Next school year, AHS will be making major changes in an attempt to enhance students’ understanding of mathematics. The Aspen School District Board of Education (ASDBE) feels that because of students’ underwhelming scores on standardized math tests in past years, the school needs to put more emphasis on math.

Superintendent John Maloy sent out an email in late-October with two targets for AHS to achieve: math will meet everyday and for at least 70 minutes. After looking at the scores from last year’s TCAPs, the ASDBE set these targets for the high school.

Over the last five years third and fourth graders have scored higher on the TCAPs than the ninth and tenth graders. This is a national trend, but ASD wants to reverse this trend locally. In recent years, AHS scores have improved significantly, especially for tenth graders, who scored above the BOE targets in 2012-13. The board set a target for 55 percent, and 62 percent of tenth graders scored proficient or advanced. More students in 2012-2013 scored proficient on the standardized test than in the past five years.

Currently students at AHS have math classes every other day for 90 minutes. If math classes were held everyday at AHS, students would increases their class time spent in math by 95 minutes each week. After trying to increase students’ math skills for many years, the Board of Education feels that this will be the only way to really improve student’s skills.

“The math department at the high school has been working really hard in terms of having professional development, working together collaboratively as a team, and adding additional math sections,” Julia Roark, the assistant superintendent for the Aspen School District, said. “We’ve done all these things, we’ve purchased new resources, and tried lots of things and so at this point what the superintendent really saw was let’s look at how often students are having math instruction and the number of minutes that they are having math and see if that can make a bigger difference.

AHS will continue all of their other math programs because they have had some impact, but overall these programs and new resources have not increased percentages by a great enough margin.

“It just came to a point where I think between the Board of Education members being very concerned about our math achievement and our superintendent saying well what else can we do, this is what we can do,” Roark said.

Though the schedule has not been finalized, AHS Principal Kim Martin has started experimenting with what it could potentially look like.

“We’ve had a couple of staff meetings and teachers have given me schedules. I’ve looked and gone over them to see what works and what doesn’t,” Martin said.

Math teachers understand that increasing math proficiency at AHS will have repercussions on other subjects at the high school, but they also feel it will be immediately successful in improving math scores.

“I know that the time will come from somewhere because you can’t invent time,” 12 year AHS math teacher Jamie Hozack said. Hozack said that standardized test scores should see an immediate positive effect.

In learning math, repetition and time are valuable. Meeting everyday should help students not only with understanding, but also with learning more information and topics.

“If we were to have math everyday, two things would come from that: increased fluency, and the other things is the time. Students would have more time for learning math and more education for whatever they do after high school,” Hozack said.

Though math may not be all students’ favorite subject, the ASD administration believes increased math minutes and time will help the school with one of its biggest issues.

“Math achievement continues to be our greatest area of concern,” Roark said.