Ojai Students Make the Grade : Education: Most put in good showing, owing to English skills, family income and hard work.

Ojai Valley students outperformed many of their counterparts across Ventura County on the new state assessment test administered last spring, thanks in part to comparatively high levels of English proficiency and high family incomes, test results released today suggest.

Fourth- and 10th-graders in the Ojai Unified School District generally are better readers, writers and mathematicians than most youngsters throughout the county and state, according to the California Learning Assessment System.

But eighth-grade students at Matilija Junior High School only barely surpassed their statewide counterparts in math and writing, and dipped below the state median in reading skills.

Nonetheless, district officials relished their success so far on the test.

“I don’t like to compare to other schools so this is not a comparison, but we’re really pleased,” said Pamela Martens, assistant superintendent in charge of curriculum for the Ojai Unified School District.

“It appears to indicate that the teachers are concentrating on implementing the state framework and motivating the students to enjoy reading and do a lot of writing,” she said.

On a scale of 6 to 1, with 6 being best, more than half of the district’s students who read at elementary and high school level scored 4 or better, indicating that the majority of those tested possessed at least “a thoughtful understanding” of the material.

“We have writing across the curriculum,” said Michael Maez, principal at Nordhoff High School, where 68% of 10th-graders scored 4, 5 or 6 on the writing exams.

“We encourage that students do writing in every discipline--science, social studies, math and, of course, the language arts,” Maez said. “So it’s paying off.”

Maez said the Nordhoff teaching staff would continue to challenge students to improve.

“We only had 53% of our kids in the top three areas in reading, so we want to bring that up,” Maez said. “This is benchmark data. We will go up from here.”

Matilija Principal James Berube was at a loss to explain how his eighth-grade students failed to match the progress of their older and younger schoolmates.

Ojai eighth-graders lagged the state median by 1% in reading, and bested the mark by just 3% in writing and 1% in math.

“These scores are not as high as I would like to see them,” Berube said. “We’re going to sit down and develop strategies to try and improve.”

Berube said school officials will review the results in detail and implement a plan to improve test scores.

“I haven’t been able to study them yet, and I don’t have the detailed information,” Berube said. “But we’ll do what’s necessary to improve them.”

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One school that stood out--even in the Ojai district--is Topa Topa Elementary.

Although the grade school ranks lower on the socioeconomic scale than others in the Ojai Valley, 70% of its students earned 4 or better on the reading test. That compares with just 35% of students at similar schools statewide and 54% among Ojai fourth-graders.

“The teachers worked hard, but the students worked really hard,” said Chris Smithers, a fifth-grade teacher at Topa Topa, who taught fourth-graders last year. “They know it means a lot to us to do a good job.”

Reading logs and book-report tallies are posted on Smithers’ classroom walls, with each student’s progress in plain sight. However, the scrutiny does not seem to bother the children.

“It was easy because we learned a lot in fourth grade,” said fifth-grader Alyson Weeces, recalling last spring’s exams. “I just knew a lot of the stuff they had on the test.”

Others cite an unusually strong sense of community in explaining the above-average scores.

“Ojai definitely is a cloistered community,” said Dawn Gorman, a fourth-grade teacher at Topa Topa. “We pooled what great resources we have in this town and this school, and it paid off.”

But, Gorman added, students also are pushed to consider more than the obvious.

“When they’re reading, we ask students to think about characters like a real person, and relate to their problems by asking what’s happened in their own lives that’s similar,” Gorman said.

“We also have them edit their own work, and we look for substance in what they’re saying--rather than have them repeat what other people are saying,” she said.

On Tuesday, Alyson and her classmates were busy preparing for next month’s round of CLAS tests for fifth-graders, which will focus on science and social studies.

Roque Hembree, who will celebrate his 11th birthday today, is not very worried about the upcoming exams.

“I just hope I do well,” he said, heading for recess. “I did pretty well last year.”