Middletown High Students Excelled on Common Core Testing

At the Oct. 30 meeting of the Career and Technical Education Advisory Board of Middletown held at the Library-Media Center at MHS, Keynote Speaker Dr. Stephen Hoag of the State Department of Education said that when all the data was taken into consideration, Middletown High School students performed the best in the state out of 154 competing high schools.

There were competitions in eight areas.

These included Video Production (MHS was No. 1), Vocational-Agriculture: Natural Resources (No. 1), Vocational-Agriculture: Animal Science (No. 2), Marketing (No. 3), Personal Finance (No. 6), Co-operative Work Experience (No. 8), Pre-engineering (No. 9) and Child Development (No. 10). 

Also, Middletown was ranked No. 10 on the Common Core aligned questions on the overall exam. "To be ranked No. 10 on that part of the test is a credit to our entire school district," said teacher David Reynolds. 

The purpose of the advisory board is to discuss topics related to Career and Technical Education and to support the programs in Middletown. MHS has a comprehensive Career and Technical Education Suite of programs that prepare all students for college and careers. 

Members in attendance at the CTE board meeting were City Council members Thomas Serra and Deborah Kleckowswki, Board of Education member Sheila Daniels, City Treasurer Quentin Phipps, Kathleen Shea, Anita Ford-Saunders, David Gallitto, Tracey Stanley and Melanie Carfora from local industry and business. 

On the comprehensive test, Middletown had some 144 students, or 80 percent of students meeting the goal. Griswold had 86 percent reach goal, but that school had only 66 students reach goal and Canton, with 85 percent reaching goal, had only 17 students at that mark. 

"Looking at the numbers, we had almost double the number of students reach goal of any school," said Hoag. "But it's based on percentage and we had many more students taking the test than anyone else and still reached 80 percent. While that ranked us third [out of 150+] a case can be made we were better than that."