GES Award

Grenada Elementary School Named as a Value Added School in Mississippi

Grenada Elementary School was recognized recently by the Program for Research and Evaluation of Public School (PREPS) with the Value Added Award. The school received a plaque, displayed by Assistant Principal Vivian Simmons, center, and Principals Dr. Randy Poss. left, and Paul Portera, right. The plaque states, "Awarded to Grenada Elementary School for outstanding gains in student achievement and extraordinary service to the children of Mississippi." Grenada Elementary has achieved Level 5 status, the highest level of achievement for Mississippi schools.

PREPS is a private non-profit consortium of school districts whose purpose is to develop and implement educational products and services that help manage and support districts' efforts to demonstrate improvement in their instructional programs. PREPS is supported by the College of Education at Mississippi State University and is housed in the Center for Educational Partnerships, the service division of the college. Although PREPS is supported by the university, its governance is held entirely for its member school districts. Collaboration among member districts enables the districts to benefit from the development of products and services that no single district is capable of developing alone.

The Value Added Award began in 1997 to recognize schools that are high performing among Mississippi school districts across the entire state. Schools that are "Value Added" are those that are considered to be performing significantly better than other schools with comparable socioeconomic circumstances. Using school performance classifications by the State Department of Education under the Mississippi Statewide Accountability System and the school socioeconomic indicator, PREPS has performed Value Added analysis at the elementary through high school levels.
There were 838 Mississippi schools assigned performance ratings between Level 1 and Level 5 on the Mississippi Statewide Accountability System for 2004-2005. The PREPS Value Added analysis resulted in 159 schools statewide being designated as Value Added Schools. Each of the 159 Value Added Schools has a performance classification of Level 4 or 5. Seventy of these schools are among the 84 school districts which are members of PREPS. Grenada Elementary School was named as one of the 70 schools which were named as the 2005 PREPS Value Added Award recipients. The award was presented by the Dean of the College of Education at Mississippi State University.