— KEYSER, W.Va. — Three Mineral County schools failed to make adequate yearly progress for the 2009-10 academic year, according to assessment results released in August by the West Virginia Department of Education.

Falling short of the AYP benchmark has become a chronic problem for two of the schools, Frankfort Middle School and Keyser Primary-Middle School. KPMS hasn’t made AYP since 2006, Frankfort Middle since 2005.

But it’s a new issue for Keyser High, which missed AYP because its low-income student population scored low on reading and language arts.

Students who qualify for free and reduced lunches are classified as low-income. Nearly half of the KHS student body is made up of low-income students.

Frankfort Middle fell short of AYP because its low-income students scored low on reading-language arts, and its special education students scored low on both the math and reading-language arts sections.

At KPMS, both low-income and special education students scored low on both sections of the assessment test. Nearly 60 percent of KPMS students are classified as low-income, while one-fifth are special education students.

The school system has attempted for several years to address the problem of low standardized test scores at Frankfort Middle and KPMS.

“It has been there, and we’ve tried to work with it,” said Superintendent Skip Hackworth. “I think we now just have to become more diligent in our efforts in these two subgroups.”

Hackworth said he hopes to center some future staff development activities around issues of teaching low-income students, and pursue extended school day programs or summer learning for students that need extra help.

But because KPMS receives Title I funds, there are sanctions for its failure to make AYP. Specifically, parents of KPMS students were notified by letter, before the start of the school year, that they could elect to transfer their children to a different school.

Hackworth said the administration received about a dozen transfer requests, but not all of those students could be transfered because the school they requested did not have the room.

Hackworth attributed Keyser High’s failure to make AYP largely to state-level changes that made it more difficult for students to reach the “mastery,” or average, benchmark on the assessment test.

For 2009-10, the department of education updated its WESTEST standardized assessment and scoring system to reflect “a more rigorous curriculum,” according to an agency news release.

Now students need to score higher on the assessment — renamed WESTEST2 — to meet the criteria for “mastery.”

In 2009, a third grade student in West Virginia would need to score 557 on the test’s math section to reach the “mastery” level for that material. In 2010 a third grader would need to score 581 points to achieve the same status.

The test scores weren’t all bad news. Six county schools made AYP, and in some areas Mineral County students far outshone statewide statistics for improvement.

Countywide, the percentage of third graders scoring “mastery” and above on the test improved nearly 19 percent in math and 18 percent in reading-language arts over the previous year. By comparison, those figures statewide improved only 6.4 percent in math and 4.2 percent in reading-language arts.

Mineral County’s percentage of seventh graders scoring “mastery” and above improved 16 percent in math and nearly 13 percent in reading-language arts over the previous year, while statewide, those figures were 8.2 percent and 3.4 percent.

The county’s attendance and graduation rates are also higher than those of the state.

Contact Megan Miller at mmiller@times-news.com.