BELLE — Annual Performance Report (APR) results for the Gasconade County R-2 School District were down less than a percentage point, said Assistant Superintendent Dr. Staci Johnson during the Dec. 15 presentation to the Board of Education. Johnson advised that the district will have to improve its state assessment scores to receive an overall higher APR.

“Once again, we earned almost all possible points in the continuous improvement category, 98.3 percent,” Johnson said. “The data shows that the only way we can move the needle on our APR composite score is to increase student proficiency on state assessments.”

The district is measured in two categories to determine the APR: performance and continuous improvement.

“Then your overall APR composite score is based on your last three years’ average,” Johnson said. “So ours went slightly down, which, if you’ll remember, at our board retreat in October, we went over our map and EOC scores, and that was my prediction.”

Johnson said the APR scores go down when the district’s testing scores drop.

“We dropped about .9 percent. We were at 71.8 percent, I think, last year, and now we’re at 70.9 percent,” she said.

Johnson broke the scores down by building, showing the elementary schools with slight growth and the middle and high schools’ results with a small decrease.

• Gerald Elementary (GES) saw an overall improvement in its APR, from 49.4 percent to 56.8 percent. This was due to improved performance and growth in ELA.

• Owensville Elementary (OES) saw an overall improvement in its APR, from 41.8 percent to 43.1 percent. This is due to an increase in points earned for student attendance.

• Owensville Middle School (OMS) saw an overall decrease in its APR from 53.2 percent to 51.6 percent. The decrease was due to not meeting expected growth in state assessment scores, except for math. OMS increased its attendance score from the prior year.

• Owensville High School (OHS) saw the largest decrease in APR, from 68.7 percent to 59.9 percent. This was due to state assessment scores and not meeting growth expectations.

“Short story, our elementaries both had a slight increase. OES was more due to them getting additional attendance points,” Johnson said. “So, really focusing on that, and GES had some good performance, especially, I believe, in English Language Arts (ELA), some additional performance there. Our middle school and high school both dropped slightly for a variety of reasons.”

Johnson believes the district is doing well in most categories, leaving one primary avenue for improvement.

“What I would overall point out is, for our APR to increase, we are going to have to do better on the state assessment,” Johnson said. “We’re earning basically 100 percent of the points that we can earn for all of the other things. So the only place we’re not earning full percentage points, and that continuous improvement is in attendance, which is tough, right? Because you’ve got, you have to have 90 percent of your students over 90 percent attendance, and so that’s been really hard for schools to hit, especially since COVID.”

The district is receiving full points in the other categories.

“The bottom line is, it comes down to assessment,” she said.

Superintendent Dr. Jeri Kay Hardy added that it’s hard to explain the scores when they don’t have the grading formula.

“That’s hard to explain to the community, and that’s something that we’ve talked about in our admin team,” Hardy said. “We have the data (from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education) that shows that we grew, but we still lost points. So that’s a little frustrating.”

Johnson, who watches the district’s curriculum and test scores, added that she couldn’t explain it either.

“I can’t really explain the growth to you, because it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and they won’t share the calculation. We’re compared to a group of districts. We don’t know what that group is. We’re alike in some way.”

Despite the overall loss of growth, Johnson said individual cohorts did well within the district.

“I’ll give you the example. Our middle school cohorts, every single cohort, grew this year from their last year. So sixth graders did better than they were as fifth graders, seventh graders better than sixth graders, eighth graders better than they were seventh graders, and we lost points in growth. So I’m not exactly sure how that calculation works.”

According to the 2025 APR scores, the Performance APR scored 80 out of 136 possible points, for a 58 percent, and Continuous Improvement received 139 out of 196 for a 98.3 percent, for an overall score of 70.9 percent.