Under a new Texas Education Agency (TEA) school accountability system to be fully implemented next year, Canyon High School earned an average grade of “C” on an A-F scale based on data from last school year. 

Two years ago, the TEA announced House Bill 2804, a bill planning a switch to the new A-F school grading system, where schools are graded based on four domains, and a fifth to be added. Canyon High School received a B in student achievement (STAAR assessment results), a C in student progress (progress at STAAR English, reading and math assessments), a D in closing performance gaps (bridging space between students of different socioeconomic backgrounds) and a C in postsecondary readiness (preparedness for college, a career or the military after secondary school).

“The rating system doesn’t bother me so much,” Canyon High School principal Tim Gilliland said. “It doesn’t give us any new information that would help us better the school, and that’s what feedback is all about. You want your feedback to help you, to guide you, to give you things you should be working on.”

Under the previous rating system, Canyon High School earned the highest rating, “Met Standard.”

“It’s a baseline for us,” said executive director of curriculum and professional development Cameron Rosser. “It doesn’t matter if it’s A-F or ‘Met Standard.’ No matter what data we get, we always look for strengths and weaknesses and develop strategies to get better, because we’re always about doing what’s best for students.”

Gilliland agrees the focus moving forward will continue to be meeting students’ needs.

“We made a plan last summer about what we wanted to do this school year, and so far so good,” Gilliland said. “Some of those plans are going to be in place every year, because we’ll always have kids who need extra help, and we want to provide it. We’re always going to be working on those things, and that’s really what the data’s based on.”

Rosser said the district is about to embark on a strategic planning process involving a lot of people.

“It’s an exciting time, especially when this data came out,” Rosser said. “We’re not doing this because of the data, by any means. We were already planning on doing this, but this helped us look at what we’re doing. It made us say, this was an area we weren’t thinking of focusing on, but now we should focus on it.”

The other high school in the district, Randall High School, earned a C in the first category and Ds in each of the others. Over 180 districts throughout Texas have appealed to the TEA to repeal the bill, but Canyon ISD will not take any action against it.

“We’ve been rated for over a decade, and regardless of whether the rating is one word or one letter, we’re always looking to do what we can for our kids to help them succeed,” Gilliland said. “While we don’t like a C and it brings out the competitive side of us, we’re going to do everything we can to fix that and make that better. We’re not going to let that rating define us.”