83% of Manassas kindergarteners meet or exceed benchmarks

Sara Brescia, Member, Manassas City School Board: “While we await the past school year’s SOL test scores for grades 3-12, the PALS assessment results are in for grades K-2. PALS is a statewide early literacy assessment that is administered in both the fall and spring to track progress over the year.

“As seen below, our grades K-2 saw large improvements over the course of the year in the share of students meeting or exceeding benchmarks, catching up to the state average in many cases.”

“Two specific things I was very happy to see:

1. The Kindergarten cohort, the first class to have not been school-aged during the pandemic, saw 83 percent of students meeting or exceeding benchmarks, a full 8 percentage points higher than the last pre-pandemic class!

2. Also, while our share of second graders hitting proficiency continues to lag the state average, this cohort experienced a year of virtual Kindergarten and a stunted first grade with masking and mandatory 10-day quarantines. Despite this, the share of students meeting spring benchmarks improved greatly from the fall and now slightly exceeds where our 2018-19 cohort of second graders was before the pandemic.”

“We’re going to have to make sure that these gains follow through into higher grades, but this is a very encouraging trend.”

In 2022, Virginia Standards of Learning test scores for Manassas City Public Schools students were up. Reading scores improved by 10 points to 57%, history and social science by 22 points to 56%, math by 22 points to 49%, and science by eight points to 45%.

For economically disadvantaged students, scores were up 10 points to 49% in reading, 25 points to 50% in history, and 23 points to 44% in math.

Writing scores dropped four points to 61%. The school division has about 7,200 children.