We received a postitive rating from our Unified Improvement Plan report which has all of our academic measures in the green zone over a three year average. Since last year's scores were at an all time low, we'll need to keep progress up. However, hope in not impossible to generate with what we are doing so far.

On the other hand, the Colorado Department of Education send in a team last week that will be showing us what to do next. This is the same team that confused the heck out of a team of teachers two years ago over the course of two sessions in Glenwood Springs. When pressured, they admitted that they were unable to answer some of the questions.

The first question was did it make sense to target schools that were alternative classification in the first place. Of the 35 schools on their turnaround list, 17 were alternative schools. They already know that we are composed of largely failing students. The degree of success we achieve can often be viewed as a net benefit since all of our students arrived to us after failing in a tradtional school setting.

In the next year, tne CDE changed our classification to Alternative Education Campus. This compared our performance with other similar schools. Our classification went from "red" in the overall comparison to "yellow" last year. This year's evaluation has us as a "green" school.

To our principal's great credit, she has not crowed about the successes and has pointed out that last year's scores will certainly cause a dip in performance unless we do better this year. The good news is that the areas I can most impact, academics and behavior in school, are doing fine. The area that is still in the "red" zone is attendance. This is far more of a systemic problem and I believe requires more of an administrative intervention.