Pep Rallies, Games Aim to Boost Scores
By Maria Glod
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 12, 2005
The children of Fairfax County's Bren Mar Park Elementary School marched around the building yesterday afternoon clapping and cheering just as loudly as they could. Their mascot -- in superhero garb that included a red cape and a lightning bolt across his chest -- led the parade.
Filing into the gym, waving banners and yelling, "Let's go!" and "We are ready!" they might have been mistaken for pep rally participants psyching up for the big game. But the chants weren't about basketball or soccer. These kids were getting revved up to take their state standardized tests.
After months of reading, writing and drilling for the Virginia Standards of Learning tests -- which are used to determine how each school measures up under state accreditation standards and the federal No Child Left Behind law -- many schools are spending the final days doing more than eleventh-hour reviews.
Now that the students have studied the material, teachers and principals want to give them some last words of advice, boost their confidence and cure their jitters with some plain old fun.
"When all this testing is done, we need to be able to look at each other and look in the mirror and say we have done everything we possibly could do to help these children be successful," said Bruce Leiby, principal at Bel Air Elementary School in Prince William County.
For Leiby, that means bringing all the students outdoors one day next week to watch their teachers take sledgehammers to cinder blocks in keeping with the school's "Smash the SOLs" theme. Bel Air students also made SOL thinking caps in art class, and the physical education teacher taught them stretches to do just before the test to get more blood pumping to their brains. After Leiby heard that the crackers the school usually offered as snacks during testing weren't "brain food," he switched to fruit.
School districts statewide have strived to perform well on the SOL tests, administered in the spring, since they were introduced provisionally in 1998. The pressure has grown year by year as the results began to count toward graduation and as target scores under No Child Left Behind began to rise. Last year, 61 percent of students in each school had to pass the English tests and 59 percent had to pass math. This year, the target passing rate is 70 percent on both tests.
Last year in Fairfax, 27 schools did not meet the target passing rates, and two high-poverty schools that receive federal funds had to offer students the option of transferring to a higher-performing school. If this year's standards had been applied to last year's scores, 86 schools would have fallen short.
But educators have stressed that some schools miss the mark because a few children score just below passing, and teachers said they believe they can fix that by making test preparation more exciting.
Melinda Carper, principal at Rolling Ridge Elementary School in Loudoun County, has a special SOL pencil for every child, and teachers and staff have planned a cheer for a Monday pep rally. Testing begins Tuesday at the school.
"They know their stuff," Carper said of the students. "It's just to say, 'Good luck' and 'We're cheering for you.' They are still going to be a little anxious, but we hope this will help."
Yesterday's pep rally at Bren Mar Park led up to an SOL social studies quiz game for fourth-graders.
Kindergarten aide David Lindsay, who painted his hair gold and transformed into SOL (pronounced "soul") man, cheered the students on as they took turns answering questions. They rattled off the five states that border Virginia and its four major rivers (Potomac, Rappahannock, James and York). They knew that the Virginia House of Burgesses was the first elected legislative body in the country and that John Brown led the raid at Harpers Ferry, W.Va.
Shannon Bollman, 10, said she's less nervous this time around.
"I used to think it was one of those big tests you really had to take, and if you didn't pass you were going to get held back," Shannon said. She said her teachers assured her that wasn't the case, and she's convinced that she and her classmates will have "excellent perfect" scores.
As the students left the rally, the teachers and SOL man led them in a final cheer: "SOLs, who's going to pass? Every single student in every single class!"