User's Guide: Field #7 
Various school indicators

Selected School Indicators

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What you are looking at

You can see the frequency or percentage for this indicator at the school, district and state levels. These selected indicators were assembled in compliance with three sets of requests:

1. Legislation passed in February 1996 and incorporated into Title 16, section 60-4(21-22)

2. Article 31 – the State Student Investment Initiative, passed in July 1997 and revised in 2000 (Title 16, section 7.1)

3. Rhode Island’s Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education and Board of Regents

High school drop-out and graduation rates are not included at the elementary and middle level charts because they are not applicable to those levels. 

What you are looking for

You are looking to get a sense of what the school feels like to its inhabitants – its tensions, its stability, its cooperative attitude, its safety, etc.

Indicator measures and definitions

1. SALT survey teacher response rate: the percentage of the total number of eligible teachers in this school who responded to the 2000 SALT survey

2. SALT survey student response rate: The percentage of the total number of students in this school who responded to the 2000 SALT survey

3. Student attendance: the percentage of time the average student is present during the required 180 instructional days per year

4. Students exempted from state testing: The percentage of test-takers who were not eligible to take the state exams either because their IEP requires an alternate assessment, or because their arrival in this country is too recent to have offered them a reasonable opportunity to learn functional English.

5. Stability: This indicator shows the proportion of the total student enrollment who entered the school at the beginning of the year and stayed through the end

6. Mobility: This indicator shows the rate of student turnover, or the percentage of students who moved into or out of the school during the school year as compared to fall enrollments

Please note: The stability and mobility indicators measure different phenomena and are not inverses of one another. The mobility index measures the rate of flow through the non-stable portion of the student body. Together, the two indicators describe the degree of turnover in the school and its potential effect on the classroom environment.

7. Suspensions: The number of students who have been temporarily dismissed from school, received an in-school suspension or sent to an alternative placement, followed by the total number of students in the building

See Web page 3 for break-out of student suspensions by type

8. Drop-out rate: The drop-out rate is derived by subtracting the graduation rate (see #9 below) from 100. This method of figuring rates uses a four-year picture which takes into account key factors such as annual differences in class size and the different grades at which students drop out. The statistic reported here is based on the number of drop-outs reported annually by grade level for students who drop out between October 2 of the previous school year to October 1 of the current year.

9. Graduation rate: The high school graduation rate represents the percent of the current ninth grade class that will graduate from high school after subtracting the aggregate current dropout rates at the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade.

Special to the school report on Web page 3

Suspensions: The number of students who have been temporarily dismissed from school or sent to an alternative placement, broken out by the reason for the suspension. The number of suspensions is followed by the total number of students in the building.

Reasons for suspensions

1. Assault
2. Fighting
3. Weapon posession
4. Sale of controlled substance
5. Possession of controlled substance with intent to sell
6. Under the influence of a controlled substance 
7. Disorderly conduct
8. Threat/intimidation
9. Tobacco possession or use
10. Vandalism
11. Larceny/theft
12. Other

Teacher grievances: The number of grievances filed by teachers in the building in 1997-98, broken out by type, contrasted by the number of full-time teachers

Types of grievances

1. Insufficient materials
2. Too many students
3. Physical environment
4. District-level administrative decisions
5. School-level administrative decisions
6. Other grievances

Selected School Indicators

1. Average class size (Elementary): The average class size is the average of the figures reported by the core academic teachers on the elementary SALT survey. Other teaching staff are not included because the number of students they can teach effectively varies widely by subject -- for example, physical education classes are generally quite large. 

1. Span of responsibility (Secondary): The average span of responsibility refers to the total number of students whom core academic teachers are responsible for teaching in the course of a regular day. “Core” academics are math, science, language arts and social studies. The number is the average of the figures reported by the core teachers on the SALT survey. 

2. Teacher Attendance: The teacher attendance rate reflects the percentage of time the average full-time teacher is present within the 180 day instructional period. This number was calculated using the number of “sick days” which accounted for teacher absences.