With a new presidential election around the corner many current policies in American government may indeed stand pat or change dramatically over the course of the next few years.
What will happen to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA) once the new leader of the United States is established in November is anyone’s guess.
The act itself has brought greater learning materials for all educational levels according to many teachers past and present.
Some however, are also concerned with the over-emphasis on testing and a decreasing one in teaching toward multiple-intelligences.
However, until it goes or stays, the fact remains that the NCLBA is living and breathing in the midst of Lake County, for good or bad.
For the 2007-2008 school year, Lakeview’s Fremont-Hay and Union schools were deemed to have met the standards set forth by the NCLBA.
The current NCLBA accountability progression standards that determine if a school is qualified to call itself “successful” required that 60% of a school’s pupil populace pass the English/language arts section and 59% pass in mathematics.
Those standard goals will remain in effect for the next two school years.
In 2010-2011 the goals will become 70%-70%, to increase to 80%-80% the following year to eventually a perfect 100 in both subjects by 2013-2014.
Fremont/Hay ended up with 87.04% of its students meeting the standard in Language/Arts (not including the margin of error), and 77.61% of its students doing so in Mathematics.
Union school ended up with a 96.88% and 95.31% “met” the standard respectively.
However, as a testing focus increases, the concern is that, during a time where children blossom creatively, the once more spontaneous and free-flowing levels of education are now becoming narrow-minded.
“It’s all becoming based on testing and to base it only on that when there’s a lot of intelligence that is not measurable bothers me,” recently retired Lake County Elementary Teacher Debbie Simontacchi said. “We have over tested and testing is good if you use it to set teaching standards but it’s taking a large amount of time and we are taking out the creativity from these kids.”
Regardless of its positives or negatives, until otherwise noted, the NCLBA is here, and now it’s a matter of preparing elementary students to succeed when indeed they are tested at the 3rd and 5th grade levels.
“The game plan is to provide a solid foundation of reading, writing, and arithmetic, socialization, and physical education and prepare for the secondary level,” Lake County Supt. Sean Gallagher said. “We have a program called Response to Intervention to identify those struggles early on and intervene before they become problems for individual students.”
For now, however, it appears that local elementary students have done just fine and the issues, to date, are minimal.
“Currently we are meeting AYP just fine but they will ratchet it up each year,” Fremont/Hay and Union Principal Will Cahill said. “The positives outweigh the negatives. It has some wonderful aspects in accountability, and tracking student progress, but it’s an election-year and it’s a hot topic so it will be interesting to see where it goes after that.”
Even if the students of Lake County would be able to pass these tests at an 80,90, or even 100% clip in the future, some past pupils of local elementary schools believe that education has taken a turn for the collective, less entertaining.

...for the rest of the story, refer to this week's edition of the Lake County Examiner.