Month: May 2016

ICYMI: State Budget Impacts Education

Posted on by Leslie Jacobs

In Case You Missed It (ICYMI) … Your mini news clippings

Budget Impacts Education

The state budget proposal approved by the House has a $72 million shortfall in TOPS Scholarship funding. The Senate is now considering the proposed budget and discussing two possible ways to handle the shortfall. One is to increase the minimum ACT score for TOPS, reducing the number of awards by about 13,000, and the second is to keep the minimum ACT score the same but reduce all scholarship amounts by about 25 percent.

The money in the proposed state budget for vouchers may not be enough to fund the program. Editor’s note: Returning voucher students will likely have the first priority. If there isn’t enough funding for new students, it could increase kindergarten enrollment in New Orleans public schools.
 
School Choice Updates

Slightly more than half of New Orleans students got their first choice of public school in the main round of the city’s common enrollment process, and 77 percent received one of their top three choices. TheEnrollNOLA report shows 91 percent of applicants who listed three or more schools in their neighborhood were matched with a school in their zone. More than half of the applicants listed a school outside of their neighborhood zone as their first choice. The top OneApp schools were Warren Easton High School and Ben Franklin Elementary. 
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More students graduating on time!

Posted on by Leslie Jacobs

New Orleans 4-year Cohort Graduation Rate Continues to Rise

The citywide 4-year graduation rate for New Orleans (OPSB+RSD) increased by 2.5 percentage points, bringing it to 75.2% of all students graduating on time.
 
Today, the state released the 4-year cohort graduation rates for the Class of 2015. The Class of 2015 cohort includes all students who entered 9th grade for the first time in 2011, and the cohort graduation rate is the percentage of students in the cohort who graduated within four years. 

New Orleans Outperforms the State in Every Key Sub-Group

In 2015, 73.3% of African-American students graduated on time in New Orleans, an increase of 2.6 percentage points from 2014 and 1.9 points higher than the state average of 71.4% for African-American students. 
 
The New Orleans 4-year cohort graduation rates for other key sub-groups – students with disabilities, economically disadvantaged students, and English language learners – were also higher than the state average for these sub-groups.

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