 2013, as well as the percentage of students passing both.