Effingham County fifth graders’ writing tests improved by as much as 29 percent in one school and dropped by as much as 10 percent in another, school board members were told Wednesday.

Improvement across the state was 7 percent. Systemwide, the improvement was 4 percent.

“You’ll see that some of our schools did not see any increases, but half of our schools showed what I believe are significant increases,” Assistant Superintendent Greg Arnsdorff said.

He said the schools have been allowed to use techniques they believed would best address the needs of their students.

“However, after having some time to work with programs, and we have some local schools that have participated in the training, we began to hear a lot of good things about a program,” Arnsdorff said.

Arnsdorff said the program is a developmental writing program that is used from kindergarten to fifth grade that teaches a systematic way of writing.

He described the program like “building a house—you’re going to have to build on what the previous year has done.

“Sand Hill used this program, and you’ve seen their 29 percent increase in performance,” Arnsdorff said. “Now we have adopted this as our writing program for all our elementary schools in the district.”

School system officials said that while the progress from last year to this year is exciting, the progress of the students from the beginning of the school year was even more remarkable.

The district contracted to have a test done at the beginning of the year to see where the students were at, and how they would score with no intervention on the writing test.

The results indicated that 36 Sand Hill students would not meet the standard and only six would meet or exceed.

The scores
Blandford Elementary
This year: 75 percent met or exceeded
Last year: 79 percent met or exceeded

Ebenezer Elementary
This year: 75 percent met or exceeded
Last year: 85 percent met or exceeded

Guyton Elementary
This year: 73 percent met or exceeded
Last year: 58 percent met or exceeded

Marlow Elementary
This year: 87 percent met or exceeded/21 percent exceeded
Last year: 89 percent met or exceeded/12 percent exceeded

Rincon Elementary
This year: 75 percent met or exceeded/12 percent exceeded
Last year: 65 percent met or exceeded/3 percent exceeded

Sand Hill Elementary
This year: 84 percent met or exceeded
Last year: 55 percent met or exceeded

South Effingham Elementary
This year: 86 percent met or exceeded
Last year: 93 percent met or exceeded

Springfield Elementary
This year: 75 percent met or exceeded
Last year: 58 percent met or exceeded