State School Superintendent Linda Schrenko says some Georgia schools - including a number in the Rome City and Floyd County systems - are not making the grade in the performance of their Title I students.

But the superintendents of the Rome City and Floyd County school systems say the criteria on which those Title I performance rankings are based do not make the grade with them.

Model Elementary School was named a distinguished school for its performance, but other Rome City and Floyd County schools did not fare as well in the report, released by Mrs. Schrenko this week.

Floyd and Rome school rankings include:

Alto Park Elementary, Garden Lakes Elementary, North Heights Elementary and Pepperell Elementary on special notice, not progressing list because 8 percent of their Title I students did not move out of the lowest level of performance last year.

McHenry Primary and West Central Elementary as schools needing improvement but making adequate progress list because they met goals last year but not the preceeding two years.

Cave Spring Elementary, Anna K. Davie Elementary, Southeast Elementary and Rome Middle on bottom 365 schools needing improvement and not progressing list because Title I students did not show improvement the past three years.

The 365 schools that did not show improvement for three years need special help, Mrs. Schrenko said in a telephone interview Thursday from Atlanta.

"Those are the schools that, if you were going to be grading the schools, would get an F, and what that tells me and should tell the Legislature is, if we have 365 of them, we better have a lot more school improvement teams available to go out there and help them because that is what the legislation calls for," she said.

"We have one school improvement team made up of eight people and 365 schools to try and help."

Larry Atwell, superintendent of Rome City Schools, takes exception to the criteria in ranking schools as needing improvement and not progressing.

"It doesn't reflect where your overall standing of a school is," Atwell said. "It reflects whether or not you had more students coming out of reading and math remedial programs.

"Well, if you are close to reaching your potential and working as hard as you can work and have a very high achieving school...you are not going to make dramatic progress."

Jackie Collins, superintendent of Floyd County Schools, Said the list is confounding.

"I think the biggest problem we have, as far as comparative status and the various programs that we have, is the fact that you have the catagories in that one year you would be an exemplary school and the other year needing improvement," Collins said.

"It varies so greatly in a short period of time based on the narrowly focused criteria."

The superintendents noted that Cave Spring Elementary and Rome Middle School are among the bottom 365 Title I schools but in the past have been cited as Georgia Schools of Excellence.

Mrs. Schrenko said that's not surprising and that the criteria to be named a School of Excellence will be change.

"When we grade the schools for real...then they are going to have to bring all subgroups up," Mrs. Schrenko said.

"It has to be progressing or that school is going to be on the failing list.

"When I came to the department and I looked at the Schools of Excellence program, we found some real anomalies in there and found that the criteria had been set so that you didn't really have to be showing student achievement to be a School of Excellence.

"Beginning next year, the criteria will change so that you can't make both lists."

Atwell said Title I goals are unrealistic for most of its students.

"Let's say a student is in the 30th percentile, a low achieving student. They don't want to see that child just in the 30th percentile again next year. They want to see that student make significant progress in relation to all the other students," he said. "When you find that out of a thousand and some odd elementary schools, only about 200 are distinguished or adequate, that tells you something."

Also, Atwell said, tests don't follow the same students.

"The pre-tests are scores last year's second graders had," Atwell said.

"The post-test is what this year's second-graders did. We did the numbers. As far as progress is concerned, we took the scores of our last year's second-graders and their scores this year, and we met the criteria.

"You get frustrated when you work to try to improve and try to help these kids, and yet, when you look at the standards that are shown...it is like you are getting whacked again. It is very discouraging."

**************************************************