Report card on Nevada school students now available online

Within the first 100 days of the 2004-05 school year, an average of 96.4 percent of Carson High School students attended daily.

That percentage stays consistent among the school's eight sub-groups except for one: an average of 58.5 percent of Native Americans attended Carson High School each day.

At Eagle Valley Middle School, the Native Americans again have the lowest rate of daily attendance, but at 92.9 percent, it is only a few points below the overall average and other sub-group averages.

This information and more is now available online at www.nevadareportcard.com, a site free to the public.

"This is the information that used to be published for each district and each school, but there was never an opportunity to do comparison," said Mike Watty, associate superintendent for education services for the Carson City School District.

With a few clicks, any Nevada school can be compared with any other in the state on a number of variables

"For instance, if you wanted to see what the demographics are for one school compared against another, you used to have to find the individual (printed) reports cards," Watty said. "Now it's all on the Web site, which is very easy to use and manipulate to see the data."

Some of the data includes teacher-to-student ratios, suspensions rates, number of classrooms, number of classrooms with Internet access, school Web sites, test results for proficiency tests, criterion reference tests, and Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, graduation rates, retention rates and class size.

"It just goes on and on," said Watty.

The Nevada Report Card was previously required by law to be published, but a new change requires that the district send home only a summary report. The Web site data is formatted similarly for each school.

"In Nevada, we've always had accountability reports," Watty said. "They've been published at least 15 years, maybe longer than that. And usually, they've gone out in the paper in the Nevada Appeal. They've done an insert."

The Web site is available in English, but the summary data reports still being sent home to parents, as required by law, are available both in English and Spanish.

They will be sent home in the next couple of weeks in folders for elementary students and they will be mailed home to middle and high school students.

Watty said in the past the district has had a lot of requests from real estate agents for the reports. They used the printed material to help people pick out homes in specific school zones. The report card is available in print-ready format.

"Parents were asking 'What about this school? What about that school? What zone should I be moving into?" Watty said. "Now we can just aim them to the Web site."

n Contact reporter Maggie O'Neill at moneill@nevadaappeal.com or 881-1219.